Name: Zena Price-Broncucia
Breakthrough Program: San Francisco
Subject Teaching: Social Studies
School Attending/Year: University of San Francisco

In our 6th grade Social Studies class, we have been working on finding information from different sources and organizing it in useful ways. In one particularly successful lesson last week, we viewed a complex map of Alexander the Great's Empire and the different exploratory routes that he took as he conquered large parts of Persia. After reviewing the parts of a map that we learned in the first week (using Say-See-Do cycles of course,) students got to work to answer questions about different parts of Alexander's journey.

By the end of the class, it was clear that all students had mastered the objective and one student even noted that "maps are fun" and that "it's cool that all of these different colors actually mean something."

In reflecting on this lesson, I recalled a piece of advice that my mentor teacher had shared with us in the first week: In some classrooms, the teacher is the only one working, but in effective classrooms, the teacher puts the students to work. It was so clear to me that the latter had happened on this day in my classroom. I had taught directly for only 12 minutes or so, but students had what they needed to practice the skills, learn the content, and complete the task at hand. Though Breakthrough focuses a lot on making sure that students have hard skills to succeed in academically rigorous middle and and high schools, my most effective lessons have also ended with students expressing their excitement about learning in general - something that is harder to measure but yet so important if we expect these bright young people to go on to be curious, engaged thinkers in school and in the world.