Terry Judson: 9th & 10th Grade Global Studies;
Queens, NY

Unit: Religion

Project: Powerpoint Presentations

Project Outline

Project Description

Teacher Reflections

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Judson’s school is organized into interdisciplinary teams, all-day programs wherein the students travel together all day. The students work in groups of about 25 students supervised by a teacher; three of these groups form section of about 75 students, with four teachers and a guidance counselor assigned to each section. The school administers the NY State Regents Exams as well as a graduation portfolio. Read more about the combination of these two forms of assessment.

Terry Judson
9th & 10th Grade Global Studies Teacher

Over the past 12 years, in addition to Global Studies, Terry Judson has taught ESL Through Literature (American and World Literature), Short story reading and writing, drama, career education, internship placement and supervision, and American Studies. In the fall of 2004, Judson will combine teaching with his new duties as School Leader, a position similar to "Assistant Principal for Instruction."

Mr. Judson's Teaching Philosophy

"In student-centered, project-based work, planning is usually a really big piece of it--creating the handouts, deciding on your goals, your skills, what the students are going to do, how you're going to assess the students, a lot of that is done beforehand. Whereas the teacher will spend less time in front of the class, there is a lot of time spent in preparation. Today I made the groups ahead of time, heterogeneously, decided on the activity, there was this whole search for what the Regents wanted, and what I think is important, that combination. Tomorrow I may make another handout, about what particular topics, for each religion, would help. For Hinduism, for example, I would say, 'you should talk about the caste system, you should talk about reincarnation,' suggesting topics, ahead of time."

Working with a Student Teacher

Mr. Judson developed the Religion unit featured on this website together with his student teacher, Harlan Barnhardt, who is in the ESL master's program at Queens College, and in his first year of student teaching. He observed Judson teach the Rome/China units in the first part of the year, then the two developed this unit together. He works with Judson in the second part of earch day.  

I like the collaboration, you know, teachers are alone so much, in their classrooms, it's kind of nice to walk out of the classroom and say, "what did we learn today? What worked, what didn't work? How are we going to do the next period?" It's nice talking about it. It's also nice that you learn how to talk about instruction, therefore you learn how to make your instruction better.