Learning Sciences Graduate Student Takes Second Place in Competition
Olga Vaskova, a graduate student in the Master of Science in Education and Social Policy Program, earned second place and a $500 prize in the Tzu Chi Center’s Character Education Lesson Plan Competition.
The competition is centered around compassion, and educators were invited to create a lesson plan focusing on teaching compassion as the primary goal.
Vaskova, who is studying Learning Sciences, is a former teacher and also holds a Master of Law degree. She focused her lesson plan on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, one of her daughters’ favorite books.
Vaskova says she was inspired to enter this competition by her former work as a teacher. “I ran lessons on this book several times before,” she said, “and I wanted to challenge myself to go deeper and use this story as a way to teach problem-solving and creativity.”
In the lesson plan, designed for grades 1-2, students are encouraged to empathize with the characters, and use teamwork to solve problems depicted in the story. For example, in the story, Dorothy is kidnapped by the witch and held prisoner in a castle surrounded by a large moat. How can her friends save her?
While this lesson plan is written for an English Language Arts lesson, Vaskova sees the potential for these values to be taught across content areas. She especially feels there is potential for more compassion to be taught in social studies courses, for example. “In social studies, you don’t usually see this type of approach, and there is a lot of value in teaching metacognitive skills, reflection, and compassion in a social studies setting.”
While Vaskova is proud of her work, she has since taken courses at Northwestern that have made her rethink certain aspects of her lesson design. “If I were to do this again, I would make the lesson more student-centered,” she reflected, “giving students more agency, and using the teacher more as a guide.”
When she's not at school or busy raising her two teenage daughters, Vaskova co-hosts a podcast with a friend. Delivered in her native Russian, the show explores children's literature and offers practical tips for parents on how to weave books into everyday playtime with their kids.
Read Vaskova’s lesson plan here.