Annotating a Lesson Plan (2)
LESSON PLAN
Loneliness (51 min) OVERVIEW/RATIONALE As the penultimate lesson on OMAM, students are preparing for their culminating project on the unit, which is to write a poem from the point of view of one of the characters in the book. In preparation to write these poems, during this lesson students will focus on how loneliness affects various characters in the book and choose a character to write about. Students will have finished studying the Robert Burns poem “To a Mouse,” from which the title of the book was taken. In their reading of “To a Mouse,” students looked at how the mouse was characterized and which characters from Steinbeck’s novel are most similar to the mouse in terms of how they are affected by loneliness and dreams. ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS Students will understand the various ways loneliness manifests itself and affects the characters in OMAM. GOALS/OBJECTIVES
MATERIALS
PROCEDURES OPENER/DO NOW Text rendering, chapter 6 (10 min)
BODY OF LESSON
CLOSURE
ACCOMMODATIONS Everyone in the class is at an “advanced” level, but competency in specific skills vary across individuals. The class is also diverse in terms of students’ cultural backgrounds and language skills - though there are no current ELL students in the class, there are several students for whom English is not their first language. To account for these differences, I can grade the discussion packets holistically, so that if one student has more reservations speaking up in the group, (s)he can make up for this through what (s)he writes down. I can also consider that just saying one sentence may for one student may imply the same amount of risk-taking as another student saying making five separate points. In other words, while I need to hold all students accountable for understanding the material, I can be considerate of the fact that they may express their understanding differently. ASSESSMENT/EVALUATION
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From the beginning, there were issues with the execution of this lesson. The Do Now text rendering activity was problematic. Since there are over thirty students in the classroom, it took too long to go around the room having everyone say their sentence. Having to orchestrate the reading (pointing to the student whose turn it was) and stopping to have students repeat themselves when they did not speak up further slowed the process. We ended up skipping the second round, but in order for this activity to be effective it needs to be smooth. In the future, there are several adjustments I would make. First of all, rather than indicating turns by pointing to students myself, I might have them all stand up to start with, then sit down once they’d said their sentence, phrase, or word. I might also only have half the class participate (taking volunteers), standing until they’d spoken, while the rest of the class listened and noted how many times someone said the same sentence, phrase, or word that they’d written down.
The discussion on the ending of the book went well and students were eager to participate, sharing strong opinions. Because it was going well, I allowed the discussion to go longer than I planned for, which created timing issues with the activities that followed. In the future, how could I better organize an informal debate like this to stay on schedule without reducing engagement level? During our debate, one student remarked, “We should have a debate team.” Maybe a formal debate format would be effective, but the question remains of how to draw less outspoken students into the conversation. When we transitioned to the gallery walk, there was some confusion about what I expected of students and how this factored in to the overall lesson. I needed to make instructions clearer and the purpose of the activity more explicit. Furthermore, this activity was cut short due to the lengthening of the debate. I also needed to make the instructions for the poem assignment clearer. There was not enough time to go over the rubric and answer student questions. I will need to allot time in the following class period for this. Finally, the timing of introducing a new project on the same day that their essays were due was not well received by all the students in the class. Some complained about the work load being too heavy. However, others responded to their classmates in my defense, saying things like, “This is an advanced class. What do you expect?” Moving forward, how do I continue to push students while making assignments more organized and thus more manageable both for them to complete and for me to grade? Also, how do I integrate visuals (smartboard) more effectively in order to guide/structure instructions and class discussions A note on the title of lesson: This is misleading, as the focus was more on characters in general than loneliness specifically. |