First lesson plan of the year

It's just a draft at this time, and I don't really have much time right now to wax philosophical about it, but here is a draft of a teaching demonstration lesson for my English 297 class, Teaching of Writing.  The lesson is about capitalization.  The basic plan is to start class working in pairs correcting the capitalization of an ee cummings poem.  From there, we will come back as a whole class to go through the various rules of capitalization with the use of skeletal notes to be filled in with examples offered up by the class as a whole.  To finish up, the class will form 5 groups of 4 and correct the capitalization in a Don Marquis poem, "The Coming of Archy".  As a sponge, there will also be a short passage of my own creation with as many capitalization errors as I can fit!

Please let me know what you think:


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Literacy Presentation and Lesson Plan

Okay, so I may not be getting any students to let forth a barbaric yawp just yet, but I presented my lesson on Wednesday and I think it went well.  I'm not exactly Robin Williams, but I think I can get there.  For my presentation, I utilized the literacy strategy of Text Impression.  With this pre-reading strategy, you give the class a list of vocabulary words that you have gleaned from the upcoming reading (enough to give them a hint as to the content, without giving anything away), then ask them to craft a short descriptive passage about what they think you'll be covering.  Once finished, you share several responses and then start the reading.  The goal of the strategy is to generate interest and begin creating a greater sense of engagement with the text.  As the students start the reading, they will keep the short passages in mind, constantly comparing their own guess with the actual text.

As mentioned, I think my presentation went well, despite a small hiccup with the order of things.  However, I ran into a small problem by trying to have the students work on two lists and two descriptive passages at the same time.  We were covering two separate texts, but I gave them both lists at the same time...this was a mistake.  Even my college student classmates had trouble following what was expected of them with this strategy.  When I repeat this lesson in the future, if I choose to cover two texts in one go, I will definitely split the lists up.

Literacy Strategy Lesson Plan
Literacy Strategy Concept Map
Literacy Strategy Presentation
John Henry Handout

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Thoughts on my first lesson plan

These things are HARD!

I am currently working on my first ever lesson plan for the aforementioned C&I class, and it is way more difficult than I initially anticipated.  The main problem for me, I think, is the goal of the lesson.  I have an idea about the texts I want to use and connections I want to make, but now I am struggling with the actual goals I want the students to accomplish at the end of the lesson.  I wish I had known about Backwards Planning before I came up with my idea for the texts I wanted to use.

It is interesting, however, to think about the evolution of my idea even over the course of two or three days.  The initial impetus for my lesson was the article I found, Songs That Teach: Using Song-Poems to Teach Critically, by James R. Carlson, wherein he speaks of using Bob Dylan songs (among others) as alternate texts with which to aid the students in meaning-making.  While I don't have the time in the scope of this particular assignment to utilize the songs in the same way that Carlson does, I did appreciate the concept of using songs (and accompanying lyrics) as a way of engaging the students by providing them with an alternate view of text.  In the article, Carlson used Dylan's, "The Death of Emmett Till," to further the discussion of two books that his students had read.  He further tied it into the concept of artistic/stylistic choice and the fallibility of sources. 

This is an incredible amount of information and I feel that I can absolutely do that sort of thing...when I have an entire year to work with.  One of the problems I am confronting is scaling back my idea.  At the beginning, I was planning on using "John Henry" by Johnny Cash and wanted to tie that into the Monomyth and how it relates to American Folklore and our folk heroes as extensions of the Classic heroes.  Oh, and I wanted to extend it to the connections of various versions of the same song and how our ideas and stories change and evolve over time...all in a 15 minute presentation.  I guess I can't be blamed for being unambitious!

I have since scaled back to using, "John Henry" as an introduction and alternate text relating to Man vs. Machine, and tying that in with an excerpt from an as yet to be determined short story by Isaac Asimov in I, Robot.  The connection will hopefully be Man vs Machine and Man vs Technology and how two authors in two mediums can approach the same theme, but with very different results, very different texts, and very different viewpoints.  This could also tie into a broader lesson arc of the continuing struggle of Man vs. Machine across the ages of literature (every advance in technology has detractors and proponents, and every advance is heralding the downfall of society etc etc).

See.  Even when I scale it back, I run into the problem of all of these ideas floating in my head to connect this to this to that, and nowhere is there a state standard in sight.  I've even decided on the fact that I want to do a prereading exercise, but again, without a standard or goal to shoot for, there's no way to choose a strategy.

I'll check back in tomorrow night, and by then I'll definitely have a lesson plan to share.  I promise.

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