Lesson Plan By Kaveena Bullock
Use this lesson plan to spark the creativity in your students. (Age group: Middle school. However, you can adjust the lesson plan to any age group you teach.)
Directions:
What inspires you? Use the crayons and markers in front of you and use what inspires you to write in the form of a picture. (You can draw or if you are a teacher, you can provide your own coloring sheets). Different colors could mean different emotions. You have 15 minutes. When your time is up, answer the following questions:
1. What happened when you used your coloring for inspiration?
2. How can you use these emotions in your writing?
3. Do you think students should have access to more activities that spark creativity?
4. Going forward, what activities will you do to spark enthusiasm in your writing?
Lesson Learned- Christina Masucci
The beginning of my college career, I was neck deep in the education department—first with a music concentration, then English. Not to be deep or anything, but I wanted to be like my dad, who’s a music teacher. (He actually went to Kean back in the day. Music Ed major.)
Anyway, long story short, I didn’t graduate with an education degree. I realized it wasn’t for me. It took me a while to be okay with that, what with the whole “don’t want to disappoint anyone” mindset, but y’know what? Teaching in a classroom wasn’t going to make me happy, and the need to please people and the need for job security didn’t win out over the want to be happy and the want to do something with my life that I love.
Wow, I said I didn’t wanna get deep, yet here I am.
Rewind. The highest class level I got to in the education program was… well… student teaching. I was literally in a classroom, had my substitute certification, had the beginnings of a teacher wardrobe, and I realized “this isn’t for me.” It was my cooperating teacher that ended up convincing me. She said that teachers have to have a passion for teaching, not just the subject they teach. I was in love with writing and literature and English, not teaching (aside from tutoring, which I am strangely more adept in). I would have done students a disservice, and for their sake (and mine), I am forever grateful for that cooperating teacher of mine.
Self-discovery aside, my stint as a teacher-in-training gave me a greater appreciation for the teaching profession as well as the minds and needs of students. I recall weeks of creating, fine-tuning, and presenting lesson plans. Of learning how to capture and keep students’ attention and interest. Truth be told, it’s been years since, so I don’t fully remember all the concepts, but based on that vague, fuzzy knowledge and the more recent discussions of our Writing Theory & Practice class, it all has to do with the students. With addressing their needs and preferred learning styles and areas of interest and adapting all of that (somehow) to the lesson being taught that day. Even an offhand comment could serve as a connection a student can make to a lesson/activity/etc.
At the end of the day, it’s the students that are the area of main importance, that are the main characters here, and it’s their passion that makes them willing to learn, just as it’s the teacher’s passion that makes them willing to teach and my passion that makes me not willing to teach willing to write.
Effective Lesson Planning- Darline Ceus
In her article, The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing, author Cynthia L. Selfe argue that
“the history of writing in the U.S. composition instruction as well as its contemporary legacy functions to limit our professional understanding of composting as a multimodal rhetorical activity and deprive students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning.” ( 617)
As a educator I have witnessed some very well written lessons plans and some others that lack essential elements for a successful class environment. In response to Selfe’s argument I suggest that all effective lesson plans should include the following:
Directions are clear / tools are available
Purpose/ objective
Present clear goals
Moving forward these three elements will provide students the opportunity to have a valuable learning experience where they are not limited and have adequate resources for learning in a multimodal way.
“The students will be able to...”
...do a lot of things given the opportunity. Unfortunately, that would be a vague statement and deemed insufficient for a lesson plan. Oddly enough, that was the part I struggled the most when I was assigned to create and hand-in a lesson plan. It was the equivalent of writing the thesis statement in an essay in high school; a near impossible task. The trick is avoiding the methodical approach to it. Instead of focusing on the design on paper, trying to imagine how the lesson itself will possibly play out in class would be a much better technique. Sometimes, you must discover the thesis in writing rather than having it ready beforehand. I believe that same conduct of discovery can be applied to a great lesson plan.