The following lesson plans are from my first student teaching placement in a seventh-grade ELA classroom and my second placement in a ninth-grade English classroom.
The lesson above was carefully planned to address student misconceptions and points of confusion in a seventh grade ELA class. It was from a unit on Greek Mythology, and the text we were studying was The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin. The team of teachers I was working with was hoping that students would be able to understand the difference between Fate and Luck in the novel. Students were having trouble with this concept, so I designed an interactive demonstration as my set induction for students to visualize and embody the distinction. This helped solidify this concept for students, becoming a point of reference throughout the entire unit as we worked on higher order skills such as writing theme statements.
This lesson also shows my thoughtful attention to scaffolding and psychological principals of learning. I sequenced the lesson so that students would participate in and watch the demonstration, we would look at quotes from the novel and discuss as a class, they would work to sort examples in pairs, and then finally they would complete the exit ticket alone. This final step acted as a formative assessment of their understanding and progress toward my objectives, and was used to alter my instruction going forward.
The lesson above was the culminating lesson for my Lord of the Flies unit in a ninth-grade ELA honors class. This lesson showcases my ability to utilize a variety of cohesive strategies to guide students toward my objectives. The lesson started with a gallery walk, where students were able to walk around and view different covers of the novel from different publishers and illustrators, in standard English, German, and Spanish. I believe it is important to expose students to various languages, ideas, and representations. This activity gave students the chance to observe and evaluate, eventually generating an interesting discussion about the themes that William Golding conveyed in his novel, and how those themes could be represented with a single image.
We moved on to reading the final chapter of the book, discussing as we read, and watching a video clip from the movie to help students visualize what they had been reading. The main assessment of this lesson was a book cover project, where I asked students to create book covers like the ones we had previewed in the gallery walk activity at the start of class. This was a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the novel as a whole, and engage with themes, plot, characters, and background information about the author in both an artistic and written way. When I choose to integrate the arts into my classroom, I make it clear to students that they will never be judged on artistic ability. Instead, through the use of clear guidelines and expectations, students understood that they would be evaluated on their representation of a theme from the novel, their summary of the novel, and their author bio that connected Golding’s view of human nature with the text.
The lesson was a great way to bring closure to the unit and allow students to collaborate with peers to deepen their understanding of the themes portrayed in the novel as well as review the plot.