EDUC 586 Literacy in the Secondary School Lesson Plan #1
INTRODUCTION:
During the Spring of 2015, I took a class titled Educ 586: Literacy in the Secondary School. We were asked to create two lesson plans using activities from Doug Buehl's Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning. The following artifact is a week-long debate activity that I completed with my fifth grade students.
STANDARDS:
Wisconsin Teaching Standards
Standard 1: Teachers know the subjects they are teaching.
Standard 4: Teachers know how to teach
Standard 5: Teachers know how to manage a classroom
Standard 7: Teachers know how to plan different kinds of lessons
International Reading Association Standards
IRA Standard 2: Candidates use instructional approaches, materials, and an integrated, comprehensive, balanced curriculum to support student learning in reading and writing.
IRA Standard 5: Candidates create a literate environment that fosters reading and writing by integrating foundational knowledge, instructional practices, approaches and methods, curriculum materials, and the appropriate use of assessments.
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REFLECTION:
The students LOVED the debate portion! The thumbs up/down worksheet helped my students keep track of their ideas, and it was also very useful as a scaffolding tool. I feel that if we did not use the discussion web, we would have jumped in (headfirst!) too soon without really taking note of an author’s evidence and biases. It worked well to have the thumbs up/down worksheet and pro/con articles attached, this way students were not getting papers everywhere. This thumbs up/down worksheet was effective because students not only got to state their opinions, but they also had to look at another person’s opinions (which were backed up with evidence). One modification that could be made would be to have several articles for the students to choose from, instead of just one for the “pro” side and one for the “con”. It would be very interesting to put some non repudiable/biased sources and compare these sources with reliable ones (this would not only show the author’s evidence, but also clearly show their credibility!).
