Lesson Plans: Learning From Our Mistakes
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|
Let's
move on. We're not done with this lesson plan yet. |
| "There
are many good templates out there for a teacher to use; keeping with the
KISS rule..." |
2. The next obvious problem here is the lack of important elements. There
are many good templates out there for a teacher to use; keeping with the
KISS rule, she should find a suitable one and use it. For instance, the
New York Times publishes a lesson plan every day, and uses a good format;
take a look at any one at the Lesson Plan Archive there: http://www.nytimes.com/
learning
/teachers/lessons/ archive.html. The teacher will find dozens of excellent
lesson plans there, each following the same design, which includes grade
level, subject, overview, suggested time allowance, objectives, resources/materials,
activities/procedures, wrap-up, further questions for discussion, evaluation/assessment,
vocabulary, extension activities, interdisciplinary connections, related
articles, additional online information, and connections to national and
state standards. This may seem like a long and burdensome list, but look
it over and you will see that there is nothing that can be deleted. A
thorough lesson plan using conventional sources will include the same
features; why should an online learning activity be any less thorough
or challenging?
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|
The lesson plan that we are analyzing includes some of the requisite features
of a complete activity but leaves out many, as well. Well, here's the new
lesson plan; take a look at it and see if you like the changes:http://www.doctorgus.
net/ lessons/ alexandernew_and_improved.htm. I know that I am prejudiced,
but I like the new version. It has both learning power and lasting power.
It is a complete lesson plan now. It seems to me that the revised version
complies with the Don'ts that I have discussed: it is not unnecessarily
complicated, it is not boring or tendentious, and most importantly, it seems
to me that it challenges students to do critical thinking, to reach out
for not only the information contained in the sites provided, but for information
that they will find and analyze on their own, also, posing their own questions.
I think that the new version reflects good changes that are the result of
learning from my own mistakes. |
| "I
intend to use the new version in the fall with next year's classes." |
I intend to use the new version in the fall with next year's classes. I
encourage other teachers to give it a try, also, and to let me know how
it goes with their students. Sometimes we tend to forget who the ultimate
consumers of this work are: it is the students, of course. These lesson
plans do not exist in some kind of vacuum, like artwork hanging on the walls
of a museum. This stuff is meant to be used - and abused, and critiqued,
and improved. In this article I have demonstrated one instance of one failure
of one teacher with his classes; I would appreciate sharing with and hearing
from other teachers - successes, hopefully. |
About
the Author:
Arnold Pulda has taught
Social Studies at Doherty Memorial High School and Middle School in Worcester,
MA, for eight years. Currently he is the Director of Gifted and Talented
student programs for the Worcester Public Schools. He received his Ph.D.
in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in
1977. He has been using the Internet in his classroom since 1993. He has
led many workshops and made many presentations on how to use the Internet
in education. He is a Fellow of the Library of Congress and served as
a Facilitator for the Library's Institute for Educators this summer. His
website is www.doctorgus.net. He
can be reached at doctrgus@massed.net
and would welcome comments on this article from other teachers.
Resources and notes:
There are many places to go to start building your own lesson plans. I
have cited the New York Times format above; it is as good as any. For
a different approach, get your students acclimated to analyzing primary
sources of all types; document analysis worksheets are at the excellent
site of the National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.nara.gov/
education/teaching/analysis/analysis.html. American Memory, at the
Library of Congress site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/media.html)
also offers media analysis tools that will help your students use and
create their own document-based questions. There is also a "Lesson Framework"
on the site (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/
media.html ), but it is not for beginners. Filamentality (http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/)
offers yet another approach: a step-by-step guide to building a lesson
plan from scratch. As it says on the web site, "Is Filamentality Easy
to Use? Does cream cheese come from Philadelphia?" A good example of lesson-plan
structure can be seen at E-Tutor, http://www.e-tutor.com/demo/lessons/1/index.htm
; for a fee the site will provide you with tools to build lesson plans.
PBS is also a wonderful classroom online resource, with many ready-to-go
lesson plans at http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/teachtech/ideaswebbased.shtm
; there is no how-to tutorial there, however. The same is true for "Education
World" (http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/),
TeachersFirst (http://www.teachers
first.com/matrix.htm), The Lesson Bank (http://www.teachersfirst.com/matrix.htm
) at $18.00 per, "A to Z Teacher Stuff" (http://atozteacherstuff.com/lessonplans/),
Microsoft's Encarta site (http://encarta.msn.com/schoolhouse/default.asp),
and TeacherVision(http://www.teacher
vision.com/tv/curriculum/lessonplans/index.html). My advice again
is KISS: find a couple of lesson plan indexes that you like, bookmark
them on your browser, and use a few of them as you go through the school
year. You will find, however, that you will want to customize even the
best of the "canned" lesson plans to suit your students and your curriculum,
and that's where my advice of how to avoid mistakes in that process might
come in handy.
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Meridian: A Middle
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a service of NC State University, Raleigh, NC
Volume 4, Issue 1, Winter 2001
ISSN 1097 9778
URL: http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/toc.html
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