Curtiss Hall, Nov. 5, 3:40 pm
Context, lesson objectives, and lesson outline
With respect to the preestablished schedule for English 150, this observation occurred during the initial stages of assignment 5. Prior to the lesson Abram observed, I had asked my students to read some passages about visual communication located in their student guide. The intent of this assignment was to prepare them for in-class discussion and activities related to the content they had read.
The primary learning objectives for the lesson were twofold: 1.) to introduce assignment 5 and 2.) to practice visual analysis to reinforce understanding of important visual design concepts. Below is a link to the lesson outline used to fulfill these learning objectives.
Personal Impressions of lesson implementation.
While I definitely could have done a few things to improve my lesson, I feel it was generally successful. One effective aspect of my lesson was the use of a jigsaw activity to facilitate student understanding of key concepts related to visual design. In preparation for this activity, students were introduced to the concepts of context, audience, and purpose in order to discuss how they play a role in influencing different design elements in visual communication. They were then asked to use their new knowledge to analyze one of four visual communication examples. They were subsequently prompted to explain their analysis to other students who had not yet seen the visual. One reason I found this activity to be effective is that the analysis forced students to connect the concepts of audience, context, and purpose to design choices the designers had made with respect to their visual. Moreover, the ability to make these connections would certainly be useful when it came time for the students to create their visual design for assignment 5. In other words, I feel that since they were forced to interpret designers’ choices related to purpose, audience, and context, the students would now be much more aware of the role these concepts should play in influencing their own visual designs. Maintaining this awareness would indeed be crucial for ensuring the effectiveness of their visual designs in their implementation.
Another effective aspect of my lesson directly relates to feedback Abram gave me following his last observation. He indicated I had a tendency to unload too many discussion questions on my students at once. This placed an unnecessary cognitive burden on the students, preventing them from answering each individual question to the best of their abilities. He further suggested that it would be a good idea to introduce discussion questions one at a time to limit any cognitive issues students may encounter when attempting to process all of the discussion questions at the same time. I did all possible to incorporate this suggestion into my current lesson when presenting my students with discussion questions before, during, and after the jigsaw activity. Following this technique resulted in at least one of the benefits I had postulated in my last observation report. This benefit was that students engaged in more sustained, robust discussion of each discussion question since they did not have to concern themselves with getting through multiple question during a relatively short amount of time.
Reactions to Abram’s comments & future instruction
Following the implementation of the lesson, my follow-up conversation with Abram was generally positive, serving to validate the personal impressions I had of my own lesson. That said, Abram made some suggestions that I feel were valuable for my improvement as an instructor. In this section, I will discuss two suggestions that stood out to me, giving some attention to how the suggestions could be used to improve my teaching in the future.
The first suggestion that stood out to me specifically related to integrating examples into my lecture. According to Abram, I generally had good small group activities intended to help students understand key concepts related to visual design. However, those small group activities would have likely functioned better if I had illustrated the key design concepts to the entire class using visual examples before asking them to work in small groups. In other words, rather than just teaching the students the key concepts they needed to know to analyze examples of visual communication in small groups, I should have displayed visual examples to the entire class to help students make connections between important design concepts and instances of those design concepts in practice. This would have placed the students in a better position to achieve success during the small group jigsaw activity.
At its most basic level, Abram’s suggestion to integrate examples of visual communication into my lecture was nothing more than a suggestion to model what I wanted the students to do in their small group activity. On drawing this conclusion, I realized that I had missed a valuable opportunity to more fully ensure that students achieved desired learning outcomes during the jigsaw activity. Moreover, this inference also reminded me that I need to do more to prepare my students for successful group activities by modeling what I want them to do during my lecture. For this reason, I am going to take special care to integrate opportunities for modeling in my lesson plans. In fact, I have already done so. After becoming aware of the missed opportunity for modeling visual analysis, I reserved some time during the next class to have my students look at one example of visual communication so that we could practice analyzing it together. Even though this was done after the small group jigsaw activity in the previous class, I was still able to check that they were making appropriate connections between various design elements and the broader concepts of purpose, context, and audience. I am confident that doing this better prepared the students to more strongly connect purpose, context, and audience to their own design choices when creating their visual for assignment 5.
Abram’s somewhat veiled reminder to integrate more modeling through the use of examples was not the only important suggestion that I derived from his feedback. Another useful suggestion was related to lesson organization. During my lesson, I made the choice to have one of my students do a make-up presentation for assignment 4 at the end of class. However, Abram noticed that this seemed to create a sense of “pressure when everyone is ready to pack up and leave.” He further stated that it likely would have been better to have the student do her make-up presentation at the beginning of class to avoid such unnecessary pressure. Before receiving this feedback from Abram, I admit that I had not given much thought to placing the make-up presentation at the end of class. Nevertheless, after receiving his feedback, I specifically recalled that at the time I announced the make-up presentation, many of the other students were in the process of packing up to leave. I should have realized at this point that those students were already checked out and so, therefore, unlikely to be good audience members. Moreover, the student giving the presentation probably recognized this, prompting her to rush her presentation to avoid keeping her classmates from leaving. As I recognize these issues, I am now more determined to give more thought to how I organize classroom activities. This will ensure that the time I share with my students in class flows more smoothly, effectively avoiding jarring situations similar to the one discussed above.
Concluding Remarks
Similar to my last reflection on my own teaching experience, the opportunity to reflect on the implementation of my lesson as well as Abram’s feedback to my lesson has been extremely beneficial. It has given me the chance to analyze both my strengths and weaknesses with respect to small group activities, modeling, and lesson organization. I am now more aware of how I can better prepare my students for small group activities by taking the time to show them examples and model what I want them to do. I also have a better sense of how to organize my lessons in order to avoid unsavory circumstances such as the one discussed in this reflection.