Peter Haleas, Maple Willow Larch, Nov. 6, 10 am
Section 1
Lesson Context. I observed Peter’s lesson during the culminating stages of assignment 4 and the initial stages of assignment 5. In the previous lesson, Peter had finished discussing assignment 4 with his students. Thus, the purpose of Peter’s current lesson was to help his students make the transition from assignment 4 to assignment 5.
Lesson objective & relevant activities. During our brief discussion following his lesson, Peter indicated that one of his primary learning objectives was to implement an activity that he considered to be a microcosm of his reconceptualization of assignment 5. According to Peter this not only gave his students a taste of the expectations for assignment 5, but it also gave them practical practice fulfilling some of its requirements.
To fulfill this learning objective, Peter broke his lesson into three phases. For the first phase of the lesson, he asked his students to use their lab computers to write a 5-minutes summary of their favorite movie. As part of this task, the students were asked to leave out the title of the movie. The purpose for this instruction became clear after the five minutes transpired. On completion of the five minutes, Peter asked his students to get up and go to a random computer to read one of their peer’s summaries. After reading the summary, the students were instructed to place the appropriate title at the bottom of the summary. If they could not surmise the appropriate movie title, they were asked to create what they felt to be a good movie title for the summary and place it at the bottom of the summary.
Following completion of the tasks above, Peter entered the second phase of his lesson. This phase began with him dividing his students into informal groups of three to four. After the groups were formed, he instructed each group to find a film poster on the Internet for one of the movies that the group members had summarized in the previous phase. Peter then explained that they should use the poster to create a short pitch for a movie that had absolutely nothing to do with the true premise of the film. Before allowing them to work on their movie pitch, Peter modeled a fictitious pitch for his students so that they were able to get a firm understanding of what he wanted them to do. He created his pitch on the spot using a random movie poster that one of his students asked him to use. After modeling how to quickly come up with a fictitious movie pitch, Peter gave the students fifteen to twenty minutes to come up with their own pitches for the movie posters they had chosen. As students worked on their pitches, Peter went from group to group providing help when needed. In addition to providing help, he asked each group to show him the movie poster they were using for their pitch. He then went back to his laptop and found the same posters on the Internet so that he could display them on the projector for phase three of the assignment.
The third phase of the lesson involved each group presenting their movie pitches in front of the class. Peter gave each group two minutes to present their pitch while he displayed their respective movie posters on the projector. After each group was done presenting, the students who were listening to the pitch were asked to collectively state “boo” or “sold” based on how well the pitch went. During this phase of the lesson, there seemed to be a lot of engagement from the students as they listened to the rather comical pitches that their peers had developed.
Section 2
After observing his class, I noticed that Peter employed many useful techniques for enhancing the overall learning environment in his classroom. Given that I have already observed some of these techniques in other teachers’ lessons (e.g. showing vs. telling, fostering rapport, etc.), I will focus on two that I have not already discussed in previous observation reports. As usual, these techniques have informed changes that I want to make to my own teaching practices.
Making the most of technology. One of Peter’s techniques that has unique implications for my teaching was his ability to use technology to appropriately support the tasks involved with his lesson. To clarify, in each phase of the lesson described above, Peter was able to find some way of meaningfully connecting the available technological resources in the lab classroom setting to the task at hand. For example, in phase 1, he had students use the lab computers to write a summary of their favorite movies. In phase two, in addition to having each group use the computers to write a quick outline of their intended movie pitch, he also had them use the Internet to find a movie poster which they could use as a visual to support their fictitious movie pitch. Finally, in phase three he used his own computer to project the images of each group’s movie poster onto the projector screen as they pitched their movie.
Although it is more than likely that Peter’s lesson could have been implemented without the use of lab computers, his determination to use the available technology throughout the lesson had various positive effects. First, the use of technology made each phase of the lesson a little more robust. Take, for example, phase two of the lesson. Having the students use technology to find a visual in phase 2 provided something tangible for the students to use to help them formulate their unique pitches. Peter could have simply asked his students to come up with a fictitious pitch for a movie without the help of a visual to inform their pitch. However, doing so would probably have proven more difficult for the students since they would not have had a visual to help them generate ideas for their pitch. Furthermore, Peter’s decision to project the movie posters on the screen in phase three of his lesson more than likely helped the students who were listening stay engaged. In many instances, the presenting groups had attempted to make comical pitches for otherwise serious movies. Without the presence of the serious visual of the movie poster, these pitches could have possibly fallen flat with the audience. Nevertheless, the presence of the visual helped the audience fully understand the comical disconnect between the pitch and the poster, solidifying the activity as a fun, engaging activity intended to prepare them for completing assignment 5.
As I consider the positive effects of Peter’s use of technology, I am reminded of how important it is to use technological resources when they are available. Although this is something I generally try to do during lab time, Peter’s use of technology to support the learning objectives of his lesson definitely reemphasized the necessity of asking myself the following question every time I give a lesson in the computer lab: How can I best use the available technology to achieve the learning objectives for my lesson? As I more frequently keep this question in mind during my lesson preparation for lab days, I feel that I will be able to make each facet of my lesson more robust, facilitating both student engagement and their achievement of the lesson’s learning objectives.
Accessing students interests. The second technique I hope to borrow from Peter’s repertoire relates to his efforts to access student interests. This technique was not immediately apparent to me during the lesson. However, I noticed that his students were typically excited to participate in classroom activities and Peter did not normally have to motivate his students to complete group tasks. On the contrary, the students went about completing their tasks with smiles on their faces and laughter in their voices fully focused on the primary objective of each assigned task. When I asked him about how he got students to engage so readily in classroom activities, he mentioned that he purposefully adapted assignment 5 in an effort to connect more with their interests. Moreover, he attributed his adaptation of assignment 5 to more appropriately engage with student interests as the driving force behind his students’ engaged participation in the lesson’s activities.
I must admit that before Peter told me that he had made some changes to assignment 5, I was wondering why he had chosen to have his students practice coming up with movie pitches to prepare for the submitting the final product of the assignment. This failed to make any sense given the original purpose of assignment 5: repurposing assignment 3 or 4 to produce a form of visual communication. However, Peter potentially recognized that the original purpose of the assignment would not have been as engaging for his students as his reconceptualization of the assignment. Moreover, it can certainly be reasoned that students are much more likely to achieve learning objectives if their interest in a given subject is strong.
Given that interest is a key component of learning, my conversation with Peter reminded me that it is important to be flexible with major assignments. In other words, as long as students are meeting intended course learning outcomes, it is completely acceptable to modify major assignment to more appropriately address student interests. In fact, if students lack interest in a particular subject, it will likely have a much more deleterious effect with respect to the achievement of course learning outcomes than modifying an assignment’s stated purposes to foster student interest. That said, I intend to keep this in mind as I create and adapt assignments for English 250 next semester. I would rather have my students interested in the subject matter than have them fail to meet learning objectives due to a lack of interest in preestablished course content.
Concluding Remarks
Attending Peter’s class was an excellent learning experience. The activities and techniques he employed were well executed, and I learned a lot from my observation and our follow-up discussion. I have already attempted to implement some of the techniques I learned from his lesson and will continue to do so next semester in English 250.