Group A Lesson Planning Check-In Post
What is your main thing you want this lesson to communicate? What is the main thing you want your audience to come away with?
The lesson objective we will be presenting is that social group divisions in schools (high schools in particular) cause repercussions that can affect an individual emotionally and mentally for year to come and that it only serves to divide peers and foster harmful stereotypes and bullying. Ultimately, we hope to share the idea that unifying as a student body and not judging one another based on appearance, hobbies, or likes/dislikes can only produce many more advantages.
Where, when, and via what medium (i.e. twitter, video, face-to-face) will this lesson take place?
As a group, we plan on creative a video based on interviews with individuals who have passed the stage of high school cliques and social divisions and are now pursuing higher education and/or careers. We will ask them of their high school experience and whether or not social divisions played a role in their teenage life and if so, how it has affected them. We will then present this video to a group of high school students and conduct a face-to-face interactive discussion regarding their thoughts, personal experiences, and feelings on the matter.
What is your general mode of communicating this lesson (i.e. performance, debate, discussion, lecture, etc.)?
After presenting the video, we will hopefully be able to initiate an active discussion in which each member of the group shares their thoughts and ideas on the matter.
What materials are needed for this lesson? How will you acquire these materials?
We will need a video camera and a microphone as well as a tripod to film and create the video, which we have already acquired access to via the Baruch College Journalism Department.
Briefly (3-5 sentences) describe what your vision for teaching this lesson looks like.
Basically, our video will be a short five minutes (or less) of us interviewing an eclectic groups of young adults on their high school experiences and social divisions within their high school. We hope to acquire interviews from individuals of all different backgrounds, ethnicities, and walks of life so that we can also compare how American schools differ from international schools in this respect. After showing this compilation to the high school students in New York City, we will ask them their thoughts/feedback on what the interviewees had to share and how their school is socially divided in comparison (if at all). Also, we will ask them how they think they can take steps to crush these barriers and make a greater effort to relate to one another.
Please detail at least 8-12 detailed action steps for how you will teach this lesson.
- We will first introduce the video project idea and quickly explaining the lesson plan.
- We will explain how we created the video and thought of the theme for our lesson which we plan on sharing with the students. (Explain how The Outsiders played a role in this decision)
- We will then play our video and ask for any comments/feedback
- After a few students have participated, we will go around the room and ask each student to discuss their perspective of social divisions in their own school and if they view it as a matter of concern (and why/why not).
- We may also choose to interject with our own high school cliques that were prevalent when we were teenagers, if the students seem reluctant to speak.
- We will then brainstorm, as a group, why this is such an important issue in America and what social divides can lead to (i.e. bullying, violence, self-esteem issues, and long-term effects).
- We will discuss how we think these groups are formed and what we can do to unify students and help them understand one another better and break free from cliques.
- My group members and I will conclude the lesson by leaving the students with an impactful, resonating message of how separating into social cliques can hinder their growth and acceptance of others.
How will you assess whether you have successfully communicated your main point? What will you look for as signs that your audience heard and understood you (i.e. a quiz; an ability to identify a related example; a certain number of Facebook comments or shares; a written or verbal reflection on the material; etc.)?
It will be simple to base our assessment of how well we were able to communicate our ideas to the students on how willing they are to participate and how interested they seem in contributing to the lesson.
Somehow I missed this post when I went through the previous check ins. I don’t think my comments are really different than what I’ve said in your most recent check-ins.
I just want to emphasize that based on this description, I would say your group is perhaps trying to do too much. Making a video with high schoolers is already one project. Wanting to screen a video and lead discussion is a whole other project. And given that your group doesn’t seem to have completed the video yet, I would suggest doing one part of this project.
Secondly, audience participation is not a reliable measure of whether or not your audience hears you. There are several times in our class where people don’t readily participate but are actually paying attention. After asking a more pointed question, giving time for an exercise, or looking a post a student has written, I can see more clearly what they have taken in. Yes participation is usually a good sign, but participation and lack thereof can arise from a variety of reasons. I suggest you indicate some sign. Like if students demonstrate verbally or in writing that they are trying to draw connections between the video and the events of their own lives, then you will take that as a marker of comparative analysis on the subject. If students can go beyond saying my life is like X in the video to also explaining how they understand Y and X factors in their life to complicate the comparison between their life and X in the video, you will take that as a sign of their analyzing both the text and their own life.
Lastly: I’ve said this to other groups. Make sure you have a clear teaching objective. Right now your objective seems a little bit more like creating a space for personal reflection. That’s not bad. It’s actually important and part of what teaching can allow for. HOWEVER you still need to include within that larger goal some specific thing that you hope to teach. So perhaps you want to teach students that literature can be a center piece of dialogue around these issues. You’re kind of demonstrating that with the lesson and forum, but you can teach it more specifically by 1) saying it explicitly 2) telling them that you are hoping to demonstrate that idea with this forum 3) show how the texts you’ve read also seem to arrive at that conclusion 4) provide a few real life examples were discussion around literature or art has helped intervene in these issues and 5) by providing them with a list of possible literature and other texts that could be potential tools/sites of initiating a dialogue.
Do you see how in what I’m describing, you can still do the kind of network building, dialogue forum, while also having a teaching objective and you do things to get that objective across?