Group E – Lesson Plan (Check In)
Group E – Asiye, Jaclyn, Trent
- 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 main thing we want our lesson to communicate is the struggle that young minorities face and how they are more severely treated. We want our audience to come away with the knowledge of the reality of our youth in society.
- Where, when, and via what medium (i.e. twitter, video, face-to-face) will this lesson take place?
We thought it would be best to approach our peers at Baruch College and use a face-to-face method in communicating our lesson.
- What is your general mode of communicating this lesson (i.e. performance, debate, discussion, lecture, etc.)?
The mode we chose is possibly giving a lecture to inform our audience, and then allow for debate and discussion after which we will hand out questionnaires to know hoe much of our lesson was retained.
- What materials are needed for this lesson? How will you acquire these materials?
We will use the books and articles we have acquired for this class as well as use the Baruch library to further research the topic and print of questionnaires.
- Briefly (3-5 sentences) describe what your vision for teaching this lesson looks like.
The vision we have for teaching this lesson was to approach students at Baruch College and give a lecture of the many things we have discussed and learned from our course. Many of which pertain to the way that young minorities are dehumanized and seen as monstrous, using the literature we’ve read in class as a guide to help communicate this. After our lecture we will leave room for any debates or discussions our audience may have. Then we will hand out questionnaires to see how much of the information our audience was able to retain.
- Please detail at least 8-12 detailed action steps for how you will teach this lesson.
Step1: Find students on campus who have time to spare and willingness to cooperate.
Step2: Lecture said students on the facts and statistics of cruelty towards young minorities.
Step3: Give audience information from the many real life examples we went over in class, like Emmitt Till, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Step4: Then we will tell the story from Monster as a real life story.
Step5: Find out whether the audience would convict Steve Harmon if they were the jury.
Step6: Find out why and for how long they would sentence him.
Step7: Allow for debate or discussion.
Step8: Hand out questionnaire.
Step9: Gather the results from the questionnaire and present them to our class.
- 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.)?
The questionnaire we will hand out after lecture/discussion will be our main way to assess whether we successfully communicated our main point. We will also check to see if they are actively listening/nodding and engaging in discussion or asking questions.
So I’m really interested in your lesson, partly because you want to work on campus with Baruch students and partly because you seem to want to do two things: give a lecture and stage a kind of debate over the trial in Monster.
I have a number of questions though:
1) Lectures are usually scheduled. It’s very hard to just tag someone near the elevator and start lecturing. They are in route to things and are likely to politely (or not so politely) excuse themselves. Do you plan to reserve a space and a time and advertise your lecture? If you are going to students randomly, how will you ensure they stay, and how will you have enough students for debates?
2) What do you imagine the lecture to be on? Your discussion here is quite vague. Lectures are great, but they require you narrow your scope and do some pre-planning. Do you see this lecture as providing statistical data for current status of minority youth in NYC? Who is minority in your lecture? Who is a youth? And what kind of data will you want to have? Or are you going to do a less statistical presentation and a more rhetorical analysis of several cases in the news? What exactly will be the content of the lecture? How will you frame it? What will be your major objective (your most important point)? How will you discuss the examples in a manner that illustrates those points? What background information do you need? How long will this lecture be? How will you relay your sources to your audience?
3) A lecture and a kind of simulation debate are two different activities. I think it’s possible to have them together, but it seems like you will one need to shorten both of them, and you will need to articulate their relationship to one another. The audience should know exactly how the exercise connects to the information provided in the lecture. If it were a law course, and your lecture was about accessory felony charges, then you would have to give lots of information about what the law says and maybe some precedent examples, so it would be clear when the audience debates, the point of the debate is for them to use the material just given (apply knowledge) to assess this hypothetical case. You need to have a clear relationship between the two that works for your objective. You also need to make sure that your instructions for debate are clear. How will you debate? Will there be one representative from each group? Or will everyone talk in a round robin fashion? Who will be the judge? Or Jury? How will you decide when you’re done?
4) TIME: What you have planned would take about a standard class time at least, so an hour and fifteen minutes. I think having a survey might leave you with less time, though I imagine there are other ways to assess what people are learning. If you do a debate can there be things you will look for in the debate that will indicate that your audience has learned what you wanted them to learn?