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Arnold
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Don't you hate it when someone comes up with a cute acronym for something when a word-by-word description of the idea would be much more effective? Well, sorry, but I have three acronyms for you that apply to the theme of "What Not to Do When Creating a Lesson Plan." These are: KISS (an oldie but goodie), ONES, and DRUDGE. No, these are not meant to be put together in sentence form to suggest something improper; each represents, rather, a basic principle that I have learned and advocate in regard to this process of lesson-plan "Don'ts." KISS means, of course, Keep It Simple, Stupid - but we alter it slightly to end it with Sweetheart, instead. ONES tells us: Only Not Excessively Simple. DRUDGE reminds us: Don't Ruin it Under Dreary Garbage, Either. |
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image: http://www.allfree-clipart.com/
"...it seems to me that there is no One Way to design, write, and execute a lesson plan for students using the internet for research and reporting." |
This article is not meant to be a comprehensive how-to on How to Create a Lesson Plan for the computer room. I doubt that such an authoritative tutorial exists, or if there is one, I would appreciate it if someone would point me to it. I have even stronger doubts, however, if such an article (or book, or encyclopedia, even) could exist, for the subject matter is still so new, not much more than five years old, yet at the same time so broad. It would be like writing an article on How To Teach (Electronically). What teacher or educational theorist would even presume to tackle such a subject? Any teacher knows that there is no One Way to teach. Likewise, it seems to me that there is no One Way to design, write, and execute a lesson plan for students using the internet for research and reporting. Moreover, creating and using these things is a learning process: the good teacher learns from his/her mistakes, and gets better at it as he/she goes along. Finally, I will concentrate mainly on the structure of the lesson plan here, the bigger picture: egregious errors, important features left out or poorly utilized, and the like. This is not to imply that the core content of the activity - the questions, listed under Activities/Procedure, considered both individually and collectively -- is beyond analysis or criticism. But the step-by-step building of a lesson plan is the subject for another article. What I want to show here, instead, is one piece of the larger puzzle, an online lesson that did not work. I will analyze that lesson plan and draw some conclusions as to why it failed in its objectives; by doing this I hope to help other teachers avoid some of the same mistakes. |
Let's take a look at the lesson plan in question. It is at http://www.doctorgus.net/lessons/alexander.htm. It is probably best here to open it in a new window so we can look at the poor thing while referring back to my comments on it: first copy the url above, the go to File, New, and Window, then Paste the url in the Address box of that new window. Now let's look at it and number its major defects: 1. The first thing that stands out, as I look at it now - and as my victim-students looked at it -- is the long list of vocabulary words that the students were required to look up. Thirty-one words. I teach in both high school and middle school, and this lesson plan was designed for students at both levels; I felt that most students were unlikely to be familiar with these terms used in the source site at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/7545/ Alexander.html. So I asked them to look them up, using the reference-dictionary sites shown. Doing so violates the KISS rule, adding unnecessary complication and complexity to something that did not require either; it also violates the DRUDGE rule: the list of vocabulary words is certainly Dreary Garbage. Let's be specific: |
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I drew the focus of the lesson immediately from its content and supposed objectives (more about those in a minute) to vocabulary. What was intended to be a teaching and learning exercise about a significant historical figure quickly became an exercise in looking up words. It was boring, plain and simple, to walk through the process of defining 31 words. I had chosen a fine web site, vibrant and informative, but had managed to make it leaden and lifeless by requiring students to define a bunch of terms. If I had deemed the site to be overly laden with words that students needed to look up, then I should have chosen another source; there is no dearth of information about the subject out on the web. You can't really have it both ways here: either the web site is good or it isn't. In this case, I think it's a good source, if a bit challenging. But my rule (then, as now) is: better challenging than a pushover; better to make the students reach out for understanding, and that includes vocabulary as well as concepts. This recalls ONES, above. |
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| The KISS and ONES rules seem to conflict, to want to stake out both ends of the idea of simplicity, and, as we've seen already above, you can't have it both ways. But you can here, because Keeping It Simple applies to the teacher, and ONES is for the students. Writing lesson plans is a difficult enough task for the teacher even at its most basic level - one idea, one resource (web site), one document, one assignment, one set of related questions. Why make it more difficult, more complex? My advice here is to keep it at that level and write your lesson plans just so. Don't go mixing in multiple resources, several web sites, and dozens of questions. This is like the old saw about trying to teach a pig how to sing: don't do it, because the pig won't like it, and it won't work, anyway. If I may be kind of fast and loose with my imagery here, likewise the students won't like the complex lesson plan, they won't perform well using it, and they won't learn much, if anything, from it. So the teacher will be unhappy, too. |
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| "They were bored by it - especially burdened with the vocabulary part - and they were not challenged by it." |
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