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Toward Praxis Lesson Planning
Title Praxis is the combination of reflection and action to change the world. Can your title make a praxis connection? Overview What grade level are you teaching? Consider challenging yourself by developing meaningful, intellectually exciting lessons for young, low-track, and/or diverse students. How is this lesson not isolated but part of a meaningful curriculum? What themes are the students exploring? If the most basic and important mission of education is preparing citizens for an incomplete democracy, how do your curriculum and lessons tie to questions of justice and issues that matter in students' lives and in the world? How will the lesson foster critical analysis, dialogue, and making a difference? Goals Some lesson plan formats emphasize teaching individual students specific behaviors or skills, because these skills or behaviors are in the standards or curriculum guide, but ask yourself, why are these skills or behaviors important? Can students have a voice in shaping the behaviors and skills they are learning? How would understanding purpose and participating in decision making impact student motivation and learning? How would it prepare them for collaborative action and making a difference? (Rather than simply getting ahead because of their individual skills?) How do your goals help students develop critical consciousness? Demystify official narratives? Listen to and work with others like and unlike themselves? How can you set up the lesson so that the teacher is also learning from the students? How can your lesson involve authentic dialogue? A list of activities is not the same thing as your goals for the lesson. The key question to organize your lesson is: what are students learning? Standards Sometimes teachers are asked to indicate how their lessons meet specific standards. How might you connect your lesson to NCTE/IRA Standards and/or Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Materials or Resources Needed Specify. Activities or Procedures Describe the activities you plan. How will the students be active learners not passive recipients? How can they engage in inquiry, reflection, and action? Can activities involve the practive of democracy? Can they consider excluded voices? Engage in collaborative learning? Address real world problems? Imagine alterntive possibilities? Analyze complex real world issues and problems? How can marginal, excluded, or oppressed voices be included and valued? How do you draw on student's prior knowledge, incorporate their writing, student choice, value their responses as readers, meaningful thematic instruction, carefully focused discussion, group work, etc. How are you fostering student inquiry? What role do students play in asking questions and shaping the directon of learning? Here are a couple of traditional lesson plan formats ITIP (anticipatory set, objective, modeling, monitoring, guided practice, independent practice) and ROPES (Review, Overview, Presentation, Exercise, Summary), and there are many others. Think carefully about how these formats define knowledge, the role of the teacher and the power, or lack thereof, of the students. How would critical pedagogy rethink these lesson formats? Consider ways you can make the lesson creative and challenging for the most capable and, at the same time, engaging for the full range of students. Explain how you will break complex activities, assignments, or projects into specific steps or stages. Feel free to attach any instructional materials, handouts, instructions, discussion or study questions, etc. you might create or need for the lesson. A lesson may include more than one class period. Accommodation Indicate how the lesson will succeed with a variety of learning levels and styles. Also, consider how you might accommodate and individualize instruction for a student or students with special needs, learning disabilities, emotional and physical impairments, social disapproval, etc. Challenge yourself to make the example you give an interesting one. Extensions What kinds of follow-up activities could students engage in to develop and expand on what they have learned in the lesson? How will you encourage continued learning beyond the classroom and the teacher and making a difference? Assessment How will you know that students have achieved your goals? How might you encourage student self- and collaborative-assessment? p>Some lesson plans are built around teacher-created rubrics, such as those found at Rubistar . Alfie Kohn and Maja Wilson raise questions about rubrics. How do rubrics limit or control student learning? What power dynamics do rubrics establish in the classroom? How can you engage in more meaningful forms of assessment? Created by: allen.webb@wmich.edu |