This week’s assignment challenged me, as I am not a
teacher and never created a lesson plan. I reflected on a book I read in the
adult education program titled The
Skillful Teacher. Brookfield (2006)
discusses a phenomenon he calls impostorship.
Impostorship is the feeling that one is not intelligent or smart enough
to go to college or complete an assignment. Brookfield states that this is common
amongst college students, so perhaps you felt impostorship as well this week.
A few months ago, a friend of mine took a
graduate school class at Central Michigan University titled Organizational
Dynamics. I remember looking at the
course syllabus and found it very interesting.
For this assignment, I searched Google for the Organizational Dynamics
syllabus. I managed to find an online version of the course that is currently in
session and used it as a basis for my lesson plan.
The main thought I had over the past couple of weeks
reference the wiki is collaboration.
West and West (2009) state that educators use a number of techniques and
strategies to promote collaborative activities to facilitate learning. In my lesson plan I attempted to incorporate a
few collaborative and individual activities. I enjoy
reading, learning and replying to wiki posts, so I incorporated these items into
my lesson plan. The students will develop their own wiki page and respond to
a question from the instructor by Wednesday of every week. The students must also
reply to at least 2 student posts by Sunday of each week. From my vantage point, learning from others is
just as important as learning from the textbook. I choose to incorporate different types of critiques in my lesion plan. One of the critiques focuses on a website and the other is a critique fellow student’s summary book/movie review paper.
I found the particular assignment very
rewarding in that I completed a task with little previous experience and gained
a better understating of how wikis can be used as an educational tool.
Click here to access my lesson plan.
J. A., & West, M. L. (2009). Using Wikis for
Online Collaboration. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Your first lesson plan? A good start, AKBaker2014. How you completed this blog entry clearly demonstrated your problem solving skills. Learning is empowered by technology!
ReplyDeleteJust for clarification purpose, it seems to me that the course you designed will have a main course wiki site and each individual learner will have their own wiki sites? If so, you might want to make it clearer about what assignments to be posted where. For example:
#1. Slide 4 - "...Each student must post 3 key ideas ... by Wednesday on the class wiki page." Is it the main course wiki site/page? If so, what assignments do they post on their own wiki site and also what's the difference of having them post on discussion board vs "the class wiki page" since you will be using BlackBoard LMS anyway?
#2. Slide 4- "… Students will post the critique on the main wiki site, not the individual sites." Why not discussion board or assignment dropbox since the critique assignment sounds like a 600-word paper, no peer feedback is required, and you will be using BlackBoard LMS anyway? As a major assignment, the Website critique assignment should be listed in your weekly overview as well.
#3. Slide 5- "Final paper ..... Students will post a summary of their paper on their wiki page."; Slide 6 "...Post summary of final paper on course wiki page...". Do you see what may confuse your students?
"Their wiki page," "course wiki page", "the main wiki site," "the individual sites" all mean different places.... So, one suggestion is that it is important to be consistent with the language used in your lesson plan. That's what I learned from the past. It doesn't matter how many times you read, re-read, write, re-write your lesson plan, you can always find something to fix each time you revisit it.
Again, a good start, AKBaker2014.
Kang
P.S. In case some of you experienced the following issues as I did when trying to read his lesson plan, click on that "print" icon. Google will automatically generate a printer-friendly version for you:
#1 The right portions of all the slides are cut off.
#2 Not allowed to download a copy to local computer. Error message "Sorry, you can't view or download this file at this time. Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. (Your lesson plan is hot, AKBaker2014! ;-))"
Standee,
DeleteThank you for your detailed analysis and feedback. After I read your comments I went back and looked at my lesson plan and see that it needs refinement. I was inconsistent with my definitions of “wiki site” and see that it may cause confusion amongst the students. This was a great learning experience and I will use your feedback to improve in the future.
AKBaker2014
It was very resourceful of you to find something to work off of to write your lesson plan. I can see how Impostor Syndrome would be present this week. As Brookfield (2006) indicates awareness and transparency help alleviate the anxiety we feel. I definitely experience it every time I have to do something for class that I have never done before. I am certain everyone else is in a better position than I am.
ReplyDeleteI think you will find as you write lesson plans they develop and evolve as you put them in use. I always keep a copy of Bloom's Taxonomy that has a list of action verbs with it when I am working on objectives. (I have included a link below to a sample chart.) I always have to remember to make sure that my lessons are meeting the objectives of the course. Sometimes they fall short and sometimes they overshoot. In your plan, the objectives are relatively basic on Blooms Taxonomy, but your activities include some upper level cognitive processing. In application, you would want to revise the learning objectives.
Nice work incorporating the wiki and emphasizing the collaboration.
Dr. Kang, thanks for the access tips!
http://www.clemson.edu/assessment/assessmentpractices/referencematerials/documents/Blooms%20Taxonomy%20Action%20Verbs.pdf
Brookfield, S. D. (2006). The skillful teacher (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for your feedback. Most of us stated and identified that in online courses (to include this one) that we will learn from the instructor and from others in the class as well. I plan on incorporating your thoughts and ideas into future lesson plans.