Hey Guys,
Great news! I have made my first
student-centered lesson plan. With the assistance of my two awesome advisers, I
have made both a quiz and an activity for the AP World History class to take
tomorrow.
Mr. Bayer and I had some difficulty coming
up with a way to adapt his very lecture-based lessons, but Mr. Coaloa gave us
some good insight. We will still utilize our collection method of giving the
subjects a baseline quiz beforehand, and then the same quiz after the lesson.
The
difference here will be the lesson itself. Instead of Mr. Bayer or myself
giving the students a PowerPoint lecture, we will give the students a worksheet
that they must use the textbook to complete. Now, the information will be
found, processed, and ideally retained exclusively by the students. They may
work alone or in a group. The instructor’s role in this style is only to keep
the students on track. The kids can ask clarifying questions or ask the meaning
of something, but they must find the information without the teacher feeding it
to them.
In terms of student-centered classes,
tomorrow I also plan on observing a college level class taught by Mr. Coaloa
which utilizes a lesson wherein the students teach themselves.
Writing an entire worksheet was difficult,
but I think that I was able to write it in a way that the students must process,
at least once, the information needed to learn the lesson and to take the quiz.
We will grade these quizzes tomorrow, and I will let you all know how it goes!
Till then!
Won't the pre-test skew your results? I've heard of studies that show that pre-tests increase student retention, no matter the instruction strategy.
ReplyDeleteWe have thought about that, and we are anticipating some affect. Putting this research into a simple answer is tricky. In order to empirically see a change, we have to establish a baseline for both methods. But If the pre-quizzes do increase the retention, both teaching methods will be taught to students at the same knowledge level. And in anticipation of this, we do not hand back graded pre-quizzes until after the post-quiz, and we ensure that there is substantial time between the students seeing the pre-quiz,the learning of the lesson and then taking the post-quiz.
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