WEEK TWO:
Create a Lesson Plan
and Teach an Activity

Monday, July 16, 2012

Greetings Interns and Congratulations! You have successfully completed Week One of the MAT program. Your accomplishments include several aspects of becoming a language teacher: becoming a professional, learning about second language acquisition (SLA) theories and the history of language methodology, planning instruction, and implementing instructional activities.

You know where to find information about your SPA (Specialized Professional Association) and other organizations to support you as a language professional. You can list the main theorists in SLA and briefly describe methodologies from Grammar-Translation to Suggestopedia. You have participated in several instructional strategies to address cognitive, affective, and psycho-motor domains. You know how to group students and how to lower their affective filters. You also have received examples of daily lesson plans and are now ready to write your own. Well-done, emerging professionals!

Week Two shifts focus from a more receptive classroom context to a productive context. You will begin the week with a two-day lesson plan for “Shopping at a Market.” The format for the homework assignment requires much detail and thought on your part in order to lay the cognitive structures necessary in planning for each minute of a lesson.

Consider these ideas as you begin to plan for your own lessons:

• What is the “big idea” that anchors each lesson?
• What essential understandings do you want your students to have at the end of each lesson?
• How will your students show you what they have learned?
• What do you know about your students to help you in planning for your instruction?
• How will you get their attention, introduce your objective, guide them in understanding what you want them to know, and give them opportunity to practice?
• How will you check for understanding?

As you design your lesson, think about the time frame and the materials and resources you will need. Most of all, think about your students.

This week, each one of you will have the chance to teach an activity from your two-day lesson plan. Last Friday, I demonstrated how to introduce a lesson with Total Physical Response (TPR) to teach action verbs (my goal). I also showed you how you can use a PowerPoint Slideshow to support a TPR lesson with an embedded grammar lesson. The demonstration ended with a formative assessment in the guise of a Bingo game. Did you think about what modes were included? What skills were addressed? Did we touch upon the interpersonal mode? Do you remember how I designed a writing assessment? Finding good answers to these questions will give you a better understanding of how to design an effective lesson.

In preparing for your mini-lesson, keep in mind that you are engaged in a valuable learning experience — a chance for you to receive constructive feedback from your peers and from an expert. The mini-lesson presentation will give you an opportunity to reflect on the process of designing and implementing an instructional activity. I’m looking forward to a week of engaging, motivating, and informative lessons.

Week Two also includes a scholarly assignment to complement your pedagogical lessons. The first (EDOK) assignment is due on Wednesday. The format for writing an EDOK includes five areas: bibliographic information, the central theme, the main idea, the author’s conclusion, and a self-reflection.

The first part familiarizes you with the APA guidelines for citations. The next three sections hone your comprehension skills by asking for the theme of the article, the main ideas, and the author’s assessment of the research. The last section is the most important because it asks you how the information relates to you as a future teacher and how it connects to our class content. You will often hear me say that you are a “reflective practitioner.” Reflection helps us assess our own teaching and learning so that we can improve.

So here we go, awesome interns, into Week Two of the MAT program. You are now a week closer to having your own classroom.

 
Dr. Bowles

Freddie A. Bowles
Assistant Professor of Foreign Language Education
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
College of Education and Health Professions
Peabody Hall 312
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Office: 479-575-3035
fbowles@uark.edu

Different languages — I mean the actual vocabularies, the idioms — have worked out certain mechanisms of communication and registration. No one language is complete. A master may be continually expanding his own tongue, rendering it fit to bear some charge hitherto borne only by some other alien tongue, but the process does not stop with any one man. While Proust is learning Henry James, preparatory to breaking through certain French paste-board partitions, the whole American speech is churning and chugging, and every other tongue doing likewise.
     — Ezra Pound, "How to Read," 1929