Analysis for Lesson Plan #1
This lesson is an example of students’ autonomy in the classroom and how I meet the needs of diverse learners by designing lessons to be basically carried on by the students themselves. Before this lesson, students had finished all but the few last chapters of the book They Cage the Animals at Night. They constantly kept dialectical journals about Jennings’s character traits and responded to the discussion questions for each chapter in oral or written forms. After all these teacher-guided activities, I think they are ready to become the owners of the classroom and demonstrate that they can think independently and exchange their opinions in a creativeand constructive way.
To prepare for the Socratic Seminar, I devoted a class to get students familiar with three levels of questions (literal, interpretive and universal) and the procedures of Socratic Seminars, and I designed two handouts for the students to practice asking three levels of questions. From their answers, I found that quite a few students were confused about universal-level questions and they lacked the background knowledge or the critical thinking capability to ask meaningful universal-level questions. I put some well-thought questions from the students into a PowerPoint file. I also used another PowerPoint file to illustrate the correct role a student should take in the Socratic Seminar. Thus I have adapted my instruction to help students understand and use universal questions and I have also clearly defined the different roles for a Socratic Seminar in order to give every student the tools and confidence to participate successfully in the seminar.
I have set four main goals for this class (please refer to the lesson plan). These goals directly address Reading and Communication EALRs and GLEs and require the students to closely read the texts, analyze the characters and the plot, and to participate in meaningful conversations. The learning goals focus on developing thinking skills, which provides the students with an opportunity for intelligent development. The goals also actively engage the students to participate in class activities, supporting their social development. I designed this lesson with the students’ learning process and development in mind. When I prepared for the class, I found that most of the students had a good understanding of the plot, but they had some difficulty relating the topics in the book, such as poverty and childhood abuse, to themselves. When I looked at their three levels of questions worksheet, I also found that some students can come up with very thought-provoking questions, such as “When can we eliminate poverty?” or “Why cannot countries at war forgive each other while kids are supposed to?” Some other students are stuck on the level of literal questions. Assessing students’ prior knowledge is a critical step to meeting the diverse needs in the classroom because I need to gather the information regarding how differently students might respond to a prompt and how diversely they think about a question. Based on the information, I can devise adaption and accommodation in lesson plans to help students with different learning capabilities to learn.
I decided to utilize what I learned from the students’ worksheets to plan the lesson. Before I let them delve into the Socratic Seminar, I showed the PowerPoint file of the interpretive and universal level questions I gathered from the students’ worksheets. This showed my respect for my learners, since I used genuine questions generated by the students. The questions varied widely in their focuses and perspectives, reflecting the students’ diverse cultural, linguistic and socio-economic backgrounds.
I also discussed together with my students which questions they would prefer to think about and answer, and this activity provided the students with a learning opportunity before the discussion. They basically learned to understand each others’ concerns and interests,seeking the common ground after comparing their differences.
During the student discussion, I also showed full respect for students by letting them decide where the discussion would lead to. I think the Socratic Seminar was a good venue for diverse learners to meet and communicate. Students with different cultural and social backgrounds converged and exchanged their opinions. Within the inner circle, everyone was equal and students felt freer to talk than in a teacher-dominated discussion. Although some naturally shy students might be impeded from engaging in the dialogue, at least everyone had a chance to participate or observe. When I designed the lesson plan, I kept the students’ diversity in mind, putting in each circle some students who tended to speak up and some who tended to be satisfied with observing.
I decided to incorporate three writing elements (see the lesson plan) besides the grade for the performance into the assessment of the lesson because I knew some students were more reserved and did not feel comfortable expressing their opinions in public. If I had only graded their performance in the Socratic Seminar, I would have penalized them for their character traits. The three levels of questions worksheet assessed the first three learning goals and the evaluation worksheet and the reflection of the Socratic Seminar served as the students’ evaluations of others and self-evaluations. Without the evaluation and self-assessment, students won’t be able to strengthen what they were good at and work on what they still need to improve. The Socratic Seminar was only one circle in the chain of student-dominating activities, such as literature circles. The assessment of their evaluation and reflection was a formative assessment that could help me to build on future lessons. For example, in the literature circles, I revised the packet for the assessment to include a section of self-reflection and group leaders’ evaluation for the group members.
The students’ performance in the Socratic Seminar was rated by how many thoughtful questions they posed, how well they responded to others’ questions, and how appropriate they played their roles in the seminar. As for the students with difficulty in mastering the language or with an IEP, I provided them with printed handouts of the question lists and asked them to take notes during the Socratic Seminar, and I counted the notes as part of their grades. With this adjustment, their performance was more fairly evaluated.
Overall, this lesson of Socratic Seminar did a good job of meeting the needs of diverse learners. I designed the lesson plan according to students-posed questions in the worksheets, the seminar provided a platform for diverse learners to voice opinions and exchange viewpoints, and the assessments were tuned to the differences in the learners. It was a good learning opportunity to support the students’ intellectual and social growth.