Week 1 Assignment 2: Lesson Plan Critique

Lesson plan critique:

Learning Outcomes: The learning outcomes are clearly aligned with the activities. In this lesson students will work together to create a found poem.  This develops student’s creativity and helps them be insightful readers. In addition, students will gain the skills to collaborate with their peers and work as a team.

Activities: In this lesson, the activities are clearly aligned with the learning outcomes, objectives and standards.

Instructional grouping: This lesson includes independent, group work and whole class instruction to enable students to learn effectively. Once students choose their words and phrases independently for the found poem, they share the words that they chose with a peer they are grouped with. Then, they work together as a class to create the final poem.

Instructional procedure: This lesson plan ensures that every student is actively involved in the lesson. The teacher involves all the students in class discussions and  has them all work as a team to create the found poem.

Resources (including technology): The resources include books, writing materials, and the found poem planning page. The actual lesson plan does not include technology, but it does say that having the students experiment with Word Mover is a great extension to the lesson. I would incorporate this technological tool to engage the students and help them gain the material properly.

Teaching Practices: By having students create writings by working with texts to create a writing, they will gain the skills which they will eventually use in their own writings. This allows them to learn skills according to their zone of proximal development- they do not need to create the writing from scratch, but rather will learn the skills by working with a text.

Assessment: There are proper assessment measures in place. Throughout the lesson, the teacher will observe the students to see whether they mastered the material properly. In addition, there is a rubric that will be completed at the end.

Accommodations: This lesson plan uses the Bernstein Bears as the text, but teachers can use any text that they feel is appropriate for their class. In addition, as an extension to the lesson, students can experiment with the word mover app and can add drama or music to their performance. However, there is no accommodations for struggling students. I would provide struggling students with additional one-on-one instruction and peer them up with brighter students to share their words and ideas.

All in all, this lesson is a great lesson that teaches students language and literacy in a clear, engaging way.