The conventional lesson plan includes three components:
1) Objectives for student learning
2) Teaching/learning activities
3) Strategies to check student understanding
In Part One of a series on lesson planning, I contrasted traditional learning objectives with an open-ended “feast-preparation” mindset. This is Part Two, where we’ll discuss teaching/learning activities.
I think the best way to discuss this is to tell a story that is basically true.
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About the middle of the third presenter’s talk, Kathy experienced a bout of teacherly self-doubt.
“Then the student takes a denarius from the jar,” The woman explained. “I made these coins out of Sculpey clay at the beginning of the year. Each one has a vocabulary word from that week’s story imprinted on the back.”
She held up a handful of the coins (Kathy thought about how much time it must have taken the woman to make them, and then decided NOT to think about it). “I’ll have these up here after the presentation if you want to take a look. Anyway, the student pantomimes the word, and if his team guesses it correctly, the team keeps the denarius.
“Here’s the fun part. On Fridays, the team can use their denarii to purchase weapons and pieces of armor.”
The presenter held up pieces of life-sized armor she had fashioned from cardboard and milk jugs. Kathy hunched in her chair over her handouts. Armor, too.
The woman continued. “Each team picks a champion, and we go out to the soccer field and have a gladiator fight. We follow a set of rules, which I copied onto your handout in case you’re interested, and of course if a student doesn’t follow those rules during the competition, the team is disqualified. But basically, the more armor and weapons you have, the easier it is to win. At the end of the match, all the teams turn in their weapons. They’re all really motivated to, you know, learn their words throughout the week, because they sure want their armor! We keep a tally of the victors on a scroll at the front of the classroom. At the end of each term, the team with the most tallies gets to wear laurel crowns and recline in the places of honor at our Roman feast.”
Kathy was attending a curriculum conference for Latin teachers. The curriculum came from a publishing house in England. Two tweedy gentlemen from the publishers were sitting behind her, ready to close the “Implementation” session after several American teachers spoke about their teaching methods. They whispered to each other now and then.
Kathy herself had lain low all day. She was a relative new-comer and a lone-wolf teacher. She met with a group of students once or twice a week. They turned in their homework. They opened their books and discussed the lesson. She assigned new homework. It was pretty basic. Kathy was attending the conference partly to see if there was anything she was missing, anything she should change about her classroom routines. She was there to listen, and she had gotten an earful. Either my methods are laughably simple or theirs are disproportionally complicated. She couldn’t figure out which it was.
The presenter had finished, and was now scurrying to collect her charts, maps, scrolls, armor, jars of coins, and togas. “Should we take a break while ya’ll set up?” She asked the two teachers from the publishing house, as they came to the front of the room.
They looked at each other. The older one said, “We’re set, thanks.” He hadn’t brought anything up with him but the book, his finger marking a chapter.
“Oh, alright.” She looked surprised. “Well I’m all done I guess, so begin whenever you’d like.”
“Hullo everyone, I’m David and this is John. We’re from York University Press. We helped write the curriculum you have in your hands, and we’re thrilled to be here. We’ve really enjoyed seeing what you all are doing with our baby on this side of the Atlantic.”
“Yes,” John chimed in. “Really impressive. In fact,” he looked around him, “on the subject of implementation, we’re somewhat at a loss as to what to tell you. David and I have been chatting about this in the back. From what we’ve seen, we aren’t really sure what to add to this session.”
The previous presenter, who was also moderating the session, chimed in from the front row. “Well, why don’t you just tell us a little about what you do with your material in the classroom? What kinds of learning activities do you do with each chapter?”
David and John glanced at each other. “Learning activities,” David said.
“Yes, how do engage students in the material?” She smiled broadly.
“Ah, well, we do things differently…” David said.
John jumped in. “I guess we don’t typically have all the things that we’ve seen here.” He waved his hand around the presenting area. “We just…well…read the stories in the book out together. It’s narrative-based, as you know, our material. So we read out the stories together.”
Kathy began breathing deeply again.
The presenter asked, “Would you like to elaborate on that?”
David said, “It’s really pretty simple, what we do. We use the books, and we read it out.”
There was a slight empty space as that sank in. Kathy raised her hand for the first time all day.
“Is there a question in the back there?” David sounded relieved.
“When you say, ‘read out together,’ do you think you could show us what that looks like? Like, would it be possible to do it with us right now?”
David and John looked at each other. “Sure, I guess. Why don’t we try Lesson Eight. That’s where Adrianus watches the chariot race. Page 43.”
The room rustled as the attendees rummaged the books from their bags and opened them.
“Why don’t you read the first several sentences for us?” David asked, looking at Kathy.
She did.
“Great,” he said. “If you were a student and you had made any pronunciation mistakes, we would have talked about those. You didn’t, by the way. You were brilliant. Well done. Then I’d ask another student to summarize what’s happening in the story in her own words, not translate, but just tell the story so far. Anyone want to do that?”
Kathy relaxed into the plastic chair-back and felt her conference-anxiety depart. Text and mind coming together. That’s what it was about. That’s what it was for. She listened with delight. Soon the story was over.
John closed his book. “That’s it really. After the story, I might ask some comprehension questions, like ‘Who went with Adrianus to the race?’ And maybe some grammar questions like, ‘How do you know that the chariot shook the rider instead of the rider shaking the chariot?’ But not too much of that, especially if they’ve got it already. Mostly we focus on the story itself. And that’s what we do.”
Another attendee raised her hand. “So, I guess I’m thinking, if we just read through the stories, my students would get bored. They wouldn’t connect with the material. I’ve got a lot of kinesthetic learners, as I’m sure we all do. They need to touch things and to move in order to learn. I’m just trying to imagine reading from the books like that, and I’m not sure it would work in my classroom.”
David shifted on his feet. “Well, that’s a good question. My thought is that what you’re doing when you’re learning a language, especially a dead language, is fairly textual, so I try to stay true to that in the classroom. But I guess I don’t have a lot of experience with the lack of engagement you’re talking about. I mean, language acquisition is hard work. It takes discipline and patience. But our students have seemed willing to put that in when we put the real stuff in front of them. Our goal is that they should be able to read unabridged primary texts, albeit simple ones at first, by the time they finish our books. Mostly, in our experience, they derive great internal satisfaction from that. We’re trying to build the habits they’ll need in order to do ‘the real thing,’ as it were.”
The moderator in the front row smiled broadly. “I hate to break us off, but I think we’re out of time for the session. David and John, we appreciate you being here.”
“Our pleasure.”
Kathy put her books away. She thought of how pleasant it would be to learn from these two gentlemen, with their gentle humor and calm, steady reasoning, and above all their simplicity. No clutter. Read it out together. We can do that.
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The image used in this post is in the public domain.