Practice Makes Perfect

For the "connections across disciplines" assignment, my world history classmates have created a lesson plan that emphasizes the "doing" in learning while simultaneously fostering the construction of knowledge about a relevant topic. The purpose of their lesson, which occurs over two days of class including a homework assignment, was to help students "formulate an opinion." However, this is done in a different language. I was fascinated reading this for two reasons. First, it is extremely in line with much we have learned of the student-centered pedagogical approach, and employs a very constructivist style of teaching and learning. These are the frameworks that I have most appreciated and agreed with throughout this program. Secondly, their use of a student debate around the topic of using technology in the classroom is so unlike anything I would have done as a student in my own high school spanish classes.

Even though I am not still a practicing spanish student or speaker, I can tell that this group put a lot of thought into making their content-specific lesson one that could easily be applied in another classroom like my own. Much that we have read so far for this program has reiterated the need for history teachers to allow students to construct their own analysis and interpretation of an historical event. This same approach is used for the world languages lesson plan. Students are asked to articulate their opinion, which requires knowledge about the topic and the language they are studying. This is far more interesting than students merely receiving information about a topic; here they have to apply what they have learned to their own lives, if only hypothetically.

I also really like this lesson because it is so different from anything I would have been asked to do as a student when I took spanish. In my experience, world language instruction was limited to conjugating verbs and memorizing short topical lists of vocabulary. We rarely did any kind of cultural analysis, which meant that spanish felt all the more foreign. Here, students are exposed to the social and cultural norms that ultimately influence the language they study. 

My classmates were extremely thoughtful in their planning, as evidenced by their narration of the process and the justification of their decisions of what to include in the lesson. I especially like that students have some choice in the articles they read to research the topic. Otherwise, I worry about students with lower levels of comprehension ability being able to contribute and ultimately take away knowledge from this assignment. Obviously this is meant to challenge students at all levels, so that aspect of the lesson is great for making it self-differentiating. They also then allow students to reflect on the process at the end of the debate. This is helpful because students can self-assess where their skills are but, more importantly, how they think about and view the issue behind the debate. Technology is presumably pretty relevant for them so they would hopefully have something useful to say about how it felt having to negotiate their own beliefs with the side of the argument they were given. 

To my classmates: buen trabajo!