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WebQuest Evaluations and Lesson Plan - Multiple Intelligences Lesson Plan - Cognitive Development Lesson Plan

WebQuest Evaluations and Lesson Plan

This lesson required us to work as teams to evaluate several web-quests from various perspectives. Each member of the team used a specific lens to look at the website. Mine was the efficiency expert. I felt this lens was appropriate for me because I am always feeling pressed for time in my classes and try to be conscious of using materials that give an in-depth understanding in a minimal amount of time (versus time consuming activities that provide only superficial investigations). Next, we compiled all of our assessments to come up with the best and worst of the quests. However, the most useful aspect of this was to see what worked well and what did not work, how design and instructions and use of hypertext facilitated or confused lessons, and how other teachers reacted to different quests. Particularly, I learned how to evaluate a website based on various goals and objectives (i.e. the lens we were asked to adopt).
From here, I could directly apply this new-found knowledge to the internet lessons I have designed for my classes. Though I have been experimenting with designing online lessons for my classes, I never really thought of them as web-quests until this lesson.

The complementary lesson (in my mind, which is why I am including them as one sample), was to design a lesson incorporating a web-quest. I decided to revise a lesson I had already created teaching students how to use the internet for research, naturally lending itself to a web-quest. My original lesson was designed to modify a lesson I found online for my students’ abilities and to provide them with specific tasks they had to write down so I had a means for assessing the work and for holding students accountable for the various steps in the lesson. Now, after having evaluated the web-quests, I redesigned the lesson thinking of it as a web-quest rather than just a modification of another plan.

Also, for this assignment, I also needed connect the lesson to specified objectives and standards. This forced me to clarify the purpose of the lesson (for myself and for the students) and helped me to streamline and focus the directions and expectations. This can be seen in the clearer wording of questions and instructions. It think it also gives students an idea of what we are doing, thus giving purpose to what otherwise seem like busy work. I also changed it from a lesson where the students were researching for a paper to a lesson only on how to do research. By making this change, the quest of the lesson is greatly simplified – how to do research – and not clouded by the exceptions that will arise once students get caught up in the complexity of researching a specific topic. This modification allowed me to also embed a lesson on plagiarism, a problem at our school (and in my research, an increasing problem at many schools as internet use increases), by making it our sample topic.

Finally, this process allowed me to rethink all my lessons and the wide variety of possibilities of planning lessons for the internet by seeing how a more traditional lesson plan can be integrated with online technology (having objectives, links to resources, and directions all on the paperless screen for students to follow). The next step I am working on is coordinating with our technology coordinators to have server space for each student to store work. In this case, the worksheets could then be completed in Word and submitted via the network or email. In my final analysis, this lesson encouraged my efforts to incorporate technology and the internet into my lesson plans.

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Multiple Intelligences Lesson Plan

The next lesson I thought was one of my best samples and was one of the most beneficial to my understanding of how to apply educational psychological theory to my classroom was the Multiple Intelligences Lesson Plan. This assignment required the design of a lesson plan that incorporated all eight of Gardner’s multiple intelligences: verbal/linguistic, math/logic, spatial, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, naturalistic, and kinesthetic. At first, I was a bit apprehensive about how I could include all of these in one lesson; I was particularly concerned about elements that seemed to be antithetical to English class such as the naturalistic, musical, and math/logic. However, once I studied the resources provided in our texts for the class, I quickly found fun and interesting ways to address the various intelligences in my class. In fact, I was struggling with developing this unit in an interactive and interesting way for my classes, which is why I chose the topic of media literacy as the theme for this assignment. In designing this lesson, I realized by taking various techniques I already use independently of each other (i.e. categorizing, analysis, creative writing) and integrating them into a project (i.e. analysis and creation of ads) it is easy to create meaningful lesson to which all students will be able to contribute their intellectual talents. By creating such lesson, I also will be able to more easily incorporate cooperative learning as well as personal reflection. Teaching a student population that is mostly Hispanic and mostly ELL students, allowing for cooperative learning is essential to keeping my students engaged and making them feel successful. Focusing on including all 8 levels of multiple intelligences made it easier for me to design a group project with specific roles that would not favor some students over other and with has a clear focus. This clear objective is important not only for students to be able to complete the project, but also for me to better be able to manage the project. In the end, this assignment ended up being enjoyable and resulted in a unit I am eager to teach.

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Cognitive Development Lesson Plan

My final example of my best work is the cognitive development lesson plan. Again, I entered this assignment with much apprehension, not sure how I would be able to apply this theory to my own teaching. However, after our time to workshop in class, I felt that I would be able to find something. In this case, I used a lesson I had taught last year and am currently teaching. I started expecting to find a few instances of examples of inclusion of cognitive theory and to find many places where I would need to add more activities to address the needs of my students. However, I was pleased to find that much of the pedagological theory I used to design the plan (frontloading, reflections, clear expectations, seven habits of good readers, etc.) coincide with the theories of Piaget, Vygotsky, Erikson, and Kohlberg. Making the connection between the pedagogy I have been studying and using to the cognitive and psychosocial development of my students helped me to better understand the reasons why these techniques are widely used and promoted. For me, this is essential to my being able to understand the purpose for what I do in the classroom and to my being able to tweak these methods when they are not working as I want them to in my classroom. For instance, first habit of good reading, activating schema, correlates to Piaget’s principles of how we use schemes to organize what we know and to incorporate new knowledge. Likewise, Vygotsky’s principles of social learning, private speech, and assisted learning help me to more deeply conceptualize how shared reading, read aloud-think aloud, silent reading, writing reflections, and pair reading need to work together to help students become proficient readers. Thus, just as I want my students to go beyond simple comprehension and application of steps of the writing process or elements of literature to a deeper understanding of why these concepts are important, so this lesson helped me to see the underlying significance of many methods I previously only comprehended and applied.

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