Lesson Plan Analysis #1

Lesson Plan: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/SSKWLCountryCity34.htm

This lesson plan was designed for students in grades 3 and 4. The plan would be implemented in a social studies class, where the students are beginning to discuss similarities and differences between rural and city life. There are many concepts that connect to the plan, such as paraphrasing, scaffolding, Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development, constructive learning, defining and variable attributes, information processing, maintenance rehearsal, and elaborative rehearsal.

First of all, the teacher introduces the lesson by showing the students photos of city life and urban life and asks them what those pictures represent in their own words. This is an example of paraphrasing, which promotes more effective storage and retrieval in the brain. This is because the student is giving the ideas represented in the pictures their own unique meaning, whether it is through personal relevance, unusual examples, or mnemonic devices.

The teacher also seems to be a clear advocate of scaffolding in this step, since they are providing the students with the photos to use as a guide so they can gather information about both ways of life, and become independent learners on these concepts. Vygotsky would approve of the teacher’s method of teaching because he believed that learning precedes development. In order to become proficient in a task, the student needs to accept signs, such as examples or a sequence of steps, in order to think logically about a concept. Furthermore, this development that Vygotsky suggests involves the child internalizing these signs so they will be able to apply the information to real-life situations without any help from others. This idea is known as self-regulation, according to Vygotsky.

The teacher then breaks the students up into small groups to discuss similarities and differences between the photos that they just viewed. This is a form of constructive learning because the students are discussing their thoughts about the photos with their peers. Constructive learning can also provide students with multiple perspectives on the concepts, and students can help each other come up with ideas that describe the similarities and differences between the photos. Through this part of the lesson, students are able to come up with their own unique examples to construct their own meaning about the concepts of rural and city living. These meaningful examples assist students with storing the information in the brain because the students can think of something that has relevance to their own life, and apply that to the concept they are dealing with. These examples will also help with easy retrieval of the information because they give the students a new, unique way to think about the concept instead of memorizing definitions that make no sense to the student in their mind.

The class will then come together, and the teacher creates two columns on the board with city life on one side and rural life on the other, encouraging the students to talk about the characteristics, or the defining attributes, of both. The defining attributes consist of characteristics that something has to have in order to be classified as that object or idea. This activity assists students in reaching the formal level of understanding about city and rural living. A student reaches the formal understanding of a concept by being able to state the defining attributes of a concept, and pinpointing positive and negative examples of that concept. Even though this is something that is hard to attain, students will at least have a better understanding of the concept through the listing of its defining attributes.

Another reason why this method is good is because it promotes maintenance rehearsal. The students are repeating the information that they learned about in their small groups, which promotes effective storage and retrieval in the brain. Effective storage will occur because they will be able to keep the concept in their working memory for a longer time through repetition. The longer information is kept in working memory through meaningful repetition, the easier it will be for it to be transferred to long-term memory. Effective retrieval will take place only if the information is rehearsed often. A way this could be done is if the student is riding in the car with their parents and they pass different neighborhoods. They could tell their parents which neighborhoods are considered urban areas and which ones are considered rural.

After doing this, they will break their list into categories (people, places, things). After doing this, students will compile a list of all the aspects of city and rural life they would like to learn about. The students may create a network model to display this list. By putting one core idea in the middle, it can help spark new ideas on things the students want to know more about. The brain enjoys this because a network model is a form of visual representation, and the brain stores information around associations. A network model is helpful because it allows the brain to more effectively chunk the information into meaningful units to be used for easy retrieval later on.

The teacher then assigns each group a topic from the revised list, and they use resources in class such as encyclopedias, magazines, and books to create a poster. The teacher and student groups work together to come up with an appropriate outline stating what is expected from each group. Having students research a particular topic involves using elaborative rehearsal. This involves three things.

The first is the student making connections to the information. This is important because it makes it easier for the students to relate information that they already know to the concept at hand. For example, they can visualize the area in which they live in, and connect the characteristics of both city and rural life to their own lifestyles. Next, the students should give the concept meaning by chunking it with other items already stored in memory, and then organizing it for easy retrieval. An idea for retrieving the information effectively can be giving the concept personal relevance. Lastly, the students have to organize the information in a meaningful way. If they don’t, it is more likely for them to forget it. Steps 2 and 3 were executed differently in each group. This is because the students and the teacher had to agree on an appropriate way to display the material to the class. Some students may have related the content to personal anecdotes, others may have used amusing images in order to present the material, and there might be others who used a Venn diagram to show the similarities and differences between rural and city living.

The students then are responsible for making a list of what they have learned in the lesson, and are required to draw a picture depicting a city or rural scene with an accompanying narrative about what is occurring in the picture. This allows the student to let the teacher know that they understood the information presented in the lesson, and that they can apply it to different mediums, not just remembering the information for the test and then forgetting it. The drawings are consistent with the information processing model because they are a form of visual representation, and can help to reinforce learned concepts in the brain. The brain enjoys imagery because it not only attaches an association to the concept, but it also gives the concept additional meaning for the student so it is easier to store and retrieve.

Although the plan is good already, there are some aspects that could be improved on. First of all, I think it would have been more effective for each student to choose a unique topic about the subject of city life or rural life (maybe by using a network model), and then for homework, read about their particular topic and present their individual findings to the class the next day. Students would learn more aspects regarding city and country life than they would if each group of four or five students researched a specific area. They will be able to come up with new ideas from other students’ presentations about city and rural life that they maybe did not think about before.

Secondly, the teacher may have used too many strategies throughout the lesson. Although I support a teacher’s decision to consider students’ individual differences by using differentiated instruction, I also believe that you should not use too many methods in your plan. The lesson will not only be difficult to teach, but it will also be very time-consuming for the teacher. Cognitive overload may also result from this. If too many methods are used in a lesson plan, the brain’s ability to take in information and process it effectively is lessened. When you are teaching a concept to people who can be considered novices about the material, it is harder for them to chunk the material into meaningful units because the information is unfamiliar to them. Given this fact, teachers need to keep their instructional methods to a minimum.

It is not realistic to accommodate everyone’s learning preferences. If the teacher wanted to improve on the plan, they could stick to showing the students photos, asking them to get into groups to talk about the characteristics of both ways of life, and then maybe talk about them as a class. After doing that, the teacher could proceed by explaining the characteristics of both city and rural life according to the textbook or another piece of literature. That way, there would be a good mix of inductive, deductive, and constructive learning to appease all students, no matter what their learning preferences are.

Overall, the methods discussed in this lesson plan were consistent with many of the concepts that we have talked about in class. The plan did a great job of incorporating different types of instruction to encompass students’ various learning styles and preferences, and kept Vygotsky’s theory of cognitive development in mind. Not only that, but the plan is consistent with the information processing model, and forces students to give meaning to the information that they are learning. I would love to use a variation of this lesson in my own classroom someday, because it makes learning about this topic fun and interactive for everyone.