Lesson Plan

Materials

Teacher Reflection

This class took place on Wednesday of Week 7 (10.05.2016) in Fall 2016, at Ross Hall 129 at Iowa State University, between the time period of 10:00 – 10:50 AM.

This is the second lesson after I introduced assignment 4 to my students, and talked to them about what are they required to do for this assignment and resources they can use as they collect information for their papers. I designed this lesson to make my students understand the difference between describing and interpreting a piece of art, and practice these through a fun poster reading activity. Since I did not want them to describe types of art that this assignment asks them to handle directly (such as sculptures, or paintings), I employed the approach of using movie posters. I thought that they would feel more comfortable with works of art that they are familiar with (like movies) and come up with better descriptions. Having them working in groups, on the other hand, simply makes them see different perspectives and approaches in describing and analyzing works of art, and also builds a strong classroom rapport. The Old Capitol discussion, on the other hand, was planned to show them how they can include historical and descriptive information in their papers.

The movie poster reading activity turned out very well; they were able to make really to-the-point descriptions and clearly separate descriptions from interpretations at first. Also, the handout of titles and plot summaries helped them interpret what they saw on posters more than I had expected. I saw that some of the students have seen some of the movies that we talked about before, and they were really into describing the posters and associating what they see with events happening in the movie. This kind of enthusiasm is what I would like to always see in my classroom as a teacher. Students will most likely to produce better work if they work on something they are really into, and activities like this one will trigger such emotions in their mind.

I would like to note that we spent more time on the movie poster activity than I had planned, which made me shorten the Old Capitol group discussion activity by about 5 minutes. My time management on that activity could definitely have been better.

The Old Capitol discussion also went pretty well; I was surprised that my students had done their homework and read the paper beforehand. They were able to see an outline of descriptive information in the text which they could employ in their assignments. However, the discussion felt a little rushed, and it would have been better if we had spent more time on it.