Lesson Plan

Materials

Click here to download the PowerPoint file.

Teacher Reflection

This class took place on Wednesday of Week 11 (11.02.2016) in Fall 2016, at Ross Hall 129 at Iowa State University, in the time period of 10:00 – 10:50 AM.

I had already introduced the essay assignment to my students before this class; it was the time for them to learn more about what they should consider as they design their visual communications. This lesson basically consisted of three main components: a warm-up activity where students post suggestions for do’s and don’ts in a visual communication, a teacher-centered instruction of fundamentals of graphic design, and an exercise activity where they get to practice what they have learned throughout the class.

The warm up activity was to determine what students already knew in terms of designing an effective brochure/poster. We also did it in order to see how their ideas would connect to what I would introduce in-class. I believe the activity went really good; all of the students made valuable contributions to the board and there was a correlation between their suggestions and the graphic design elements.

The teacher-centered part where I introduced the fundamentals of graphic design almost took half of the class time. Since this was a relatively long part of the class where students were in a passive role, I tried to get their attention and hear from them by putting some small exercise questions into the PowerPoint presentation for discussion. I believe they paid attention to my instructions; some of them were even taking notes of what I was talking about.

I planned the last part of the class as a practice session for the graphic design terms. Students had a chance to apply this knowledge to some examples of brochures/posters, and discuss whether the decisions made on the examples were effective or not. The activity worked out pretty well since they were able to use specific terms (such as color scheme, positive/negative space, chunking, etc.) as they were discussing the examples, which was the main goal of this activity.

The only major problem I spotted in the last activity was that I included a flyer for one of the poster examples. I realized this as soon as I opened up the example for discussion; however, I told the class about my mistake, and asked them to discuss some of the decisions made on the flyer in terms of typography and color scheme, and whether they are effective or not. This small error did not have an impact on the intended purpose of the activity.

I was really satisfied with my students’ contributions in the first activity and last activity. They had great small-group discussions, and were able to share their valuable insights on the examples in large-group discussions as well. They were really enthusiastic about the activities since almost all of them thought that Assignment #5 is way more “fun” than the rest of the assignments. I believe doing something “different” and interesting made them put much effort into the activities and, also, the assignment itself.