Lesson Plans

Lesson Plan — Thursday, September 29th, 2016

Objectives

  • Turning in A3 and reflections on A3
  • Audience Awareness
  • Introduction to A4

Activity 1

  • Students will hand in their Assignment 3 in hard copies
  • They will do a reflection prompt that I uploaded to Moodle where they will write on two
  • In class reflection writing question: 1. How am I improving from assignment 2 to 3, and what do I still need work on?

Activity 2

  • How would you write assignment 3 if you wrote it for a different audience?
  • Brainstorm how you’d write it for a different audience
  • Audience 1. Fourth Graders
  • Audience 2: Vietnamese Speakers who are learning English
  • Audience 3: A close friend or family member
  • Audience 4: A High School senior who is prospective student at Iowa State

Activity 3

  • Show the Assignment 4
  • QA of the Assignment
  • Ask who the audience is for Assignment 4
  • It is needs an academic audience

Activity 4

  • Groupwork based on the Object Learning Worksheet, mention evaluation
  • I will include different images than I had yesterday for the class
  • They will be printed out by me and not on computers like on Tuesday, because we’re not in a lab, six pictures to make one for each group.

Activity 5

  • In Class Writing: These four questions
  • How did the office visits prepare you for your paper? 2. How did the peer response help? 3. What can I do to make the office visits more productive? 4. Is there any way I can improve group critiques? If so, let me know.
  • Students will hand these in to me.

Activity 6

  • Wrap up for next week

Reflections on this Lesson

This lesson was largely successful because my students seemed to comprehend the rhetorical implications of different audiences’ needs. My first section is naturally lesson engaged than my second; however they have a basic conceptualization of rhetoric even if their understanding had not fully transferred into practice at that point in the semester. However, I noticed in their A4 papers, most of my students in both sections used a more formal voice for a more academic audience. I am not sure if this was a credit to my teaching, or if they had naturally become acclimated to collegiate assignments from all of their classes.

To improve this lesson, I would have mentioned its objectives at the start. Between my first and second observation, I regressed in explaining the day’s objectives to my students, so that there was a pattern to the activities, and that the activities were not random occurring and had a pedagogical logic to them.

I still struggled, and continue to, in making more detailed activities so that my students are not finished with them too soon.

Lesson Plan for Tuesday (Lab) October 25, 2016

Objectives:

  • Peer Group Review
  • Reflection, and how we do it
  • Audience

Activity 1: Peer Review

  • Students will be put into their groups
  • Students will critique each others’ writing

Activity 2 Reflection activity

  • Students to stay in their respective groups
  • Watch the Ted Talk from Draw on Reflection
  • How have you used reflection based on the Ted talk in your essays?
  • How have you used reflection in your group work?
  • How has reflection aided your peer group?

Activity 3: Audience activity

Each group will come up with one advertisement: Write the advertisement and you don’t have to visualize it!

  1. Write advertisements for a new car that hasn’t been invented yet. What is the car called? How does it look like?
  2. Write a campaign statement for a new political party. What is your party called, and what is on its platform?
  3.  A new computer game. What is your game called? What is the goal of the game and who is the right player for this game?
  4. A new movie to be played in theaters. What is the title of your movie? What is the plot of your movie? Think about who would like to see this movie.
  5. A new fast food establishment. What is your fast food establishment called? What is on the menu? Who would eat there?
  6. A new multitool (like a Swiss Army Knife or a Gerber Wrench.) What is your multitool called? What kind of tools will it have? Think about who buys these kind of tools, and how they might be useful.

Activity 4

  • Look at Assignment 5

Activity 5

  • Homework: Bring the Final Draft of A4

Reflections on this Lesson

I was somewhat rushed in my preparation for this lesson. Although I had completed the lesson plan by class time, my mind was not at ease when teaching regarding the Ted Talk on DRAW, and knowing that my students could sense that I was nervous, I feared that they believed I was unprepared. Sometimes, especially with my first class, my students do not trust in me as teacher, for whatever perceived incompetence they sense in me. This is largely due to my nervousness, and sometimes inability to immediately resolve a technical issue on Moodle, thus having skepticism on not making straight As on their assignments. This seemed to be one of my off-days at the beginning of the lesson. After the Ted Talk, my execution of the activities was much smoother and by the second class, my nervousness was gone, and I had the practice of the previous lesson to draw upon.

The advertisement activity was fun for the students, because it allowed them to not simply analyze rhetoric from someone else, they created it. My first class in the fourth group 4 imagined a Disney-type film where it gently snowed puppies from the sky, and cats must save the world. I thought this was very creative choice, even being a little jealous of it as a writer myself. Thus, I began to learn from my students that day.