The other day we went to the computer lab and looked over the IRPs required of teachers to cover in each subject area. It opened my eyes to the amount of material one is instructed to teach in a certain period of time. Personally, I want to be as creative as possible in making up lesson plans that would appeal to high school students at the same time as satisfying each of the IRPs. Especially if you teach a subject were students are going to ask the inevitable question: why do we have to learn this?” Does anyone want to share how they would go about organizing a creative lesson plan for an IRP ?
5 comments:
I cannot honestly say that I am familiar with the IRPs just yet. I have looked them over quickly, but not yet at great depth. My teachable is French, so I have only ever constructed language based activities and lessons and am unsure of how helpful what I have to say will be.
I find the best way to start a lesson or activity of any kind is to start with an attention grabber, an introduction to the subject to be covered. I am going to use Leanne's Friday class as an example. We started the class by talking about assessment and were asked to think of criteria for what our perfect cookie would be. This could have been considered the pre-activity. It got our attention and got us engaged. I mean really, who wouldn't be? we were talking about cookies!
The next step would be to give the students a task. Our task was to create a rubric and assess the cookies. This was the activity. I think most of the actually learning that occured happened while assessing the cookies, at least for myself, as our groups discovered the weaknesses of our rubrics through this exercise and realized how we would change our cookie rubrics for future use.
Normally activities or lessons (at least ones that are language-based) have a reinforcing stage at the end where the newly acquired knowledge is reiterated, practiced or tested. With regards to Friday's class this would maybe be when the groups shared their results, as we all discussed the strengths and weaknesses of our rubrics and Leanne offered elaborations on these aspects.
I thought the activity was really awesome. I especially liked the cookies. I found it a fun way to talk and learn about something not so fun. I could be way off on its structural breakdown, but I am still offering you this interpretation. When it comes to "tackling IRPs," I would start be choosing which one I wanted to address and finding an interesting way to bring it up (pre-activity). I've found in the past that this is the hard part, but once it is accomplished, the rest of the activity or lesson just falls into place.
I agree! There is a lot of material to cover. I think that it is important to incorporate creativity into everyday teaching, although really creative and thought-provoking projects may not really be the best way to 'inject' the knowledge into their heads that is required for the exams. And let's face it, an unavoidable part of the job is to teach what the province wants you to teach!
However, I do think that it is a vital part of learning to have the opportunity to look back at the 'larger picture' and reflect on the information and draw your own conclusions. Learning the facts is one thing, and is good for the final exam, but what will stick is the ability to absorb and expand on the information. I feel think that one of the best ways to be creative in the classroom would be to assign projects or assignments that look at the larger picture and broader scale of the information that you just covered. For example, after doing a particular section of the curriculum, assigning a project that requires drawing knowledge from ALL components and taking an in-depth look at what was covered. This allows room for flexibility and thinking 'outside the box' but also makes sure that information WAS covered.
As far as doing all of this in one semester...??? That's the challenge I guess!
I agree that we, as teachers are constrained by the curriculum outlined in the IRPs. Due to the need to meet provincial exam criteria and a limited amount of time, we can only do so much. That said, I hope to offer as many options to students as I can in regards to assignments and group projects as time allows.
To overcome time limitations and to expand on the curriculum, I think creating a website for the class, would be a great idea. It could be continually updated and could contain the course outline, upcoming assignments and additional notes, video audio, etc. that were pertinent to the class. Links to additional material beyond the scope of the course ( say socials 12 ) for those keen to learn more.
It's interesting that Shannon said that you need an attention grabber because when I construct my drama lesson plans, I always start with a "lure" .. which is supposed to start the drama and get the students engaged. This, however, is the first time I've had to justify my drama structure with IRPs...so I've honestly started creating my plan, and then I go through and find the IRPs that it covers...kind of a backwards way of doing it. But maybe if you start that way and are fairly familiar with the IRPs, you can check back later in the semester and see which IRPs you haven't covered yet? But again, it's quite different for drama.
For English, I would look through the IRPs and jot down little notes beside the PLOs about which activities I think would cover them (aka drama scene, writing a poem, writing an essay, reading aloud in class, poster presentation, etc...). You don't have to quite know right away when you'll cover each one, but you'd have a general idea of what kinds of work your class could do to cover each IRP
I worked a lot like Alicia has suggested: creating a thoughtful and [hopefully] meaningful activity and then seeing which IRPs the activity meets. As you get more familiar with the Learning Outcomes (those key skills and content jotted out) you will be able to incorporate a variety of the learning outcomes into your activities and assignments and not just plan a lesson around one IRP. [For the lesson plan due next Monday you can incorporate more than one Learning Outcome for sure!]
Post a Comment