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last.updated 1.7.10

 

Lesson/Workshop

Purpose

The Lesson/Workshop allows the instructor to practice a student-centered pedagogy by giving the students the opportunity to bring their own inquiries into the course as part of the curriculum.

Also, it gives the students an opportunity to practice transforming their research into curriculum, especially for an audience of instructors


Instructions–Invention

Choose a L2 writing related topic that you want to teach. While you are encouraged to use the topic you chose for the Blog Entries and Literature Review, you can choose another topic with the understanding that you will have to start your research from scratch.

Consider both your topic and your audience of pre-service and in-service writing instructors. Ask yourself...

  • What do I think my audience should know about this topic?
  • How will they benefit from knowing this information?
  • What can they use this information to do?

Then consider the parameters of the assignment: you have 75 minutes to teach pre-service or in-service instructors (i.e., your peers in English 680) how to apply an L2 writing concept or theory within a writing classroom. To fulfill your goals for the lesson/workshop, you will have to determine what practices (or combination of practices) will facilitate this process, such as

  • freewrites
  • group/pair activities
  • lecture
  • class discussion
  • individual practice
  • role playing

You will help prepare your audience for this lesson by assigning them 30-50 pages of reading on the topic; these readings will probably come from the ones you did for your Blog Entries. Submit these to the instructor with their bibliographic information by the beginning of class on March 15, 2010.

This should be an original lesson. Also you cannot simply copy a lesson that the instructor has already given nor can you assign readings that have already been assigned for the class.

Instructions-Writing

After you have mapped out what you are going to do for this lesson/workshop, you will write up a detailed lesson plan (1-1.5 pages, single-spaced) with a 500 word rationale. Think about your rationale as an argument for why you have chosen the best way to teach this lesson/workshop and support it with references to practices you have discussed in the lesson.

Note that you will be evaluated more on the preparation and design of the lesson/workshop then on the execution; therefore, you will want to make sure that you are knowledgeable about the concepts or theories you are working with and that you have thought through how you will achieve your lesson/workshop's goals.


Criteria

Logistic:

  • 75 minute lesson/workshop
  • 1-1.5 page lesson plan with 500-word rationale
  • single spaced
  • The lesson/workshop will be sometime between April 12, 2010 and April 26, 2010; you will submit your lesson plan and rationale just before your lesson/workshop.
  • 50 points

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of

  • a sense of audience–do you treat your audience as pre-service and in-service instructors? do you make the information accessible? do you scaffold when necessary?
  • fulfilling the goals of the lesson/workshop
  • preparation (do you know the material you are teaching?) and deliberate design (did you try to develop a lesson that your peers can learn from?)
  • a well-supported argument about your choices for teaching this lesson/workshop
  • appropriate use of conventions, including MLA or APA citation formatting