This was used in the beginning stages of our unit plan design. We wanted to focus on creating a fun lesson where the students were interactive and able to really engage with the content. In the beginning stages, our unit was mainly centered around trying to hook the student through each activity. Our general plan was:
Day 1: A compilation of argumentative, school-friendly, TikToks that the students would watch through. While watching through they were going to be writing what they thought the claim the creator was making is. This would lead to whether the evidence the creator uses supports what the student believes the claim is. In the end, the student would have written whether or not the evidence used supports what they believed to be the claim. Short response on why it did/didn't and if it didn't what was the actual claim being made.
Day 2: A group done in small groups where students would rotate after a designated time to engage in a fun activity/game that had to do with claim/evidence using our class novel Born Behind Bars to tie into what they were doing in class previously.
Day 3: Students work on writing their own claim and evidence using characters from the class novel/silly prompts they've been given. They would then participate in small debates with peers with their evidence being pulled from the book. These debates would have been monitored to ensure nothing got out of hand.
After altering our original plan and reworking it to be more productive and less clutter/overwhelming my lesson was adjusted. I printed off papers using this document and handed them out to students. Originally it was going to be partner work but due to testing delays we were operating on a two-hour delay schedule which prevented us from having the time to set up partner work. Students used the template in order to begin being able to separate their claim, their argument, and their evidence. At the end they worked on combining it to make it flow well.
At the end of my lesson I handed out these reflection sheets for the students to turn in for us to evaluate. The three questions we provided them allowed us to gauge how effective our lessons actually were and gave us a formative assessment on where the students overall were and what they or did not struggle with
Ms. Bleicher often used a PowerPoint presentation to keep students informed about what they were doing in the moment. Offering verbal as well as visual directions helped students immensely so we knew when it came to implementing this unit plan we would need to create something similar to help students. We compiled all of our lessons onto one presentation.
Ms. Bleicher offered us a rubric on how we did with the instructional aspect of our unit/lesson implementation.
Ms. Bleicher offered us feedback on how we were with our professionalism in the classroom and how we interacted with students as well as each other.
This was the last part of our unit plan. We reflected over our unit plan what we did well and what didn't go exactly as planned in order to put this presentation together. After my lesson I felt extremely defeated and like there was no way I could ever do this alone without the support of Denver and Alex, but this assignment allowed each of us to take a step back from our feedback, our feelings, and our student submissions and really reflect on our individual lessons themselves and well as the students genuine responses in the moment. It was good to look at unit this with a not so critical lense.