Reflection

When one designs learning activities or lesson plans, their own teaching philosophy and experiences as a teacher and learner often become visible in their design. What I attempted to accomplish in my own designs of learning activities was to re-center learning on the students, and to approach language learning from both a communicative language teaching (CLT) (Brown & Lee, 2015; Brumfit & Johnson, 1979) and a communicative framework (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010) perspective. This meant centering my lessons in functional language tasks and catering language materials towards the learners as much as possible. I think that this becomes evident in several lessons and activities that I have designed, and my strength and cohesion in designing these according to my own philosophies is well demonstrated by the following artifacts. In examining the following products of one of my Japanese lesson plans, an English pronunciation lesson, several other pronunciation mini-lessons, and an Ichishkíin lesson, it becomes clear that I am able to design cohesive, organized lessons that center on my core beliefs as an educator and learner.

Lesson design is often framed around goals and student-learning objectives/outcomes (SLOs) (Brown & Lee, 2015; Brown, 1995), and within my lessons and activities I attempted to identify and distinguish these objectives. For some smaller activities that I have designed, there is often a less clear goal and in these cases I try to frame the lesson around the content focus. In this way, my lessons and activities are cohesive and planned out, as they are written to achieve certain outcomes. Based on this, the following artifacts demonstrate my growth and strength in designing learning activities. 

In my Japanese lesson plan that I designed for LT 548, Curriculum and Materials Development, I demonstrated a very strong understanding of designing a lesson plan according to goals of the lesson and course as well as aligning these features with my own beliefs about language learning. The SLO of this lesson was that students would be able to produce short, simple sentences about their family without the assistance of a peer or the instructor. The lesson starts with a think, pair, share (TPS) (Lyman, 1981) that follows up on students’ review for homework, and this then leads into discussion of these TPS topics in regards to the Japanese language. It is at this point that the lesson transitions into explicit instruction, and moves away from the student-focus that began the lesson. Following this, students receive some more instruction through a video and then get the chance to practice the new vocabulary and structures from the instruction in an activity with their peers. This activity requires learners to ask given questions and respond in short simple sentences about their families. In this way, this activity demonstrates my communicative ideals as it asks students to learn about their peers’ family through the language. The lesson as a whole also accomplishes the SLO described above, as it is expected that students will be producing short, simple sentences about their family during this activity. 

Similarly, my English pronunciation lesson from LT 539, Design for Language Learning and Pronunciation, also identifies an SLO at the beginning, and in this lesson it is intended that by the end of the lesson students will be able to produce and discriminate /f/ and /v/ sounds in English in simple conversations with peers. The beginning of this lesson mirrors my Japanese lesson in that it first opens up the content to students and allows them to work with it in undirected ways; here, this is done by having students start with /f/ and /v/ listening discrimination to see what they can notice and to raise learner awareness of these sounds. This then moves into a discussion period of these sounds before students receive direct pronunciation instruction. Following the instruction period, students will practice these sounds in pairs and play a short game of Go Fish in groups with item cards to become more comfortable with producing these. Then, students will move into a more communicative activity that asks students to debate and share their opinions with each other. Here, the topics of discussion include the sounds /f/ and /v/, as well as the prompts for students to share their opinions. In this way, the lesson both accomplishes the SLO by asking students to produce these sounds in debates and conversation. 

My mini pronunciation lessons from LT 539 also work towards accomplishing goals, but these goals have not been fully created by me, and instead they were formulated around given textbook activities that could be implemented differently in order to focus more on pronunciation strategies. Each of these mini lessons focuses on a part of a given textbook unit, and the SLOs for each relate to both the textbook content and places where a pronunciation focus could be added. Each of these mini lessons is a different length, which demonstrates my ability to design lessons for different time needs. Here, each lesson builds up to more communicative functions and I included interactive activities in these mini lessons. These lessons also demonstrate my ability to work with given material and to alter it according to my own, or my learners’ needs. In this way, this artifact demonstrates a slightly different aspect of my skill in designing lessons and activities, and shows my ability to adapt content to fit certain purposes or focuses. 

My ability to adapt my design and approaches based on context also becomes clear in an Ichishkíin lesson that I developed collaboratively with Dakota Whisler in LT 536, Design for Learning Language Systems. This lesson also focuses on a functional language task, and the SLO for this lesson is that students will be able to discuss their hobbies with their peers, and also with their instructor and elders in respectful ways. Therefore, this lesson takes both a cultural and CLT focus (Brown & Lee, 2015) to learning the language. Within this lesson, students watch several videos from elders in the community about various hobbies and activities in class. These videos are followed by discussion of the language and practices, and then students collaboratively come up with questions that they would want to ask an elder. Here, the instructor aids students in formulating these questions respectfully. After this, an elder would ideally come into the classroom to talk about one of their hobbies or a culturally relevant hobby, and students would ask the questions that they had come up with together. This activity provides students with the opportunity to guide their own learning with their questions, and to practice using new language in culturally appropriate forms. In this way, the design of the lesson accomplishes the SLOs and helps build communicative skills in learners. 

All four of these artifacts follow similar design concepts; learner-centered warmers and activities, communicative activities, and culturally relevant activities and materials. Based on these features of my lessons, I have demonstrated my ability to create well-planned, organized, and cohesive lessons for learners of varying contexts. While the contents of each lesson differ, we still see opportunities for learners to practice using the language in functional contexts. These lessons also provide opportunities for learners to personalize their own language learning experiences by providing them with opportunities to drive the class with their questions, responses, and interests. These core features of my lessons display some of my beliefs as an educator, but more importantly they demonstrate my competency to create learning activities that align with their purpose. 

Artifacts