My film analysis lesson plan has gone through many evolutions this week.
Here is the original lesson plan I created. It focused on having the students read several film and book reviews of A River Runs Through It, identifying critical comments made by the authors, and determining the criteria that was being evaluated by the comments. It also involved charting what they found on chart paper and circulating through other groups' posters and responding. I designed a lesson that I thought would allow the students to discover what kinds of questions film and book reviews answer, would get students collaborating, and would get them up and walking.
However, like many of my lessons, the directions were a little bit too complicated. Professor Gleason gave me some feedback on my lesson that I should always keep in mind: Is this too many steps?I think evaluating my lesson drafts with this question will help me reign in my tendency to want to make more intricate lessons and will lead me to create lessons that are more direct and easier for students to follow, consequently leading to crisper and clearer learning. She also pointed out that my lesson might be too inductive. This is another tendency I think I have as a teacher. I think that lessons that are structured somewhat inductively can be great (and it's not just because I'm biased toward planning this way). They are great found having students do higher order thinking skills such as classifying and evaluating. However, I simply need to recognize that lessons that are structured like this ask for students to do more than just recall and summarize and because of that are perhaps better suited to be lessons that happen later in the sequence of a unit. Ultimately, I do not believe that this lesson should be deleted from the lesson plan library, I think it just needs to have lessons that occur before it.
One thing that definitely needed to be addressed though was that I misunderstood that Professor Gleason wanted students to read reviews of the movie at this time and use them as secondary sources. I realized she did not want them to do this and could see why when she explained that she wanted students to be able to focus on their own response and critical analysis to the film. I think it is also important to consider beginning a unit with a different and maybe more accessible example. I can do my direct instruction of new material with attention grabbing content that is less academic. For example. Professor Gleason suggested using a current popular blockbuster like Black Panther. I think that I will be able to keep this lesson in mind for future lessons, asking Can I use a "fun" example for this?
So I set out to prepare a new lesson, this time where I would give students the criteria I wanted them to consider and discuss. My first step this time was to do what I had found effective in the past and brainstorm my prior knowledge. What would I personally consider when evaluating this film? This brainstorm was helpful and I need to keep in mind in the future that this sort of pre-lesson planning activity is a very important step for me and one that I shouldn't skip. I came up with a long list of criteria and questions I asked myself about the film. My next step would be researching by reading film reviews.
Next, I read several film reviews and did what I was asking the students to do. I think that this was a good response that helped transform my initial lesson plan. Instead of asking students to do this task in the lesson, I would do it to create the lesson materials. I have a feeling this will be a technique I will use frequently to revise my lessons; do the lesson I plan originally to make the lesson materials I will actually use. The result was this table, which I realized was very complicated and that the students would not have come up with this information inductively very effectively; essentially I was asking them to guess my thinking, which is not a good plan. It also resulted in this list of discussion questions by topic. The lesson plan was probably too intricate and too many steps though.
This version of the lesson plan was more direct, but it still had too many steps. Also, Professor Gleason felt the discussion questions weren't grounded in the text enough. She asked me to consider how I would answer my discussion questions as well as answers I would anticipate from students of different academic levels in the class. She urged me to create questions that were based on the film more. So, I planned to redo my lesson in another variation, this time abandoning the idea of introducing aspects of film evaluation and analysis and instead creating simply a guide for discussion of parts of the film, which is ultimately what the students needed more at this particular point in their writing process.
At first I was frustrated by the task of planning and replanning different variations of this lesson. However, in retrospect, I think all my materials would be useful formats for teaching writing about film; the only issue is I planned them in reverse order of how they should be taught to a class. I did realize that challenging myself to plan a lesson in different ways actually would lead to a great sequence of activities that would reinforce learning and escalate into higher order thinking skills. I actually think that challenging myself to plan a lesson in different ways is something I will do in the future to help me plan a full unit.
Here is the original lesson plan I created. It focused on having the students read several film and book reviews of A River Runs Through It, identifying critical comments made by the authors, and determining the criteria that was being evaluated by the comments. It also involved charting what they found on chart paper and circulating through other groups' posters and responding. I designed a lesson that I thought would allow the students to discover what kinds of questions film and book reviews answer, would get students collaborating, and would get them up and walking.
However, like many of my lessons, the directions were a little bit too complicated. Professor Gleason gave me some feedback on my lesson that I should always keep in mind: Is this too many steps?I think evaluating my lesson drafts with this question will help me reign in my tendency to want to make more intricate lessons and will lead me to create lessons that are more direct and easier for students to follow, consequently leading to crisper and clearer learning. She also pointed out that my lesson might be too inductive. This is another tendency I think I have as a teacher. I think that lessons that are structured somewhat inductively can be great (and it's not just because I'm biased toward planning this way). They are great found having students do higher order thinking skills such as classifying and evaluating. However, I simply need to recognize that lessons that are structured like this ask for students to do more than just recall and summarize and because of that are perhaps better suited to be lessons that happen later in the sequence of a unit. Ultimately, I do not believe that this lesson should be deleted from the lesson plan library, I think it just needs to have lessons that occur before it.
One thing that definitely needed to be addressed though was that I misunderstood that Professor Gleason wanted students to read reviews of the movie at this time and use them as secondary sources. I realized she did not want them to do this and could see why when she explained that she wanted students to be able to focus on their own response and critical analysis to the film. I think it is also important to consider beginning a unit with a different and maybe more accessible example. I can do my direct instruction of new material with attention grabbing content that is less academic. For example. Professor Gleason suggested using a current popular blockbuster like Black Panther. I think that I will be able to keep this lesson in mind for future lessons, asking Can I use a "fun" example for this?
So I set out to prepare a new lesson, this time where I would give students the criteria I wanted them to consider and discuss. My first step this time was to do what I had found effective in the past and brainstorm my prior knowledge. What would I personally consider when evaluating this film? This brainstorm was helpful and I need to keep in mind in the future that this sort of pre-lesson planning activity is a very important step for me and one that I shouldn't skip. I came up with a long list of criteria and questions I asked myself about the film. My next step would be researching by reading film reviews.
Next, I read several film reviews and did what I was asking the students to do. I think that this was a good response that helped transform my initial lesson plan. Instead of asking students to do this task in the lesson, I would do it to create the lesson materials. I have a feeling this will be a technique I will use frequently to revise my lessons; do the lesson I plan originally to make the lesson materials I will actually use. The result was this table, which I realized was very complicated and that the students would not have come up with this information inductively very effectively; essentially I was asking them to guess my thinking, which is not a good plan. It also resulted in this list of discussion questions by topic. The lesson plan was probably too intricate and too many steps though.
This version of the lesson plan was more direct, but it still had too many steps. Also, Professor Gleason felt the discussion questions weren't grounded in the text enough. She asked me to consider how I would answer my discussion questions as well as answers I would anticipate from students of different academic levels in the class. She urged me to create questions that were based on the film more. So, I planned to redo my lesson in another variation, this time abandoning the idea of introducing aspects of film evaluation and analysis and instead creating simply a guide for discussion of parts of the film, which is ultimately what the students needed more at this particular point in their writing process.
At first I was frustrated by the task of planning and replanning different variations of this lesson. However, in retrospect, I think all my materials would be useful formats for teaching writing about film; the only issue is I planned them in reverse order of how they should be taught to a class. I did realize that challenging myself to plan a lesson in different ways actually would lead to a great sequence of activities that would reinforce learning and escalate into higher order thinking skills. I actually think that challenging myself to plan a lesson in different ways is something I will do in the future to help me plan a full unit.
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