Instruction Adventures

As I said in the pervious post I revised my lesson plan to try and make my points on how sources can be used to talk to one another in an essay more clear to the students. My revisions changed both how I lectured and the in class worksheet I gave the class. I changed the lecture so that I started out the class with a quick group exercise where I asked the students to make a list of the first 5 things they do when they are working on a writing assignment. I used their answers to illustrate how they need to do some background research on a topic before settling on their argument as well as using background research to help them become more familiar with the nuances of a topic and  other subcategories that fall under the broad topics they had to choose from. (This class was given a list of ten topics they could write their papers on.) From here I then began to describe some of the source types (viewpoints, statistics, scholarly articles, and primary sources) used in Opposing Viewpoints. What I did was describe one of the source types and then gave the students five minutes fill out that sources section of the worksheet. Unlike the pervious worksheet used in the past class I had printed out a worksheet for each student and broke the tables into sections based on source type. I asked the students to find two versions of the source where one argued for the topic and one against the topic. Once I covered all four source types I then had the students do one last exercise. I asked the students to pick one source that argued for and one that argued against (they did not have to be the same source type). They then were asked how they could have two different argument types can talk to one another.

I wanted the students to see how they could start a conversation in their papers. For example how an ethical argument (perhaps a source from viewpoints) can have holes poked into it with a logical argument (a source from statistics). Over all I am a bit happier with the responses I was able to tease out of the students in this set of worksheets. I think that by breaking up the lecture and having the students work in short intervials helped kept the students focused on the topic. This helps let me know that I am on the right track with how I best teach. However I do think that my last exercise needs some work. Looking at the responses that students gave some of the students were able to grasp the conversation I was trying to get them start having. However, many of the responses  were restatements from earlier parts of the worksheet.

If I get the chance to reteach this lesson plan I want to continue breaking up the lecture by having the students work for a few minutes. However, I want to rework the last exercise. I am thinking I need to reevaluate how I present the exercise. Perhaps a compare table is not the best way to do this. I might need to try and guide the students a little more in this exercise with better directions as well.