Assignment 5
Contribute to our new
Supplemental Handbook of Annotated Lesson Plans for Content and Academic Language Learning
We have been looking for a resource that contains not only lesson plans of “good teaching,” but also ones that show explicitly how the language and content needs of English learners are addressed intentionally. Your task is to contribute a lesson with embedded, annotated comments and a 1- to 2-page commentary. The audience for this handbook will be pre-service and currently practicing teachers.
This assignment is also an opportunity for you to practice and get feedback on planning and including language development elements (specifically for ELLs) in your lessons. Promoting students' academic language is an aspect of PACT. Your PACT teaching event will be scored using a scheme with 11 rubrics. Rubrics 10 and 11 are about Academic Language (10: Understanding Language Demands; 11: Supporting Academic Language Development). You will receive more information about this in section.
Part A –Lesson with Annotations
You will choose a single (45- to 90-minute) lesson and “fortify” it with elements of instruction and assessment designed to (1) make the academic input comprehensible for ELs and (2) promote learning academic language. Include opportunities for students to talk about what they are learning—and describe how you “bump up” the academic quality of such talk.
Start with whatever lesson plan format you are using in your C&I class, then annotate the lesson using the “comments” feature of MS Word (your section leader will demonstrate in section on 2/21). The annotations will focus on extra thought put into addressing the language and content demands of students who might struggle in your class due to limited English proficiency. These annotations will likely point out such things as differentiation of task or text, formative assessment, mini-lessons on language needed for tasks, visual representations of complex ideas and higher-order thinking, language reinforcement, comprehensible input, accessing/building background knowledge, etc. In short, any of the ideas, tools, techniques, concepts you have heard or read about in this class (or elsewhere) that are explicitly designed to make content accessible to ELLs and promote language (esp. academic language) development.
Part B – Commentary
Write an (approximately) 1-2 page (single spaced) commentary, in which you explain how this lesson is a good example of the practical application of the strategies and theories that you have learned in our class that focus on developing both content and language at the same time, with particular attention to the needs of EL students. Explain why you think the activities, sequence, and transitions will be effective.
Describe how the lesson elements attempt to build on strengths, language abilities, and backgrounds of your students. Describe also how the lesson gradually releases support over time. Since this is sometimes difficult to show in one lesson, or even a short sequence of lessons, one option is for you to comment on how you plan to release support gradually over a larger number of lessons. Describe how your lesson elements maintain rigor and grade level learning as they concurrently provide necessary support of language, literacy, and/or thinking development. This is a chance for you to share what you have learned in this class and how you have applied it to your content area.
The write-up can include questions or uncertainties you had as you were planning the lesson; it can also include what you HOPE--but are not sure--will work. If you do teach the lesson (see "Optional," below), describe any answers that emerged.
Optional: Feel free to teach the lesson and include a paragraph on how it worked for the English learners (or other students) and why. You might also interview a student to see what worked for him or her.
EVALUATION CRITERIA (5 pts. each)