You are going to create a teacher lecture using Prezi or SlideRocket, that you will be able to use when you are student teaching. You've probably used presentation tools before, but this is your opportunity to expand your skills. Remember, as the teacher your focus is on conveying information in ways that help students engage and understand the content. Images, background, fancy fonts, audio and video can all have a positive impact on student learning, but they can also create a chaotic effect if you aren't careful.
What content should you develop your teacher lecture around? Hopefully, you are interested in the idea of project-based learning. So, select a topic within your Unit Plan that would be suitable for a project-based learning experience. Now, what would your students need to know to be able to complete a project within that topic? That's what you create your teacher lecture on!
EXAMPLE 1: I'm a future chemistry teacher. One of the topics I'd like my students to do a project on has to do with how chemistry impacts their personal life and society. Specifically, I'd like them to create posters for a publicity campaign on "Better Living Through Chemistry" (a real slogan of Dupont back in the 70s). In order for them to create an effective poster, they will need to know how chemistry impacts their life. I also know that I'll be teaching the topics of the periodic table in my course - and so I hit on the idea of having them make posters on the importance of different elements of the periodic table. So I decide to do my teacher lecture on the periodic table - on how it is organized and on the different families of elements and their chemical and physical properties. I confirm the appropriateness of this topic with a review of the California Science Content Standards, and find that this topic is covered in 8th grade physical science and high school chemistry. I look online for some sample chemistry/physical science textbooks - just to make sure I'm covering the content sufficiently. I also want to engage students through effective questioning. I decide to ask them, in small groups, to come up with a use for 10 common elements (I provide the list). Then, they have to rank order these elements in terms of their value and importance to daily life. Groups will report out their top and lowest elements, and we'll arrive at a class decision. Then I'll give them a list of 5 dangerous elements and ask them to conduct a benefit/risk analysis on these elements - should we rid the world of any of them?
EXAMPLE 2: I'm a future middle school physical education teacher. The California Physical Education Content Standards indicate that 7th grade students should learn a variety of multicultural dances. So, I decide I'd like groups of students to create presentations on the steps to a dance that they invent. They'll need to videotape themselves performing the steps to the dance. Before they can create a dance, however, they should learn some difference dances. I plan to create my teacher lecture on multicultural dances. There really isn't a textbook to help me with this topic, so I'm on my own. I do some research and find three dances I want to teach students. My presentation includes the history of these three dances, video clips of performers, and steps on how to do the dance. This presentation will help me prepare students to learn the dances as well as identify the elements that they will need in the dance they create. To engage students through effective questioning, I will post the question: Which of the three dances do you like best, and why? This will help them identify characteristics in the dance they will create. Other questions I will ask are: Why do you think these dance persisted throughout history? and How are these three dances similar?
REQUIREMENTS:
Your lecture must provide instruction for a topic in the unit you will develop. Requirements of this assignment include:
Appropriate Topic: This is CRITICAL. The choice of your topic is important because you'll be building a unit around your topic. So pick one that you enjoy enough to spend the next four weeks working with! Make sure your topic falls within the CA Content Standards for the grade level and subject you most want to teach. With careful planning, you'll be able to use resources you develop in this course during your credential program coursework and student teaching.
Your lecture needs to include at least one slide in which you discuss the importance/contributions/value of your topic to society and daily living.
You have to use Prezi or SlideRocket. (There are samples for the Teacher Lecture that have been created using PowerPoint- but please note that they are only for you to see content. You are NOT using PPT for this assignment!)
The presentation must contain at least 10 slides (in Prezi this would mean 10 chunks).
The presentation should be grade appropriate.
The presentation must contain components that foster questioning, student engagement and/or class discussion. You must include three types of questions from the list below. Pose questions from multiple levels, not simply comprehension check questions. (Refer to readings below for explanation of question types).
Elaborating questions
Clarification questions
Hypothetical questions
Assumption questions
Reason and Evidence questions
Origin or Source questions
Implication and Consequence questions
Viewpoint question
The presentation must include 4 visual/audio resources. Choose one of each of the following (you will only receive credit for one of each type, even if you have mulitple items for each type):
IMPORTANT NOTE: ACKNOWLEDGING THE WORK YOU ADAPT There is a major difference in acknowledging versus referencing someone's idea. It is one thing to reference someone's work when you borrow an idea or a quote; it is another thing to take someone's powerpoint or assessment and basically adapt it. This is a far more significant "borrowing" of ideas and thus, the appropriate thing to do would be to put on the front slide: "This presentation was adapted from Brown's Geometry Ideas, URL.)" When you don't acknowledge the authors, you are misrepresenting their work as your own, and that has serious repercussions. When in doubt, acknowledge.
BACKGROUND ON USING QUESTIONS
Using Questions to Promote Higher-Order Thinking
As teachers talk less and students talk more in the classroom, the role of questions in the classroom changes. In teacher-centered classrooms, students often answer questions the teacher knows the answer to, and students rarely ask important questions themselves. In student-centered classrooms, learning is guided, first by Curriculum-Framing Questions, and then by authentic questions that rise out of meaningful work with the content. Facilitating student interaction through questioning is at the heart of good teaching.
Good Questions
Good questions are key to sparking thought-provoking answers whether in whole-class or small-group discussions, or in one-to-one conferences with students. Effective questioning engages students in productive discussions that result in products and performances that reflect complex thinking processes and deep understanding of content.
"Good questions elicit interesting and alternative views and suggest the need to focus on the reasoning we use in arriving at and defending an answer, not just whether our answer is 'right' or 'wrong.' Good questions spark meaningful connections with what we bring to the classroom from prior classes and our own life experience" (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005, p. 107).
Strategies for Incorporating Questions into the Classroom
View sample teacher lectures (attached below). These are in PowerPoint, which is no longer allowed, but they will still give you ideas about how to add questions, focus on content, and create accompanying guided notes. NOTE: The FOIL Method, Disease, and Spanish have the Guided Notes embedded in them- the Word file is embedded on the first slide of the lecture. Create a teacher lecture that includes opportunities for student engagement.
FOIL Method
What's good: Content is grade appropriate, aligned with State content standards, well-presented with good examples; use of images should help students recall information at a later date. Students are asked to engage in the lecture through multiple levels of problem-solving. Guided notes handout is aligned with lecture and prompts student thinking.
What needs improvement: Animations/transitions are distracting; each problem should probably be contained on one slide; insufficient questioning strategies; no teacher notes; no connection to real world.
Science Fiction
What's good: great use of images to convey ideas, multiple opportunities for engaging students in critical thinking and discussion
What needs improvement: limited questioning strategies; limited content presented
Disease
What's good: Content is grade appropriate, aligned with State content standards, well-presented with good examples; use of images should help students recall information at a later date. Students are asked to engage in the lecture through multiple levels of problem-solving. Guided notes handout is aligned with lecture and prompts student thinking. Content is aligned to real world contexts. Sounds support content.
Spanish
What's good: this early first year Spanish class presentation is in Spanish, and the guided notes help the beginning speaker make meaning, good use of higher-order questions. Content is aligned with real word contexts.
Review the Teacher Lecture Rubric to make sure that you have met all requirements. (This is what I will use to grade your work!)
When you have finished creating your lecture, make it public and post the URL on your Digital Unit Plan Site, and then continue to the next part of the lesson - Guided Notes. You will be creating a second file for "Lesson 2", the Guided Notes file.
OPTIONAL BUT RECOMMENDED: Ask a classmate or colleague to review your teacher lecture and suggest improvements. Ask them to pay attention to your content organization; use of font, images, and animation; and to consider whether your questions will engage and motivate students. Consider their feedback carefully and incorporate it into your presentation.
Digital Unit Plan
Lesson 1: Teacher Lecture and Guided Notes
- You are going to create a teacher lecture using Prezi or SlideRocket, that you will be able to use when you are student teaching. You've probably used presentation tools before, but this is your opportunity to expand your skills. Remember, as the teacher your focus is on conveying information in ways that help students engage and understand the content. Images, background, fancy fonts, audio and video can all have a positive impact on student learning, but they can also create a chaotic effect if you aren't careful.
What content should you develop your teacher lecture around? Hopefully, you are interested in the idea of project-based learning. So, select a topic within your Unit Plan that would be suitable for a project-based learning experience. Now, what would your students need to know to be able to complete a project within that topic? That's what you create your teacher lecture on!REQUIREMENTS:
Your lecture must provide instruction for a topic in the unit you will develop. Requirements of this assignment include:
IMPORTANT NOTE: ACKNOWLEDGING THE WORK YOU ADAPT
There is a major difference in acknowledging versus referencing someone's idea. It is one thing to reference someone's work when you borrow an idea or a quote; it is another thing to take someone's powerpoint or assessment and basically adapt it. This is a far more significant "borrowing" of ideas and thus, the appropriate thing to do would be to put on the front slide: "This presentation was adapted from Brown's Geometry Ideas, URL.)" When you don't acknowledge the authors, you are misrepresenting their work as your own, and that has serious repercussions. When in doubt, acknowledge.
BACKGROUND ON USING QUESTIONS
SAMPLE TEACHER LECTURES