Lesson 4: From fluff to substance

My eureka moment: the lesson plans that I churned out as a contract teacher are nothing but fluff.

Today we learnt how to write a lesson plan. First, Prof Tan told us that lesson objectives should be observable and measurable. Now that I'm thinking about it, it seems so common-sense; yet, before my eureka moment, I am sure I peppered my lesson plans with lofty but vague words such as "understand", or even words such as "master" and "learn". How do we quantify learning? With Bloom's Taxonomy of action verbs. (See list below.)



What a useful list! It is even categorised into lower and higher mental functions. (According to Vygotsky, higher mental functions arise from social interaction. But Vygotsky's definition of higher mental functions seems less cerebral than Bloom's.) I read though the list and highlighted those that I thought may be more frequently used while teaching English and Literature.



We also learnt today that objectives must specify four aspects: audience, behaviour, condition, and degree. This is known as the ABCD model. The difficulty with such a model is that it seems tailored for the sciences. How do you quantify the extent to which a student has formulated his or her own personal response to a piece of text without having to constantly get the students to reflect on paper (or on a blog, as in the case of this class)? I will have to think about that one some more.

On the whole, an interesting and helpful lesson, as always. :) I'm getting somewhat saturated with all the methods and theories we are learning in the various classes: the science of teaching, so to speak. If I write a lesson objective with four observable aspects, that uses three student-centred learning approaches, and employs three ICT tools, does that make me a good teacher? Will I get to learn the art of teaching?

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Postscript:

i. I like the demos.

ii. There is a free public talk by Denise Atchley coming up on 27 Aug titled "Defining Digital Storytelling".