Part IV: Teaching Materials Reflection on Teaching Artifact #2: Teaching Unit from Hawaii Literacy This teaching
unit is actually better described as a group of individual lesson plans tailored to my students at Hawaii Literacy. It is comprised of eight total lessons, two of which were video recorded and evaluated by my professor at HPU. The lesson plans, goals/objectives and student materials were created exclusively by me, so I am extremely familiar with them. I am proud of all these materials because they were built with my knowledge obtained in graduate school and adapted for the specific needs and desires of my students. My initial desire for my practice teaching was to develop materials for a content-based course, which I had learned about during my Materials Development class. However, I grossly underestimated the amount of time and effort required to develop materials for a content-based course, so instead I created a series of lessons with both content-based and linguistic objectives. At the beginning of my teaching, I did not have the time or knowledge to conduct a needs analysis of my students, so I only developed one lesson. It focused on current events in the Honolulu community and had students compare/contrast Honolulu to their home or first communities. The extended reading passage from this lesson was adapted from the local newspaper (Honolulu Star-Advertiser), which was meant to inspire students to read the newspaper on their own time. Then, in my third session, I polled the students about what they would like to learn/practice in regards to English. I took their ideas and tried my best to integrate them into subsequent lessons. One of the best qualities in this series of lesson plans is that they include many activities for us to cover in class. While this may suggest I need to improve my time-management skills, I think it also indicates I took extreme care to scaffold my activities. Hawaii Literacy does not
group students according to cognitive and language abilities, so all the students remain in one classroom together. Therefore, activities must address needs and levels of all the students, from beginner to advanced. Lesson 3 is an example of one that contains scaffolding. In the first activity, the students wrote down what they were thankful for with the help of the teacher and volunteers. While they did have to produce their own list, it emerged from their personal values and experiences, which allowed the activity to be individual and student-focused. This opening activity also gave the students some silent time with the activity and prepared for them to interview one another next. True/false questions about a short reading text called Thank You Notes: To send or not to send? opened the subsequent activity. These questions only tested recognition of the text and were followed by short answer questions. The short answer questions asked the students to provide written responses to questions based upon the text. A final activity asked that the students list their tangible and intangible gifts and then write thank you cards for these. I did not provide oral instructions for this activity in class though because I knew the overwhelming majority of the students would not get to it. The purpose of scaffolding my lessons was so no student would get bored or be left unchallenged during my lessons. The weakest point of my original lessons plans is that I have very poorly worded objectives. While I tried to use verbs to describe my intended outcomes of the class, they were entirely too vague; I used verbs such as understand, feel and improve. The uses of these particular words are better suited for goals and I believe my desire to be a teacher who sees the big picture of learning caused me to use them. However, objectives like these are not measurable and did not necessarily feed into the student learning outcomes Id created for the lesson. In my last semester at HPU, I learned more about writing goals and objectives in my
Second Language Writing course so later revisions of this unit show I reworded my objectives with Students will be able to (verb & measurable skill or task). Here is an example of my editing from Lesson 4: Goal: Ss will independently write thank-you cards for tangible items. Original objectives: Ss will a) learn about note introductions & closings b) improve sentence level writing c) write a Western-style date and d) practice inter-personal communication New objectives: Students will be able to a) write a note introduction & closing, b) write sentences with a subject, verb and object, and c) write a Western-style date The possibilities for implementing and adapting these lesson plans and activities are endless. They are best suited for a low-pressure environment for students that want to improve their English through topics like holidays, health, community inclusiveness and the expression of gratitude. The content of these lessons very much reflects what was happening in my life at that time (my wedding and birthday) and local events, like a naturalization ceremony on the USS Missouri. Any teacher can draw upon inspirations like these. I encourage other teachers to build a series of lesson plans and then revise them keeping in mind the theories and principles of materials development and language acquisition.
