Post Author: Annie Laurie Nichols
The spring semester here at Maryland is drawing to a close and summer is fast approaching… the perfect time for our upcoming #rhetoricroadtrip to RSA in Atlanta! But also the perfect time to take a beat and really think about engaging pedagogically with redesigning lesson plans.
With the recent trend toward active learning, many of us have been trying to incorporate more activities into our lessons. But planning an active lesson is not as simple as adding a related activity and stirring. An active lesson plan must still consider how to help students use and master skills and concepts, how this lesson connects to prior and upcoming lessons and continues to build the major arcs of the class, and how projects and theories are scaffolded and modeled. This is quite a lot to think about simultaneously, so I have developed a method of block planning to ensure I incorporate everything into a thoughtful active lesson plan.
I start by asking myself a series of questions:
● What concepts do I want students to learn?
● What skills do I want students to learn/practice?
● What do they have to already know to be able to do/understand these concepts/skills?
● What have they already learned/what do they already know that can help them understand and use these concepts?
● What upcoming material will these skills and concepts help them understand and do?
Then I subdivide the lesson into three blocks. Each block includes an activity and direct engagement with course concepts:
| Block 1 (15 min) | Block 2 (15 min) | Block 3 (15 min) | |
| Goal 1 | Give students an experience that establishes the need for this material | Give students a way to analyze communication using the material | Give students a way to apply material and generate new material |
| Action 1 | Listening is Power activity to demonstrate the role of listening in communication | Watch a clip from Star Trek where several characters are involved in a negotiation. What kind of listening is each doing? How does that affect the communication? | In groups of 3, read the scenario. You are going to act as consultants to the people in the scenario. How should they change their listening practices? Convince them will solve their problem. |
| Goal 2 | Check comprehension of homework concepts | Debrief the analysis and connect to past material | Set up need for future material |
| Action 2 | Ask students to give concepts (5 types of listening), definitions, and examples; write on board | How does listening fit into what you have learned about negotiation? What kind of listening did you use in the yellow blueberries activity? How would a different kind of listening have changed how the negotiation went? What else was going wrong in the scenario? | Your homework is to read about group dynamics, particularly how groupthink develops and can be avoided. As you read, consider how these theories could help the people in the scenario avoid their problem. |
The answers to the questions I have asked myself map into these blocks, and are each paired with an activity. I have found this type of lesson planning to be useful across a variety of courses that include active learning. This particular example is for a 50-minute class period (with 5 minutes reserved to take attendance, make announcements, etc.). For a 75-minute class, I add two more blocks. Arranging the class period like this gives the class a good balance between thinking and application, and breaks up the time I am talking with students doing activities. It also makes sure that I don’t skip the vital step of connecting each activity directly to course content in a deliberate and explicit way.
– Annie Laurie