Reflection 1: Lesson Plan 1

I created a website as a framework for a middle school reading/language arts lesson plan with the ultimate objective of enriching student responses to a text through the use of the “Forms” function of Google Docs spreadsheets (Fee, 2011, para. 1). 

This objective aligns my lesson with NETS*T Standard 1.c., which encourages teachers to “promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes” (International Society for Technology in Education, 2008, para. 1).  It does this by having students conduct an online survey of reader responses, aggregating that data on a spreadsheet and portraying those responses as a chart.

Yet, while this objective is germane to the latest educational technology pronouncements, at first, it did not have immediate relevance to my own teaching beliefs. To use technology to quantify a response to literature, seemed to me to be at best impersonally anathema to effective reading, and at worst, faddish. It also seemed impossible.

The class I took prior to this one was on teaching reading and writing to secondary school students. In this class, we studied transactional theory, in which, according to Rosenblatt (2005), readers consider initial and emotional responses to create the text, focusing on sensing, thinking, feeling, and structuring, and forging "from sound and rhythm and image and idea…a poem or play or novel” (p. 27). Reading is a personal and creative process, we learned, and the English major in me embraced this idea. That English major, who is probably a little too sentimental for the person he now inhabits, had a hard time figuring out how spreadsheets and math figured into reading.

The worst and best part of this assignment was the challenge of it.  At first, it felt difficult to an overwhelming degree, but now that feeling has given way to the sense of either the achievement or delusion of overcoming that difficulty.  All I had to do was to find a happy place in reading for counting.  This normally isn’t productive; in fact, counting words and treating a text as a body to dissect most likely engenders in a reader the opposite of what I’d like to promote to my students: it grows boredom.

The only way to properly use counting in literature, I thought, was not to count words but to count how others feel about the text. If readers truly transact with a text, and create a personalized version of a novel or poem or play within them, colored and shaped by their own experience, then each person’s interpretation could be different. It would be interesting to find out what others think, how others respond to the same text, as it doesn’t wind up being the same text for each reader. 

Students could then learn how to see how others respond to a work of literature, and, more than that, could look at evidence from the text to explain those viewpoints. By surveying others using technology as a facilitator, a person could see how others think, and to return to the NETS*T standard quoted above could “clarify…conceptual understanding.”

And math and reading could transact peacefully and productively. To sum up, the best part of this assignment, was when I figured out that technology could make a lesson interesting and that something as closed and concrete as a spreadsheet can open up a person’s understanding of others and of a work of literature.

I feel, however, that I could have made the lesson more challenging. If I were to revise this lesson, I might allow students to figure out how to use the programs on their own. Online tutorials are everywhere. I might have let the students take more of a role in their own learning, instead of overexplaining. I might have also given them an active role in both evaluating other groups of students and themselves and in justifying those evaluations to me.

References

Fee, J. (2011, July 11). A Technology-Enriched Lesson Plan. Retrieved July 11, 2011, from Calculating Responses website: http://ed609summerlessonplan1.weebly.com/index.html.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). NETS for Teachers 2008. Retrieved July 11, 2011 from http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (2005). From “Literature as Exploration” and “The Reader, the Text, the Poem.” Voices from the Middle, 12(3), pp 25-30.