Lesson Plan Reflection

Lesson Plan Description

The lesson plan involves teaching the staff at my school how to utilize a blog to collaborate on implementing the MOVE curriculum.  The objectives are that the learners will identify, produce and share strategies of MOVE from their classroom experience.  I followed my original lesson plan closely except that I was unable to use my intended audience.  Instead, I used four adult family members who had technology skills similar to my co-workers but they lacked the basic MOVE training.  The targeted group would consist of twenty.  My plan was a thirty minute lesson which included ten minutes on identifying an example to share, ten minutes on different ways to produce their project and sharing examples and finally ten minutes on accessing and posting on the blog.

Lesson Plan Implementation

The learners quickly reached the goals of identifying appropriate examples to highlight in their blog.  At first, they needed assistance with deciding which ones were appropriate.  Since they were not my targeted audience, I gave them only two examples to choose from.  Even with the choices narrowed down, they needed guidance and scaffolding to choose appropriate examples.  I modeled the completed example already posted and then I gave them a chance to discuss how they would present their example.

Next, they were allowed an opportunity for hands on work on the computer. The lesson became disorganized as my students started navigating around to other sites on the internet. The member of my group that had never posted verbalized understanding and preferred to watch and ask questions.  In the original plan, I thought this part would take ten minutes, but the students were finished before I was able to get through my instruction. Constructivism theory was seen in the scaffolding, and teaching in the zones of proximal development.  Since most adults are familiar with posting on social media, I should have prepared more questions so that the learners could describe what they already know. As the teacher I needed to know what the students know before starting into a lecture. 

Reflection

Looking back, the group that I worked with was not very attentive and they had difficulty listening to all of my detailed instruction. They were worried about how long the lesson would take and questioned why I needed their help.  They were very comfortable voicing their complaints to me and it made me aware that my targeted audience may feel the same way.  I coerced my family to do this lesson instead of asking for volunteers. On reflection, true collaboration is voluntary so I plan on involving only interested staff to start a pilot program.  I also plan on starting off the lesson with an emotional video or commercial to hook my learners into a discussion about collaboration. The point would be to demonstrate the power of video or audio to create a strong presentation.  Also, it was more difficult than I thought to assess their understanding since the focus of the group was the technical side of the lesson. 

After reflection, the use of technology for a format of collaboration remains a good choice.  Technology allows a format to express a finished project.  It offers great flexibility in that learners can communicate, collaborate and mentor each other at all times of the day.  Also, seeing the finished project allows for reflection and thinking about job performance and the flow of the classroom.  Following my lesson, I expected the learners to feel comfortable with blogging and to be able to use it in an expressive manner.  My learners did not have a lot of questions for me.  Instead, they really wanted to get started on the computer.  I realized that I may have needed to express more emphasis on the quality of work that they would want to share for their entry on the blog.  It appeared that it was an appropriate lesson and format.  For future reference, I need to consider strategies to keep my group logging on and sharing. The lesson was successful in that it pointed out the weaknesses in my presentation and the focus of the material presented.  It also highlighted that the group enjoyed using the computer for sharing information.