Ghost Lesson Plan

 LESSON PLAN

PLANNING

Planning Questions to Consider Ahead

1. What will these students be able to do as a result of their time today, or at the end of several days in this class?
   e.g. write a persuasive essay, express their feelings in poetry, elect to read more Shakespeare, speak or write in standard English

2. What information or skills will students need to achieve that goal?

3. What learning behavior has the highest probability of being satisfying and successful?

4. How will the teacher artistically use research and intuition to make students’ satisfying achievement more probable?

5. How will I begin my lesson? What will I do in the middle of my lesson? How will I end my lesson?

Date: March 15th, 2021

Class and Grade Level: 9th Grade English

Title/Subject of Lesson: Ghost

Lesson planned for 90 minutes

 

State (or Common) Core Curriculum Standard(s):	Learning Target(s):	Assessment(s):
3. Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics). 1.a – Creates developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences based on individual student’s strengths, interests, and needs.	Students can recognize and discuss the importance of various themes within a text.   Students can explore central ideas of a story using voices, bodies, and digital media.	Students will record their initial thought process in their writing journals.   Students will produce an interview-style video to compile their thoughts regarding a specific theme with those of their peers.

Concept(s) to Be Taught: Central ideas/themes of a text.

Rationale: I selected student-led interviews to give the students the opportunity to reflect on a specific theme from the text, and to be able to synthesize their thoughts and responses with those of their classmates. The affordances of this tool allow the students to learn from one another and actively organize their thoughts into a video. However, students will be limited to a time constraint and have to be able to effectively communicate their thoughts in that given amount of time.

Materials Needed: Writing journals, computer with projector, PowerPoint slides, smart phones, a free video-editing app such as InShot or iMovie (but students can use any other video-editing app that they may already have on their phones). If technology fails, we will conduct the interviews live in front of the class instead of creating an edited video.

Learning Strategies to Be Used: Small group activities, class discussion, intentional organization of information in video format.

Differentiation and Accommodations: For students without smartphones, we will use tablets from the library. For ELL students, they will be placed in a group with a partner who can answer questions as needed. For IEP students, they will be paired directly with a partner who can guide them through the activity. Students with auditory or visual impairment will sit near the front of the room. I will work with each student to accommodate their learning needs.

PERFORMING

Announcements:

Continuation from Previous Lesson: You’ll remember last class when we finished up reading Ghost, we were talking about moments in the story that impacted us or that were important to us, and how those can help us identify themes. We practiced writing themes for some books that we’ve read before. Today we’re going to consider some of the themes and central ideas of the book Ghost, and think about how they communicate meaning to us as readers.

Lesson Presentation:

A) Preparing for Learning: How will you prepare students for the day’s learning?

Okay class, do you recognize the video that was playing as you came to class today? It was the episode “Comfortable” from 50 People, One Question that you were assigned to watch for homework. (Students should have watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0tEcxLDDd4 as their homework from last class period.) We’re going to start off by talking about what stood out to you in this video. Please pull out your writing journals and turn to the list you made of impactful moments from this video. (Students should have made a list of impactful moments, as well as a list of words that the video clip made them think of, and then practiced writing those words as themes.)

B) Directing the Learning: Alright, who has an impactful moment from this short clip that they would like to share? (Receive five or six examples, ask why those moments were meaningful/how they made the student feel.)

Alright. Now that we’ve looked at a few key moments from this clip, can we piece them together to get a central message? What was this clip trying to say? (Receive three or four ideas, ask why the students feel like that might be a central message of the clip.) Take a moment and, underneath the list of impactful moments that you’ve made, write down five or six words that you think of when you watch this clip.

Now remember, by trying to identify a central message in the clip, we’re actually looking for themes. Does anyone remember what a theme is and could define it for us? [THEME: an idea that recurs in a work of literature to guide the story and give it meaning.] (If a student is unable to define theme, share the definition with the class.) If you had to sum up the message of this clip in just two or three words, what would those words be? For example, the theme of a story involving a knight slaying a dragon to save a princess might be ‘love and honor.’ Turn to your list of words that you made for homework, and use some of those words to help you create a theme for the video clip. (Take one minute to think, then take five or six examples of theme.)

Great, now we’re going to think of some themes from the book Ghost. Go ahead and turn to the page where you wrote impactful moments from the story, and lets think of a few central messages and themes from this story. Underneath each impactful moment, write a few words that it makes you either think or feel. Who has an example of a theme from the story that they would like to share? (Take a few examples, discuss how each one is represented in the story.)

Great job thinking of and analyzing some themes! For this next activity, I’d like to introduce a central theme that I think is particularly important. It’s “the impact of a mentor.” Does anyone know what a mentor is and could define it for us? (Call on someone. If nobody raises their hand, have it written in a PowerPoint slide and have a student read the definition for everyone.)

Based off of that definition of mentor, can you think of anyone in your own life who is this sort of mentor or hero figure to you? Someone that you look up to, who helps you, and who embodies characteristics that you would like to develop? Go ahead and take out your writing journals again, and list one or two of your heroes or mentors, and make a list of reasons why you look up to them (2 minutes).

Alright, now it’s time to begin our main activity today. We are going to get into groups and interview each other about our heroes and mentors. So everyone pick one of the mentors that you wrote about in your journal, and use that mentor as you respond to your classmates’ questions. We’re going to film these interviews and compile them into videos that we’ll then watch together as a class. You know your groups, it’s your usual seat partners. So turn to the group around you and quickly decide whose device you’ll be using to film these interviews. If you don’t have a device among you, there are iPads in the back of the room that you can use during this class period. You will also need a video editing app on your phone. If you already have one that you know how to use, feel free to stick with that. If you need to download one, InShot is a great free video-editing app that you can download. If you’d rather not download an app onto your phone, you can go ahead and borrow an iPad for this part of the lesson.

Together as a group, you can brainstorm four or five questions that you want to ask each other. These videos shouldn’t be above 6 minutes long, so make sure that not all of your questions require narrative responses. Can anyone remind us what a narrative response is? (Call on a student who is willing to re-define this term that we’ve previously learned.) Great! Yes, make sure that your responses are pretty concise so that they will fit within 6 minutes. I’m putting the instructions slide up on the board, but here are some things I expect from you.. As you formulate your questions, consider these questions to guide you: Why are these people impactful to you? What are their attributes that you would like to emulate? At the end of your interview, the interviewer will ask the student being interviewed to strike a pose that encapsulates the way that their mentor makes them feel, or the attributes that the mentor emulates and that the student would love to develop.

As you edit the videos, try to splice the video clips. What does splice mean? (Have someone define splice.) Splice the video clips together so that each person’s response to the same question is next to each other, like in the video clip that we watched for homework. Use that interview as your guide. Once you have the completed product, upload it to your blog and send me the link. If you need my email, it’s up on the instruction slide. We will start watching these all together at the end of class, and finish watching them next class period. 

(Walk around the classroom as students work to answer questions, guide their interviews effectively, and keep them on task.)

C) Reinforcing the Learning: What will you do to check for understanding or to reinforce the concepts of the lesson?

Present videos at the end of class.

ATAWT 

Write a paragraph reflection on some of the interviews that we just watched. How are everyone’s mentors different? How are they similar? What did someone’s interview make you think of? 

REFLECTING

[Questions to ask yourself, the teacher: How successful was this lesson? What worked and why? What didn’t work as well as you’d hoped—and why? What can you change to make it even more successful for the next class? What will you keep, what will you delete, what will you modify?]