Building Language into Lessons and Assessments
This class with the inclusion of this book has really helped me develop an awareness of the struggles that English language learners face. It also points out the significant challenges regular, “non-ELL” students face when it comes to learning and learning effectively. This chapter dealt with how to create successful lesson plans that are engaging and educational. It is very easy to overlook the vocabulary that is essential to fully understanding certain academic subjects.
My discipline is art so it is easy to forget to incorporate appropriate vocabulary when teaching. My experience with high school art is very different from how we are learning to teach in the modern art classroom. We emphasize the need for self assessment, particularly critiques of artwork. This can be done individually during various check-in points (formative) as well as at the very end of a project with a group (summative). Although as a student, I despised going through the critique process and could not wait until my critique was over, I found the experience to invaluable because it allowed me to really reflect on my process and technique. I was also better able to interpret and critique art produced by others. The crit process can be very intimidating because it is easy to take things to heart but even with the constructive feedback I received, I was better able to develop my ideas and alter a few things here and there to make it more effective. Being successful in a crit requires you to be able to talk about others’ work in addition to your own. This means that mastery of the academic language in relation to the art practice is crucial. It was not until university that I was actually able to develop my understanding of academic art language and the significance of being able to explain art work.
There are plenty of strong ideas in this chapter including how to successfully prepare for an oral presentation. Much like standing up there to defend your work in a critique, presentations require attentiveness to the information. The audience must be engaged and they must LEARN something new. Contrary to what a lot of the presentations that I have done in and out of this program, I would often present on information that the class already knew. My job was to reiterate this information in a more visual and dynamic way. Whether or not I actually achieved this is uncertain. What the chapter did point out was that it is important to make the information you present “new”. This could mean expanding on the current readings (if it is a shared class reading) and adding visuals, performances, and activities that would force them to understand the information in a different and perhaps more holistic way. This is a great tip and I think that having my students do more presentations would be a fantastic way to not only engage the audience (as they see their classmate up there) but also to create mini “experts” out of them. Teaching is the best way to learn after all.