Free Literature Lesson Plans for Adaptation!

So I was a little concerned that (quality) literature materials might be hard to find, but that worry was unwarranted. I realised (to my own embarrassment) that the internet is much larger than I think it to be, and even though I had to trawl through various sites to find some teacher appropriate resources, I found one that was pretty decent. It can be found at www.discoveryeducation.com. It’s great because there are lots of free teacher specific resources (read: lesson plans!) that have a specified age group (grades 9-12) and outlines. Some of the books and topics they cover are actually directly relevant and all we need to do is some adaptation for our own classroom contexts.

I’ve chosen a lesson plan on “The Great Gatsby” to share. You can access it via this link:

http://www.discoveryeducation.com/teachers/free-lesson-plans/the-great-gatsby.cfm

The gist of this lesson plan is simply to get the class into groups and getting different group members to do dramatic reading of specifically highlighted passages in the text. These passages are the ones that would lend themselves easily to a dramatic reading because of the amount of dialogue and number of things happening in a scene. In their groups, they are supposed come up with a script: deciding who gets to say what and how they are going to say it. They will definitely need time to work on the script as well as time for rehearsal, so this lesson will minimally be a unit of work at least 4 periods long, because it will be unrealistic to expect this to be completed in say 2 periods. This lesson is interesting because it requires students to know the text well, with special attention paid to the characters. By getting them to dramatise and do a role play of sorts, will effectively help them gain insights into the text itself and not merely studying it as a matter of academic interest e.g. to answer essay questions. I feel that this is one way to make literature literally come alive in the classroom.

Perhaps to make it more fun, it can be framed like a drama contest where a student representative from each group can form a panel of judges. Students' scoring will not be the final score but the discretion and veto power will be left in the hands of the teacher. The group that does the best dramatization wins, and special awards can go out to students who are particularly spectacular at portraying the realism of their characters.

With regard to assessment, I was thinking of a few ideas:

1) For official assessment purposes, the teacher can have his/her own evaluation and rubric to score them upon a designated number of marks. To be fair to the more introverted students, maybe the scores can be based on group performance, with some room for variance for individuals.

2) The teacher can also give a reflective writing task post activity where students can talk about how they felt while dramatizing the passages. Students will be instructed to talk specifically about any feelings or insights that have arisen from the activity. This writing task will then be graded.

3) Alternatively, the teacher can give a task post activity that will get them to choose a character in The Great Gatsby and write a journal/diary entry as if they were that character. The writing task will then be graded on how well they portray their character in writing, so the main activity is meant to help them get a sense of how the character is like through dramatization/role play.

In order to combat any lack of enthusiasm on the students’ part, the teacher can declare that all the modes of assessment will be counted for their final grades.

Assessment Projects

This webpage has a handful of very interesting projects that can be used to determine the students' level of engagement and understanding of the text. The one I'm most interested in is the "choose-your-own-adventure" strategy. As a child I really enjoyed these books, because it was almost like reading 10 books all into one, and if I didn't like the ending, I could always retrace my steps and start again. I had tried an activity similar to the one described here during my contract teaching stint with my secondary 1 English classes and the students really enjoyed the task.

Holland, who wrote this article, used this as an assessment for learning strategy. Her students had difficulty with the concept of foreshadowing, and having them think up alternative outcomes from the text that they were studying helped them to think more deeply about the text. She highlights the fact that this project allows students to create a new story alongside the existing one, which forces them to identify critical moments in the text in which a different choice made would have resulted in a different outcome. What is being assessed here is their ability to identify the most important events in the text, and, on a deeper level, their ability to determine and replicate the traits and attributes of the characters in different situations than those outlined in the original text.

A tool that could be used for this assessment strategy is the Inkle Writerwebsite. This website allows for easy writing and sharing of the choose-your-own-adventure type of story, offering tools that aid in the mapping and writing process. There are also examples of short stories written using the software that can be shown to the class as examples. Teachers may offer help in the drafting phase to guide students, and this assessment activity would probably be better suited for upper secondary students who would be better suited to handle this complex task.

Classroom Reading Strategies: Scaffolding the reading process for students WHO DON'T LIKE TO READ

Don't teachers like to bemoan about how the age of digital literacy has reduced our students' reading attention span to a mere 140 characters tweet?  Even reading the passage for comprehension, let alone the assigned literature text for O Levels, is a mountain of words too high for them to climb.

This website - 

http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies#skill1042

very helpfully lists and provides details on how you can scaffold or make interesting the reading process for your reluctant students!  They even categorize the strategies such that you can easily see which are suitable for pre-reading, during reading, or post-reading!

I've actually been taught the Directed Reading Activity and Jigsaw method in my content classes for the teaching of General Paper, to help weaker students better comprehend difficult passages, or to simply get them interested and invested in what they are reading, as opposed to just throwing them the passage and giving them 15 minutes to skim/scan/pretend to read.

So for example, DRTA involves teachers breaking up the passage (or, chunking) and crafting thinking questions pertaining to each part, read on for the full description:

D = DIRECT. Teachers direct and activate students' thinking prior to reading a passage by scanning the title, chapter headings, illustrations, and other materials. Teachers should use open-ended questions to direct students as they make predictions about the content or perspective of the text (e.g., "Given this title, what do you think the passage will be about?").

R = READING. Students read up to the first pre-selected stopping point. The teacher then prompts the students with questions about specific information and asks them to evaluate their predictions and refine them if necessary. This process should be continued until students have read each section of the passage.

T = THINKING. At the end of each section, students go back through the text and think about their predictions. Students should verify or modify their predictions by finding supporting statements in the text. The teacher asks questions such as:

• What do you think about your predictions now?
• What did you find in the text to prove your predictions?
• What did you we read in the text that made you change your predictions?

I do think DRTA is really useful in getting students interested in what they are reading, especially if you get passages which are full of suspense, or which lead up to specific arguments.  If you just hand them the whole body of text, they are likely to be put off by so much text; breaking it up for them is like feeding it to them in bite-sized pieces.

This website is brilliant also because it freely (yay kaching!) provides worksheet templates to aid the use of the specific reading strategy - which is a great help to our design of worksheets.  They even back each reading strategy up with research references, which will help us look smart(-er?), or at least, more aligned with current educational psychology theories in our lesson planning.

Reading strategies sound like really simply activities but I really do believe they can make a world of difference in lesson planning, and helping us as teachers to monitor and facilitate students' understanding of the text.  

Some assessment opportunities:
- As teachers, these readings strategies would form part of our formative assessments as we are better able to control and monitor students' reading and understanding of the texts assigned.
- The specific use of chunking may be used to help scaffold the summative assessments for very weak students as well.

Assessment through Role-play

Students usually have a tough time relating to earlier time periods such as the Victorian era. Most of the time, teachers usually succumb to stating facts about an era in hope that students make the connection. Instead of merely supplying students with facts, this lesson plan by Patricia E. Carbone enables students to become Sherlocks Holmes and to learn for themselves as to what it means to belong to an era. Her focus is on the Victorian era. Over a series of lessons, she gets students to research and learn about the Victorian era in order to gain entry to a Victorian party set in the modern classroom.

She begins by providing students with a WebQuest with information on the history, fashion, etiquette and entertainment in Victorian times. The students work in groups. Each student is assigned to research and become expert on one aspect. Later the students regroup to share their findings. 

Assessment 1

The group will be assessed on successful use of Internet to gather and document their findings and how they work collaboratively with the group to stay on task. See here for the rubric.

Next, she adds value to their research findings by giving students an invite a Victorian party that will take place in the class. However, the party invitation comes with a catch: students have to come up with a Victorian character sketch for themselves in order to gain entry. Using the information that they have researched, students have to fill up a character sketch worksheet. Students will work in groups to help one another out to come up with credible Victorian characters.

Assessment 2

In the written work, the teacher will assess if the students are able to apply their research to the writing task. She will look out for student's ability to incorporate Victorian elements to their fictional character. See here for the rubric.

Finally, on the day of the presentation, the students will turn up to class as the Victorian characters. On the part of the teacher, she will create a Victorian atmosphere in the classroom. The lesson plan suggests that the teacher provide hot spiced cider and cookies to lend a party atmosphere. However, given that our schools may not allow for food to be consumed in class, I suggest pre-packaged cookies as door gifts (a.k.a recess food) could be a welcome relief to our students too. Then the lesson ends with the teacher and students playing Victorian era games.

Assessment 3

The students will be assessed on how realistic and believable their Victorian characters are presented e.g. wigs, a certain pompous gait, how they speak to gain party entry etc. See here for the rubric.

Advantages of using this lesson plan to assess students' understanding of an era's society:

(i) It culminates into providing students with a semi-authentic situation of immersing themselves in a party set in the Victorian era

(ii) The assessment is staggered into 3 parts, giving students ample opportunities to understand the complexities of living as a member in the Victorian society. If we gave facts and assessed them on that, they may remember the numbers (e.g. a year) but not the story behind it. Role-playing allows them to engage in perspective taking (e.g. to be a high-society woman vs. a spinster etc.)

Disadvantages:

(i) This cannot be done in one lesson. Perhaps the teacher can use half the lesson for students to prepare for this project while using the other half to complete SOW.

(ii) Teacher needs to assess students carefully at the first stage so that they are learning from the research and not merely copying down information. She needs to scaffold their learning by asking questions to check their understanding.

Thanks to Ying Kai for sharing ReadWriteThink (: