A good lesson - Charmaine

This was a lesson that I conducted with my top express class. In terms of language proficiency, this class had very varied abilities as 1/3 of it consisted of international students. The main aim of this lesson was to help my students acquire sensitivity to purpose and context, rather than simply memorizing relevant features of each text-type. This class had been accustomed to the “compo-compre” style of English teaching, and my attempts to incorporate higher-order thinking skills into lessons had been greeted with confusion when they weren’t directly related to grades and examinations. In this lesson, I made awareness of purpose and context a priority in assessment and helped students concretize this concept through a worksheet with guided questions, the provision of sample brochures, and a set of rubrics for assessing their own informative brochure that explicitly stated what it meant to have “an awareness of purpose and context”.

Prior Knowledge:

1. Students have basic knowledge of the features of the information brochure.
2. Students have looked at samples of informative brochures and identified the purpose, audience, and key features of the informative brochure in each sample.

General Objectives/ Learning Outcomes:

This lesson helps students consolidate their knowledge of the features of the informative brochure, and helps them begin the first stage of drafting their informative brochures (topic, purpose, audience). Thus, by the end of the lesson,
• Students should be aware of the functions of the key features of the informative brochure
• Students should demonstrate this awareness through their ability to select features of the informative brochure that match the purpose and audience of the brochures they will be creating.

Specific Instructional Objectives:

1. Students fill in a worksheet on the functions of the key features in the informative brochure.
2. In groups, students fill in a planning template for their informative brochure assignment.

Skills and strategies applied in this lesson:
• Scaffolding and process-writing – the class was accustomed to writing timed essays and handing them in at the end of the period. The process of drafting usually consisted a worksheet with a table or chart helping them plan their points. For this assignment, I emphasized the collaborative nature of planning by having them look at samples in groups and decide on what worked and what didn’t work for that particular brochure’s purpose and audience. Following this, students were to go home and fill in a planning template (worksheet) with the points they had brainstormed for their own brochure. During the next lesson which was reading period, I conferenced with groups of three students at a time to check on their progress and help them out with questions. This gave students an opportunity to clarify doubts about my expectations for the assignment. I always began these mini-conferences by directing students’ attention to the set of rubrics and asking them to rate their work first before I gave any comments. I did this so that students would recognize that they had the ability to do self-assessments without always relying on the teacher for the “right answer”.

What students learnt:
I could assess how well students understood how purpose and context affected content through the planning templates that were graded alongside their own informative brochures that they had researched, designed and created. I could match what students had told me about their target audience (e.g. young teenagers, trendy, love for music) with the design and content of their brochures (e.g. bright colours or all-black, information about handphones that can play music etc.) They also had the chance to apply their knowledge of the features of the brochure (e.g. bulleted points, subheadings), using them to organize information in their own brochures.

Best practices in teaching:
• Always give a set of rubrics for major assignments. I have found that even though this takes a bit of effort, it increases the quality of student work immensely as students know exactly what makes a good piece of work and can aim to produce it.
• This empowers students to do self-assessment as well because they can measure how well they are doing at every stage.
• Creating rubrics may seem difficult and daunting but I think it gets better with practice. It makes grading assignments MUCH MUCH easier, and you get an idea of how to refine your rubrics once you go through one round of marking.
• Include the planning process in assessment. This helps students know that every stage of planning is important – they won’t believe you saying it’s important unless it is assessed (I think this applies to most students in our Singaporean context).