Lesson Reflection: The Truth About Ads

Yesterday I taught my midterm lesson - a 50 minute lesson on the design elements of advertising and how they influence consumers.  I taught the class to the 8th grade Current Events students, a group of 16 boys and 2 girls.  Overall, I think the lesson went really well, although I definitely have room for improvement.  During our conference my university supervisor gave me some great suggestions for improving my instruction:

• I started out the lesson with an initial assessment of background knowledge - I had students take two minutes to talk about what they already knew about advertising and then asked them to share with the whole class.  What I didn't do, however, was build on the vocab they threw out and draw their existing knowledge into the lesson.
• I had the students engage in "Table Talk" sessions through the lesson, but could engage students in even more critical thinking by asking them to first think the topic over by themselves then talk it over with their table and finally discuss with the whole class.
• Because this is a 8 day long unit, a pre and post test would be a great way to assess the knowledge gained by the lessons.
• Be more clear with instructions and actually go over the handout before starting the assignment.  I assumed that students would take the time to read the instructions...clearly a rookie mistake!
• While students are working in small groups I need to focus on improving my conferring time.  A great open-ended discussion starter for conferencing is to say, "This is interesting, tell me more about this."
• And I still need to focus on bringing the day's lesson into students' long term memories with a quick sum-up writing exercise at the end of class.  Instead of just letting the class fizzle out, I need to get students working right up until the bell!

While the lesson went well overall, my timing was way off.  I had anticipated students having their ads done by the end of the class period, but most groups still had 15 - 20 minutes of work ahead of them!  Day 2 was supposed to be ad presentations and evaluating ads as a group, but I think it will end up being work time and presentations only.  Need to shuffle the unit plan around a bit!