Curriculum Design and Lesson Planning
Brown Chapters 9-11, Kumar Chapter 13
Brown chapter nine discussed curriculum design. He explains the development process for any given curriculum, that is, situation analysis, needs analysis, and problematizing the curriculum. Also he discusses goals ("broadly based aims and purposes in an educational context") and objectives("aims and purposes within the narrow context of a lesson or an activity within a lesson") for a curriculum, and what to consider when choosing textbooks and materials and how these materials will fit into a curriculum. Finally, he explains the importance of program or curriculum evaluation, and how to evaluate. I thought this chapter was awesome. It might be a little nerdy but I don't care: in my spare time I often thinkt about how to design a curriculum for a TESOL course. It is just something that I am really fascinated by. Some questions I have are: How do you structure a course? How will the structure of the course operate to the benefit and detriment of the students learning? Before this chapter, I only had a rough and inexperienced idea of how a curriculum could be put together. Now I feel like I can better imagine a curriculum supported by functional theory, even if this chapter is only a broad overview. One thing I had not considered about curriculum design was the integral nature of the lesson plan as a building block.
Brown chapter ten discussed the nature of a successful lesson plan. Brown defines a lesson as "a unified set of procedures that cover a period of classroom time, usually ranging from 45 to 120 minutes." and "are practical tangible units of effort that serve to provide a rhythm to a course of study" (164). Lessons should have both goals and objectives, and these should contribute or factor in course goals in some way. Brown distinguishes between two types of objectives; terminal and enabling. Terminal objectives are final learning outcomes, while enabling are interim steps within a lesson that build upon each other and ultimately lead to a terminal objective (165). Brown explains what else goes into a lesson plan, materials, procedures, and assessment. He then gives some guidelines for lesson planning, which I thought will be highly valuable for the upcoming teaching demonstration. He also provides a sample lesson plan.
Brown chapter eleven discussed techniques and materials. It was helpful for me to think of techniques as building blocks to a lesson. Brown writes that technique is "a superordinate term to refer to various activities that either teachers or learners perform in the classroom... techniques include all tasks and activities." (180). He then talks about different ways to classify techniques, how to possibly adapt a textbook passage to utilize different techniques, and finally other ways to incorporate texts and visual aids in a TESOL classroom.
The last chapter of the reading for this week was Kumar's chapter 13, Monitoring Teaching Acts. In this chapter Kumar discussed the importance of interpreting what goes on in the classroom from multiple perspectives, the teacher's, the students', and an observer. Through the multiple perspectives, Kumar argues that we will be able to better interpret what happened in the classroom. Kumar provides an observation scheme called the "M & M" scheme. It is a three stage activity, he writes. First, preobservation, observation itself, and post-observation, "in which the observer and the teacher select a few episodes for detailed treatment, analyze classroom input and interaction, interpret their analysis, derive pedagogic implications, and put all this experiential knowledge together to develop a personal theory of practice."(location 3342)
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