Our lesson covered language communication issues related to elements of grammar such as phrasal verbs, idioms and slang and the confusion that English Language Learners can experience. We chose to expand on our original idea of simply doing an English lesson to make it more interesting and relevant for future educators, and we worked to develop the awareness of our fellow students of some of the challenges ELL students can have and a few of the ways of how they can be supported in the classroom.
Content Delivery Organizer - INTASC #5: We used MindMeister as a content planning organizer, and I found this interesting to experience for the first time. This content organizer made it easy to adapt and make changes as different choices were made. Additional points would be the ease of potential for collaboration and sharing of information. We organized our lesson to allow our students to be physical and interact with each other, to use technology in several different methods to share ideas and interact together, and to verbally share ideas and reflections from the experiences in the lesson. By having our classmates experience some of the confusion and awkwardness of limited communication skills felt during the "N word" exercise they had the opportunity to see things from the perspective of an ELL.
As I mentioned earlier, this was the first time that I used MindMeister or any digital graphic organizer and although I felt awkward with it at first and used more surface features this time I could envision myself using MindMeister or something similar in the future. It certainly allowed for greater ease of change than a paper and pencil visual planning system.
Lesson Delivery - INTASC # 8: As stated above, the students physically were up and interacting and then were interacting more passively via technology and verbal sharing. They had to think of phrasal verbs and produce a sentence correctly using that phrasal verb via our shared Linoit bulletin board Some students had a difficult time thinking of phrasal verbs which actually showed how deeply ingrained they are in our language and actually proved our point that language learners are bombarded with confusing language and not always offered the support, via rephrasing or explanation, that they might need to understand situations. Our classmates were offered the challenge of the "N word" exercise in which they had to have low-level and high-level conversations while avoiding any word with the letter N in it. By feeling the frustration themselves they were able to more deeply make connections with the frustrations that language learners in their classmates might experience. The class also viewed a video of language learners sharing the issues they had in classes and so were able to see firsthand accounts of struggles. My partner and I did a pre-assessment via Google docs and a post assessment via the shared Linoit bulletin board with both available for all to view on the classroom projector. While we had our lesson plotted out there were also times that we had to adapt or go with the flow and make slight modifications. I learned that I was comfortable with adapting and working with another in a co-teaching situation, and though small glitches could occur in lesson delivery finding methods to continue on were key. I also realized how meaningful it was to know information that my partner and myself were relaying might pay off with greater support being offered to ELL students in these future educators classrooms.
Digital Data Collection Assessment - INTASC # 6: Our classmates were offered a Google docs link a few days before the class to check prior knowledge of phrasal verbs and were assessed mid-lesson via Linoit postings for phrasal verb knowledge and useage after a very brief lesson. After the "N word" exercise students tweeted about their reactions and feelings to limitations placed on their expressiveness. Their post-assessment was again via Linoit where they were asked to reflect on what they could take from the lesson or how they could apply knowledge gained in future encounters with language learners in their classrooms. Based on pre and mid-lesson assessments we were able to guide the discussion and incorporate participants knowledge and reactions to events. I learned that it definitely added an energy and sense of timeliness to a lesson to use real-time sharing with technology (as with Linoit and Google docs). We all could see the postings of other students and realize that almost everyone was in the same boat in terms of lack of knowledge and then frustration because of the "N word" exercise. I realized that being able to see immediately and concretely that you were not the one lone confused person could be a comfort for students and I feel that this is something that I would apply in the future.
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