Lesson Plan

Here is my lesson plan for Critical Pedegogies for the Spring Semester of 2012.

The idea is based on the story of the blind men describing a different part of the elephant.

Level:  This lesson is flexible to be used with all levels, adjustments would be needed.

Class size:  Flexible

Goals:  There are actually a few goals intended when doing this lesson. 

The critical pedegogies' goal - to let students realize that what they think may not be the bigger picture.  One point of view is not enough to see the whole story.

The English goal - For students to use their creativity and English freely within a loose boundaries.  Also, for students to realize perfect English is not always necessary, utterances of communication is more essential than grammar itself.

I took frames from a short commercial called "3 Generations".   Depending on the class size and groups you want to make, I made about 8 frames.  There are 2 handouts.

(It seems I cannot upload files, or at least I can figure it out so I will leave the images)

1.  First you give each group one picture.  You ask the group to write all the words they can think about when looking at the picture.  Don't give any more directions than this.  It is up to you as the teacher if they can use a dictionary or not.  I would assume, higher levels would not need them.

Since I cannot upload the files, here is a sample and you can make one on your own with the pictures below.

2.  After writing their words, they can label each word to see if it is a noun, adjective, verb, or adverb.  You can skip this part.  I only did it to give some extra work for my students.

3.  Then I would hand out the next handout.  They would list the words, translate it, label it (optional), then write out sentences.

4.  After they write their sentences, as a class, add all the sentences together to see what kind of story they wrote.  

5.  Then show the video.

Here is the link to this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFyicQr2a1M

6.  Have a class discussion on the video, the class' story and the similarities and differences. 

You may get very different results than I did, however, I think the class' engagement in this activity will surprise you as much as it did for me.

Good luck....