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A Good Lesson?

When posed with the question "What makes a good lesson for you?" and after considering all the 'nuts and bolts' that go into creating a sound lesson (standards, objectives, materials required)... for me, it comes down to the essential questions, and deliberately breaking whatever we're reading or viewing in class open wide and connecting class material to real life by letting the information seep out. 

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Sometimes, the stuff we have to teach isn't all that exciting... but it has potential to be. We might find that we're teaching and reading texts we personally hated when we were in school. I think essential questions help frame texts and media in new ways, acting as launch points into discussions we never would have had if we just read the book, watched the movie, did some vocabulary sheets, and wrote a final essay about it. The EQ makes us look more critically at what the heck is actually important about xyz, even if the important thing is a bad thing. It's less about Shakespeare, and more about Shakespeare and YOU, and what that means.

As a teacher, I don't like to be confined to the thinking that "this just happens in the classroom and has no meaning or place in your lives outside of here" or "this is just for a test." The EQ is kind of my way to sneak in real world, real heavy content that otherwise would slip through the cracks. Let's not just talk about Hamlet and his Uncle -- let's talk about our families and their drama, too, and how this plays out in light of the stories others have told.

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 23, 2018 at 5:54 PM

    I like the idea of ".....and you" as you say for the EQ. My teacher used that idea when we did Othello and asked how we can relate Othello into our lives. It was interesting how we took a deep look into how gossip can be so poisonous. Surprisingly my class ended up loving Othello.

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