In the engage phase of my lesson this week I was planning on activating the students schema in order to get them thinking about the topic that we would study for this weeks class. This week the class topic is "Drinking and Smoking in Korea", which I believe is a topic these students would already be quite familiar with.
To open the class I presented the students with the question, "is smoking cool? sexy? romantic? The resounding answers were no. Then to conflict with their first answers I put a picture on the projector screen of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie smoking a cigarette on the street. The same question was then posed with a variety of different answers this time. Suddenly smoking was kinda cool, sexy and romantic. By creating these contradictions by using their schema of smoking and celebrities I was hoping to engage the students into more interesting conversations that could be had later in the lesson.
The answers given from the engage phase of the lesson worked quite well for the rest of the lesson. I had to be careful not to be too negative on the smoking and drinking topics however as there were smokers and drinkers in the class, so even though the conversations in class were interesting, I will focus on the negative AND positive aspects of smoking and drinking in the next class to avoid bias. But over all the activation of the students schema worked well and I was satisfied, but with room for improvement on Thursday.
What's interesting is that smoking is almost the national pastime, and you got a resounding vote of dissent for your initial feedback. It always makes the CD interesting when there are differing opinions. Good on ya Matt :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, the disconnect is quite startling. I think, this shows how differently students see the classroom from real life. I have never heard a teacher in Korea tackle smoking and drinking in a non-judgmental way, so perhaps the students were simply expressing an opinion in line with the expectations of their Korean teachers.
DeleteInteresting, Jean-Luc. In terms of detailed planning, would be good to know what your specific objectives/aims were, particularly what students should be able to do by the end of the lesson, and how you planned to start them in that direction at the start of the lesson. Also -- what kind of CI work did you do with them? Were they giving you one word shout outs or did you plan enough to give them a question to ask each other in pairs first? Just curious about your planning process.
ReplyDeleteRight thanks for pointing that out Tom, I guess I was not so clear. Maybe The TB I am using is more focused on the students organizing opinions ready for the exam, and that was what I was trying to instigate in the engage phase of this lesson. Although later in the lesson we talked about habits and kicking habits and i did model some sentences on the board for them to practice these.
ReplyDeleteSo by the end of the lesson my students should be able to tell a detailed opinion of the question, "Why is smoking ? drinking so popular in Asia?"
During the engage phase they were mostly one to two word shout outs, but by the end of the lesson they were using much better sentences based on the models practiced in the study phase. Should I focus on the model answers during the engage phase also? I have never done that and maybe I should...