Lesson Plan 3

EDIS 4882: English Education

Name: Sarah Sheffield

Context:
Date and time for which lesson will be taught: April 18, 2017
Course name: English Advanced Honors
Grade level: 8
Length of lesson: 30 minutes
Description of setting, students, and curriculum and any other important contextual characteristics:
Students are very bright, 8th graders who, though chatty, are high-achievers. The class is diverse with students from various
backgrounds in regards to race and socioeconomic status.
This lesson falls within students unit on reading The House of the Scorpion. There is a running, mini-unit on poetry that
occurs at the beginning of every class. Students study poems for form and rhyme scheme. This lesson will be part of that
mini-unit on poetry.

Objectives (number each objective to reference in the Assessment section):

SWBAT:
Cognitive (know/understand):
Students will know a simple sentence.
Students will know the purpose of the poem We Real Cool.
Affective (feel/value) and/or Non-Cognitive:
Performance (do):
Students will be able to use features of the poem in their own writing.
SOLs: [List with numbers portrayed in the SOL document]
8.5 The student will read and analyze a variety of fictional texts, narrative nonfiction, and poetry.
h) Identify the main idea.
i) Summarize text relating supporting details.
j) Identify an authors organizational pattern using textual clues, such as transitional words and phrases.
l) Use prior and background knowledge as a context for new learning.

8.7 The student will write in a variety of forms, including narration, exposition, persuasion, and
informational.
a) Identify intended audience.
b) Use prewriting strategies to generate and organize ideas.
d) Organize details to elaborate the central idea and provide unity.
e) Select specific vocabulary and information for audience and purpose.

Assessments: Methods for evaluating each of the specific objectives listed above.
Diagnostic: Students will demonstrate what they already know about by
Students will demonstrate what they already know about simple sentences by describing a simple sentence in a
whole-class share out.
Formative: Students will show their progress towards by
Students will show their progress towards understanding the effect of the simple sentences in We Real Cool by
describing what they think the effect is in a whole-class sharing of ideas.

Summative: Students will ultimately be assessed (today or in a future lesson) on by...

Materials Needed:
This is just a list of the materials you will need for this lesson to occur. In the Materials Appendix below, you will include the
actual materials or links to what you will be using.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/28112

Post-its
Print Poem
Print Do-Now

Instructional Steps (Procedures): Detail student and teacher behavior.

[Note: Any words that represent what I would say directly to students appear in italics.]

Beginning Room Arrangement:

[Changes in this arrangement that become necessary later will be noted in the plan]

1. [2 mins.] Bridge/Hook/Opening to lesson:

a. Introduce Do-Now:
i. What type of sentences make up this poem? What is the effect of those sentences?
ii. Who is we? What is this poem about?
iii. Good morning everyone! On the board is your poetry do-now for this morning! Please
open your notebooks and answer these prompts after reading the poem. I am going to
play a recording of the poem for you to hear how it is read by someone else. Pay
attention to what words are emphasized and think about why that is.
b. Play link where poem is read out loud.

2. [10 mins.] Whole class discussion about poem

a. Review do-now questions
i. Thank you all for your hard work on that do-now! Now, I want to go over those questions
as a class so we can get a feel for what everyone is thinking. What types of sentences is
this poem made up of? [Students may answer simple sentences. If they do not, I will point
out that there is only one independent clause to prompt the answer. If they still do not
understand, I will say that they are simple sentences because it only has one independent
clause.]
ii. Why do you think the author, Gwendolyn Brooks, chose to use simple sentences in her
poem? [I am not looking for a specific answer, so I will take about 3-5 comments. With
each comment I will probe them to elaborate their responses to explain what effect it has
on them personally.]
iii. Who is we? [Students respond explaining who they think we refers to. If they do not
get that its the seven pool players, then I will point to that part of the poem and ask
again].
iv. Now, to make sure we are all on the same page. Tell me, what is this poem about?
[Students respond explaining the connection between we and the actions. If students do
not, we will break the poem down together.]
b. There is something weird about the way that this poem is formattedthe way that the lines are
broken up. Why did the author choose to put the subject at the end of one line and the action on
the other line?
i. Enjambment: write word on board. Explain that enjambment is when a sentence or
thought is broken up over the line like here.
ii. What is the purpose of using enjambment? [Students offer examples]. I love your ideas.
Enjambment can have lots of different purposes in poems. One purpose is to really pull
the reader from one line to the next. Instead of letting the reader stop, the poet pushes the
reader to keep moving. In this poem, the author seems to want to emphasize the first word
of each linethe action.
 iii. With this enjambment, where does that put the rhyming words of the poem?

3. [5 mins.] Introduce and Explain Personal Writing Activity

a. Your task now is to use the form that Gwendolyn Brooks uses in this poem to write your own
poem. You can start by saying We real cool and then adding reasons why you are cool. Try to
think of about 8 reasons why you and your friends are cool.
b. Experiment using the enjambment technique to emphasize words like she did. Try following her
format in order to help you keep your ideas flowing and to give you a starting point.
c. I started writing my own version of this poem, and I am going to share it with you now so that
you can see some of my ideas for writing. This is a very rough draft, so some of my rhymes are
perfect and the ideas could definitely be solidified. I made mine a little less dark than Gwendolyn
Brooks made hers, but I used her form and her ideas to help me think of something to say.
i. The College Kids.
ii. Fourteen sit in Ruffner Hall.
iii. We real cool. We
iv. love school. We
v. teach class. We
vi. learn fast. We
vii. walk home. We
viii. write poems. We
sleep late. We
tempt fate.

In my poem, I tried to follow the rhyme scheme, but found it pretty hard so some of my
rhymes are slant rhymes. I used that alliteration in the first line. I focused on a group that
Im in because its easier for me. I chose words that help me convey what its like to be
learning to be an English teacher and to be a college student.

4. [10-15 mins] Students Work Individually

a. Now, you all will work independently on this poem. Do your best. You have about 10 minutes to
work.
b. Ok guys, you have about 2 more minutes. Go ahead and try to finish up your last thoughts in your
poem. Think of one line you might want to share with a partner.
c. Now, pick one line to share and share it with someone sitting near you.
d. Thanks so much for sharing! Would anyone like to share their poem, or a piece of their poem
with the class?

5. [2 mins] Closure:
a. Ok everyone, take 30 seconds to think about one thing that you learned today about poetry. Write
that down on this post-it.
b. Turn to your neighbor and share what you learned about poetry.

Attention to Individual Student Needs: (Differentiation):

Detail specific actions/materials you will use to differentiate instruction in this lesson for at least one of your three case study
students.
I will print copies of the poem for the student who gets migraines and also give students the option of
working on paper instead of on a computer.
Technology Use:
Detail specific technology being used in the lesson with explanation for why it is being used.
I am using a poem online so that when the woman reads they can hear the way that she emphasizes the lines. This will
hopefully help students understand the purpose of enjambment because they will be able to hear it.
How this lesson incorporates specific insights from course readings and/or class discussion:
This lesson pulls a little from my reading of Teaching for Joy and Justice. In that book, a Knock,
Knock lesson is detailed, and I used that to inspire having students do personal writing using the
poems form to help them try something new.
Materials Appendix:
Include the actual materials or links to what you will be using. If you are using a handout or a PowerPoint, or giving a quiz,
etc., these documents (or links to them) must be included. (see the list above)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-3zoBJ88o4t2T-
z98wkDTCOn40vqvIlIZEzw7Pxgewg/edit?usp=sharing

In Retrospect (to be completed after the lesson has been taught):

Reflect on the lesson after you taught it. Was there anything that surprised you? Discuss your students reactions and
behaviors to the activities you planned. Is there anything that you would do differently if you were to teach this again? What
would you do?

I was excited to realize that the students were very engaged in this poetry lesson. They had many thoughts about
what the poem meant and why the author chose to do different parts of the poem. I was a little surprised that none of the
students realized that we in We are cool referred to the Seven Pool Players. I wonder if this assessment would have
been different if I had collected do-nows and checked students understanding. When asking the whole-class, three different
students answered that we referred to something more abstract. In the future, if I want students to come to this realization
on their own, I could incorporate a small-group discuss of their responses to the do-now. That way, maybe one quieter
student at each table could help the others connect the first two lines to the rest of the poem.
I felt like my behavior management skills were lacking in this lesson. Since the teacher does not have strong
behavior management systems that I know about, I felt like I didnt have any strong concepts to fall back on. I noticed that
the teacher often does 5-4-3-2-1 until they get quiet; however, when I tried that strategy, they were either too rambunctious
or my voice was not serious enough because they did not even notice that I was counting down. While I have been thinking
more about discussion norms in my last few posts about my visits to the classroom, I really felt the need for discussion norms
again in this lesson because it helps to dictate how students treat each other and their teachers. Some students chose to share
their poems with the class, and often the class talked over the students and missed the poem. Further, one of the shared poems
was about running away from English class because its so miserable. While it provided a good laugh, I felt like students
would have taken the assignment a little more seriously and been more respectful towards their peers and the class if there
were norms that I could reference to help them learn. Maybe in a future lesson, I will set behavior expectations near the
beginning of class to help get students in the right mindset. I could prep the sharing part of the lesson by giving some sharing
norms and offering an incentive in the form of candy or free time for participating actively. I feel like poetry is such a touchy
topic that some students wanted to make light of it and chat a lot so they would not feel vulnerable if their poem didnt seem
as good as the person sharing or if they felt like their poem was sharing something personal. If I set some norms for sharing,
then I think that students might feel more comfortable making themselves a little more vulnerable and not making others feel
like they arent being heard.
Overall, I think the lesson was successful. One student practiced enjambment mixed with simple sentences and was
excited because he felt like his poems usually looked like prose and for the first time, it felt like he had written a poem. Other
students were able to share with their peers more easily. One of the students who is very shy and has never volunteered to
share, volunteered to share her poem without hesitation. This lesson provided a way for her to be involved in the classroom. I
also felt like the task differentiated itself well for students because students could follow the poem form closely or move
away from the form and try something more creative if they want to.