Activity 4 Designing Instruction (recognize that there are many different ways to do this)
Example 1: Imagine you have to design a lesson to help kids tell the difference between a healthy snack and an unhealthy one. Describe what the instruction would look like.
Target audience: Second graders
Main ideas: A healthy snack is low in fat and calories; high in vitamins and minerals.
The lesson would begin with a question to the students about what kinds of snacks their mothers try to get them to eat. We’d put these on the board into in one group. Then I’d ask them to list all the stuff that they really like to eat, which would probably be unhealthy. This helps them perceive what we’re talking about when we say “healthy snack” vs “not healthy.” Then we would look at the “healthy” side to identify one example that is a good prototype of healthy. This activity helps with attention because the two categories make the children focus on the differences; it helps with perception because we’re getting them to recall familiar things.
Then we would work on an activity with a whole array of snack foods spread out on a table in the middle of the room sorted into healthy and not healthy categories. This appeals to more than one sense. The students would be asked to look at the two groups and try to figure out what all the foods in one group had in common. This focuses their attention on the main ideas and highlights positive and negative instances of the concept. We’d list ideas up on the board in a comparative organizer with two columns labeled “healthy” and “not healthy.” (By writing things on the board rather than just trying to remember them, I’m paying attention to the memory load limitations of working memory.) This is all a form of schema learning. Producing the common description is a way to articulate the schema.
When we’ve listed all the important differences, we would try to come up with some image that would exemplify healthy eating. Each child would draw a picture or make up a mnemonic to highlight what the differences between the two are, but would also be easy to remember. This use of imagery is a form of encoding and it articulates the schema.
Then I would set out a new set of snacks, but all mixed up and have the students sort them into the categories. This is a form of retrieval.
A second activity would be to have them record all the snacks they eat for a week after we did this lesson and categorize them, which is a form of retrieval and takes the learning into the real world.
You have to teach kids to clean up after they have been doing art projects. This involves sorting things and putting them in their places, wiping up any messes, and re-arranging the room back to regular seating.
Main ideas: Cleaning up means “putting things away,” “wiping up spills,” and “putting the room back together.”
First I would only do one of these at a time, in the order that they would need to be done. So you have to first put things away before you can wipe up and put the tables back together. This is a concession to the limitations of working memory. Since I would be doing the other things, that’s a form of scaffolding. So we’d start with putting things away.
Since I would be both demonstrating with real objects and having them do it as well, I’m appealing to visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses. I might begin by asking them what their mother means when she says “clean your room.” This allows them to see what we’re about to learn in a familiar context, making perception easier. It also causes them to focus on a key idea: what is a clean room.
Then I would model what we do when we clean the room. As I was putting the materials away, I would talk about what I was doing and why. I would even provide a jingle that contains the sequence of cleaning up tasks in the order in which they should occur. This would help the children encode the sequence of the tasks and retrieve them later.
Then I would put back out all the things I had put away and have the students take turns putting things away in the right places. This is a form of retrieval in which their understanding of the task is tested.
Each day we would go through the same routine until it was automatic.