PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE : ACADEMIC ESSAY

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. According to Charette (2005), when a project fails, it risks an organization's scenarios and eventually, will also affect the future. From that, we can clearly see that we must have a good plan and why we prepare a lesson plan as teachers. Lesson plan is important to ensure that our objective can be achieved (Goldenberg, 2008). My friends and I are given a task to prepare an hour lesson plan in group. Based on the task, we received feedbacks from our lecturer and classmates regarding the advantages and weakness of our work. The lesson plan produced is also based on DSKP as our guidelines. In this writing, there are few things will be explained which are the materials and activities used in the lesson plan, feedbacks from the peers and lecturer and the theories of language learning, materials selection that are relevant to the justification made.

         Firstly, there are few materials and activities used in the lesson plan which are Thumbelina handout, two mystery boxes and question sheets. In our lesson plan, we choose storytelling as the teaching method. According to (Isbell et al., 2004), storytelling can be more powerful than other methods since during the activity, kids are giving their attention to really understand the story. There are also few handouts given to the students which are consist of Thumbelina’s photos and few illustrations in the story book. This is to attract the students interest to listen to the story. Among 150 students, there are 122 students that preferred to choose books with pictures and illustrations (Mohr, 2006). From the research, we can see that by giving them handouts and photos can attract their interest.

 Next, we use mystery box for our second activity which is the kids will be put in two groups and each group will receive a box. In this activity, teachers will play an audio track and the box will be passed among the students. When the audio stop, the chosen kid from each group will be given a question to be answer. This is where we use the question sheets that we made. Then, those students will write their answers at the whiteboard. If they do not know the answer, their group members can help them by giving the clues. If they managed to give correct answer, they will get marks. The group that can collect the highest marks will be the winner of the game. It is also a mini quiz at the same time.

Other than that, we received feedbacks and comments from peers and lecturer. Firstly, one of the activities that we plan is not link with the objectives in the DSKP. According to the DSKP, to demonstrate their understanding, the kids will able to ask wh questions. We do not come out with a suitable activity and failed to make the kids to ask us. The relation between the objectives and the way of the kids showing their understanding should be related to each other because if they fail to do so, that’s means they do not get what the lesson is about. According to (Tomlinson & Mctighe, 2006), the connection between the content and the kids reaction will determine whether we manage to achieve our objective or not. If the kids’ reaction are different from our expectation, it means we need to modify and be more creative in teaching.

After that, we also received comment that we should not target good student when preparing a lesson plan. Weak students are more sensitive and hard to handle rather than good students (Janssen, Braaksma, & Rijlaarsdam, 2006). This means if we always aim to teach the good students, we would not be able to challenge ourselves and fail to teach them. According to Hillyard & Hall (2007), we need to help ourselves before we want to help others. If we want to help the weak students, then we need to improve ourselves by being a flexible teacher and does not aim only to teach good students. By realising my mistake in this part, it helps me to develop myself to be more open and learn from the mistake.

Lastly, the materials selection like the box and the music used, it can be related to the theories of language learning which is the social constructivism. This concept focus on social interaction and it means to gives learners the opportunity to construct knowledge, gain meaningful experience and increase the level of cooperation by searching for patterns and raising their own questions (Crotty, 2009). From the justification made by our lecturer, which is we should change the activity using the mystery box to ask and answer. This means one group will ask the other group and the group will come out with their answer. By doing this, kids will be able to ask wh question and we managed to achieve our objectives. One of the way to enhance children’s academic performance is to encourage kids to ask teachers in classroom (Resaland et al., 2015). So, from this we can clearly see that the linking between way and objective.

In conclusion, from the lesson plan made there are few elements that we need to consider when planning a lesson. We should ensure that the activities and materials used is suitable with the content of the lesson and the method of teaching is relevant with the student level. Next, we should make justification and adjustment on our lesson plan in order to provide a good lesson plan. At the same time, we should always refer to the DSKP to ensure that we are on the right track. After that, we should be flexible to teach weak and low students since in school, there are not only the bright student exist. We also need to identify the learning theories so that it is easier for the teacher to see the development of the student.The most important part in preparing a lesson plan is to make sure our objective can be achieved successfully.

 REFERENCES 

Charette, R. N. (2005). Why Software Fails. IEEE Spectrum, 42(9), 42–49. https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2005.1502528

Crotty, K. (2009). Educational Theory. Journal of Teachers and Teaching, 1–8.

Goldenberg, C. (2008). Teaching English language learners: What the research does and does not say. American Educator, (Summer), 8–44. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308325580

Hillyard, D., & Hall, J. C. (2007). David Ellerman: Helping People Help Themselves: From The World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 20(3), 203–205. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-007-9026-4

Isbell, R., Sobol, J., Lindauer, L., & Lowrance, A. (2004). The effects of storytelling and story reading on the oral language complexity and story comprehension of young children. Early Childhood Education Journal, 32(3), 157–163. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:ECEJ.0000048967.94189.a3

Janssen, T., Braaksma, M., & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2006). Literary reading activities of good and weak students: A think aloud study. European Journal of Psychology of Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03173568

Mohr, K. A. J. (2006). Children’s choices for recreational reading: A three-part investigation of selection preferences, rationales, and processes. Journal of Literacy Research. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15548430jlr3801_4

Resaland, G. K., Moe, V. F., Aadland, E., Steene-Johannessen, J., Glosvik, Ø., Andersen, J. R.,  

& Anderssen, S. A. (2015). Active Smarter Kids (ASK): Rationale and design of a cluster-

randomized controlled trial investigating the effects of daily physical activity on children’s academic performance and risk factors for non-communicable diseases. BMC public health, 15(1), 709.

Tomlinson, C. A., & Mctighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction and understanding by Design. Development. https://doi.org/10.5860/CHOICE.44-2827