Lesson Plan Critique and Discussion, Essay Example

When making lesson plans or otherwise preparing to implement classroom strategies and activities, teachers are faced with a number of concerns. In the article entitled “Multiple Intelligences Meet Bloom’s Taxonomy,” authors Kimberly C. Gray and Jan E. Waggoner propose a lesson-planning matrix that comprises the core elements of those two theories of intelligence. This essay will explore the main ideas discussed by the authors and will examine on a proposed lesson plan through the lens of their lesson-plan matrix.

As Gray and Waggoner (2002) note, “teachers at all levels of experience frequently struggle with the basic paradox of education: which concepts do I emphasize, how much do I cover, and how do I assess students’ new knowledge, skills, and attitudes?” In a traditional educational setting, all students in a particular classroom are given the same set of information to learn, and are tested on their acquisition of knowledge in more or less the same manner. In recent decades this approach has been entirely upended, and supplanted with a differentiated approach to education that attempts to provide instruction that is more individualized and shaped to fit the knowledge, experience, and skills of each student.

As the authors describe it, “in a differentiated classroom, the teacher begins instruction where the students are, not at the front of the textbook or curriculum guide.” In a non-differentiated approach, some students would have inherent advantages simply because they would already be familiar with the ideas or information being presented by the teacher. Those students would likely do well on tests and homework related to such information; by contrast, students who had to learn the idea or information from scratch may not score as highly. Despite these disparities, it may be that the students who did not score as highly were the ones who actually learned more during the course of the instruction.

Gray and Waggoner assert that utilizing two well-known theories of intelligence can help teachers develop and implement lesson plans that are suited to this new differentiated approach. The Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory espoused by Howard Gardner proposes that “students could learn and display knowledge in multiple ways, according to their developed strengths” (Gray & Waggoner, 2002). Bloom’s Taxonomy proposes a hierarchy in which basic knowledge is at the bottom and higher-order thinking is at the top.  Gray and Waggoner propose that “MI theory (can) activate learning from an array of students,” theorizing that a matrix utilizing these two concepts of intelligence could bring the strengths of each to bear in developing lesson plans.

The lesson plan attached in the Appendix section is built around real-world activities. It involves the application of mathematical skills in the context of a restaurant menu. Students are instructed to use the menu from a well-known restaurant to practice dividing money amounts. This lesson plan is designed to meet two standards, 4.NBT.B.6  and  4.OA.A.3.  The first standard focuses on place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi-digit arithmetic. The second standard focuses on using the four operations with whole numbers to solve problems.  In each case, the use of a menu’s price listings to perform mathematical functions allows students to contextualize the skills addressed in the standards by having them perform operations that are a common component of daily life.

This approach to developing a lesson plan fits well with the suggested matrix framework proposed by Gray and Waggoner. It allows teachers to easily assess the skills that each student has already developed before engaging in this exercise, and offers students an opportunity to activate higher-order thinking, turning basic knowledge into something tangible and useful. As Gray and Waggoner explain, “”students must be taught to think in ways that are meaningful and useful to them.” By developing and implementing lesson plans that utilize general knowledge by deploying it in a real-world framework, teachers can help to support the type of “meaningful and useful” learning the authors advocate.

Original Lesson Plan

Math

Standard: 4.NBT.B.6 (add 4.OA.A.3)

Objective: For students to be able to divide money amounts and to use problem solving skills.

Teacher: Review steps for division

Review steps in problem solving

Student Application: Use Applebees menus to practice dividing with money amounts.

Modifications: In class support teacher

Peer assistance

Assessment: Observe and review student.

Reference

Gray, K. C. & Waggoner, J. E. (2002). Multiple intelligences meet bloom’s taxonomy. Kappa Delta Pi Record, 38 (4), pp. 184–187.