Lesson Plan Observation
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I thoroughly enjoyed being able to review the 1st-year TA’s lesson plans. In some ways, they surprised me with how well they had thought of certain things- I’m not sure that I was producing comparable work at that point in the semester.
Jocelyn had a lesson plan on writing case briefs and understanding legal jargon used in standard courtroom procedure. As soon as I opened her document, I was floored; I had no idea what standard courtroom procedure called for! Legal jargon usually has this lofty sense of decorum about it that makes it seem unattainable and elitist- it was amazing to see her present such material in a palatable way. One thing in particular that I loved about Jocelyn’s lesson plan was this phrase: “When I ask a question to students, I write down their responses on the board without giving clues as to whether they are right or wrong. I like doing this because then we can evaluate the answers together as a class. This is beneficial because students can then see how we come to the conclusion that they are either right or wrong.” I think that’s a wonderful way to encourage classroom participation as well as critical thinking, and students have an opportunity to bounce ideas off each other. She explained what a case brief was in clear language that was easily understood. She provided a neat mnemonic device to remember what a case brief contains: FIRAC (Facts, Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion). Her method of assessing the objective was to give the students homework on presenting case briefs, and one thing I encouraged her to do was to hold office hours or make another class time dedicated to the assignment; my rationale being that “if they go home and do all three cases but they don’t do them well, they still need clarification.” Laura’s lesson plan was on Effective Presenting Skills, to be implemented by the students at the end of the semester for their final assignment. She began by asking the students about their personal experiences with presenting, which I think is a wonderful way to start off this lesson. Naturally, she included some tips and tricks for presenting (don’t read straight from the slides, speak clearly, interact with the audience) but one thing I thought was special is that she also included a list of things to avoid in presentations. Many lessons about this topic tend to go either one way or another, presenting just “do’s” or just “don’t’s” and I like that she had both. She also planned on walking through a few example presentations and having the class as a whole decide what was good and bad about each. One note she made was to “maintain a sense of humor” and I challenged her a bit on that- I think it’s important to read your audience and then determine what level of lightheartedness is appropriate. |