The following lesson plan was taken from a Year 7 class I taught during my GTPA, while the lesson wasn’t a disaster, in hindsight it did not meet my personal goal of being a constructionism style lesson as a constructionism style lesson is achieved by building knowledge through means that are tangible and shareable (Ackerman, 2009).
The lesson aimed to do the following:
1. Be a scaffold that students can use within their final assessment which they had to include a small review of the film How to Train Your Dragon.
2. Teach students what a film review is, and why they are created.
3. To give a real-life example of a written film review.
4. To have students create a written review.
In this context, this would be creating a piece of work that the students could share with their peers.
If I were to reteach this lesson, I would make some distinct changes to how the activity would have been approached, these include:
1. Students would be given a smaller animation to use for this task instead of trying to create a review for an entire film. The reason for this was that I found students struggled to remember certain aspects of the film, and when given such a limited time it proved to be difficult for them.
2. The task would be changed into creating a group video, with each member contributing to a script and filming.
3. Students needed more time for the creation aspect, time would also have to be made in a follow-up lesson for them to present their report.