Educators understand and apply knowledge of student growth and development.
In my EDUC 490 practicum, I taught a figurative language and poetry unit with my grade 5 class. What I’ve learned with unit planning is that you have to base one lesson off how students responded to the one the day before, and the entire unit is dependent on how the students grow and develop the needed skills.
We started the unit pretty basic, as I found out in discussion with my CT that at least the majority of the students hadn’t gotten any poetry introduction in grade 4 the year before due to covid shutdowns. I started with introducing similes and metaphors, and then proceeded through different types of figurative language. While the elements of these lessons were the same – What does this mean? Can you pick out examples of it? Can you create examples of it? And finally wrapping up the lesson with listening to Katy Perry’s Firework and finding the examples of each type of figurative language within the lyrics (this was the students’ favourite part) – how deep we went into each element depended on the my students’ response to the lesson. If they weren’t understanding the concept, we went into more detail, more examples. If they nailed the idea right away, we skipped some of the finding and went onto the creating. In the future, I’d give myself even more flexibility in this teach by student growth design – stretching out concepts into multiple days, coming back to ones that were tougher, giving more opportunities to practice, etc.
Once we had covered the different types of figurative language I was covering, we moved onto different types of poetry. This part of the unit was also led by student growth and development. This also followed a pattern – discuss the attributes of the type of poem, discuss the meaning of the type of poem and a bit of the history, talk through a couple examples, write an example as the class, and finally creating examples on their own. Like before, how long we spent at each stage depended on student growth throughout the lesson. If the type of poem had an attribute we hadn’t spent much time discussing before or that was more complex – ex. a new or specific rhyme scheme, a specific tempo or syllabic structure – then we spent more time discussing that. If the class as a whole was nailing the concept of the poem from the start, we’d go through the examples and the creation as a class faster and I would give them more time to work on creating their own poems. I would circulate the classroom during this stage of the lesson, and offer one on one assistance to students who needed it.
I made sure to structure this part of my unit to give enough leeway to spend more than one day on a particular type of poem if needed, and we ended the unit with a poetry read, where any students who wanted to could read their poems out to the class.
Basing lessons on how students are growing and developing is key to designing lessons that your students can actually learn from. This unit is one that I would use again if I’m in an intermediate class with poetry in the curriculum, adapting it to fit the needs of the grade and the class.