Lesson: Summarizing Thanksgiving
Date: October 6th, 2022
During this lesson, I taught a group of multicultural students in a 5th-level academic reading course. The objective of this lesson was to give students practice summarization. Since this lesson took place near the time of Thanksgiving here in Canada the articles I choose for them were based on the holiday and its history.
At the beginning of the lesson, students were separated into 3 groups of 4. Each group was given a different article which they had to read and then discuss that article with their group mates. Students were reminded to try and come up with a short summary which their group mates. Around 20-25 minutes were given.
After students were given sufficient time to try and summarize each student from each group was given a letter A, B, C, or D. Students with the same letter were grouped together and had to give the summary of their article to their new group mates. Students were reminded to not read from their article and to instead try and recount their summary from memory. This took around 20 minutes for students to complete.
While students were summarizing I posted a list of questions in order for students to think about while discussing their summary.
After students finished summarizing I asked each group a couple of the questions posted and if they noticed how depending on which article they read some of the questions may have different answers.
This was great practice for teaching a lesson that required guiding students from one part of the activity to the next. In this case, getting the students’ attention after they finished the discussion and moving them into their new groups in order to summarize what they had read.
What I found challenging was making sure that I had the class’s attention before moving on and explaining the next part of the exercise. In this case, a couple of students were talking during the explanation and in turn did not hear the instructions and so I had to repeat the instructions for them. Making sure I have control of the room either through physical presence or through something that can catch their attention is something I’d like to pay more attention to.
If I could improve this lesson I would try to find articles that were more similar in length and difficulty. Since one of the articles was shorter than the others the group finished earlier and spent some time waiting for the others to finish. While another group had some difficulties with the article and had much less time to discuss it and practice summary.
I really enjoyed this lesson and thought it was a great way to get students to practice summaries and forced each student to participate and practice in their groups. I would definitely reuse this lesson and just modify the subject of the articles.