Lesson: Jeopardy! Vocab Review

Date: October 13th, 2022

During this lesson, I taught a level 5 academic reading course to a group of ~10 multicultural students. The objective of this lesson was to give students a chance to review some vocabulary they had learned from some of the short stories and from the literary devices they had learned before a quiz.

This lesson focused primarily on speaking and secondarily on reading. Students had to read the vocab and discuss it before speaking to the teacher and the rest of the class before giving its definition.

At the beginning of the lesson, the objective and explanation of the activity was given. Though popular in most of North America, Jeopardy is not very well known elsewhere around the world. Students were grouped into 3 groups and named groups 1, 2, and 3. A scoreboard was written on the whiteboard.

Once the vocab was shown students were given a few minutes to discuss the words before group 1 was chosen to answer one of the vocabulary words then group 2 and so on.

This lesson was great practice for use of gamification! In which a teaching objective is taught through the form of a game. Gamification is a well-known way to engage students in the activity and in this case bring in some competitive aspect to the lesson.

This lesson was planned to take around 20 minutes so that students had sufficient time to complete the quiz. Due to the eagerness and quick responses of the students, the lesson ran fast and so I had to add some bonus vocabulary and move on to discuss if there were other terms students wanted to review before the quiz.

During the activity, while other groups were waiting for their turn to answer, instead of paying attention to the group giving the answer they were instead busy talking about which word they wanted to answer next. Another thing I noticed was that certain students were more likely to speak in their group than others.

To improve this lesson I would make sure that each student in each group gets a chance to answer by either name cards or by calling students up to the front to answer the vocab. I would also move around the room more especially when other groups are talking amongst themselves in order to gain more control of the room.

I really enjoyed using gamification in my lesson and will hopefully attempt to use more games to assist with the learning objectives.