Panama Canal: Part III

Because of the debacle that was my lesson on the Panama Canal, I decided that I could not just leave the students with an incomplete assignment and wanted to at least get to a stopping point where I could feel like I accomplished something.

The problem with the previous lesson was that I assumed that my students had a prior knowledge that they did not have. My faulty assumptions led to poor time management--we did not even complete half of the lesson that I had planned. Fortunately, however, my CT is extremely flexible and I was able to complete Wednesday's lesson on Friday.

I decided that I would just have to be content with getting through the autobiography and not worry about not finishing the document analysis. Completion of the entire lesson would have taken close to a week, and I only had half of one class period left.

Now, I knew where their reading skills truly were and how I needed to adapt my lesson. Because they completed reading guides on every chapter, I knew that they would know how to do a reading guide with minimal modeling. Besides, they could not seem to grasp the overall purpose and meaning of the text without it. However, their typical reading guide offers mostly lower-order questions that are straight from the text. While I included many of those same questions, I included a few curveballs that I hoped would challenge them. Fortunately, I was right this time.

This was an assignment that they were much more comfortable with and the majority of them actually completed the assignment, much to my surprise. The majority of the questions that I asked were lower order questions, although the answers were not verbatim from the text. However, the last question that I posed to them was to decide whether or not the President used lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, or obfuscations in his autobiography. With some assistance from me, most of the students were able to answer that question--even my students in the back who pride themselves on doing next to nothing.

This lesson taught me that I had been too harsh on the reading guides. Sofia, the student that I have been observing this semester, told me at one point that she got a lot out of the reading guides and the workbook questions. She said that completing them helped her understand the overall purpose of the chapter and prepare her for CT's lecture. Honestly, there is only one, maybe two students, who openly seek to be challenged with more difficult assignments. I do not doubt that many of them would be able to rise to that challenge, but they seem to be content with doing the bare minimum. (I know I was in high school).

I will definitely use reading guides in my lessons, although maybe not as often as my CT does. I think they provide students, like Sofia, with the necessary background knowledge to understand a chapter or unit's objectives. However it is easy to fall back on them constantly and I do not want to do that. I want them to be a scaffold so that students can start to see main points in a passage and grow from answering basic, lower-order questions to more challenging, complex higher-order questions.