Making Lessons Personal!

This week in class I was provided with a great example of how to make a lesson more personal for students! One of my peers demonstrated the action activity of her lesson that focused on exponential growth. The lesson utilized worksheets, stations and manipulative counters.

To start the lesson she instructed us to divide ourselves into small groups and find a station. Once we got there we found an instructional sheet that matched one of the sections on our work sheets. We then had to read the problem, and collect the data that was required to complete our worksheet. This created a student centred lesson and allowed the teacher to circulate around the room incase there were any problems. Each station related to students lives or things that they can connect to.

The first station that we started at was called “Zombie Apocalypse” and involved the number of new zombies that would be infected each day. The theme of zombies is ever growing in relation to television shows and video games, allowing the students to connect to their learning. Similarly, the second station focused on the growth of the ice bucket challenge. This allowed students to explore the growth of viral videos or challenges. Many students will already have completed the ice bucket challenge so they may have been interested to explore how it got started and how it travelled so fast. With 3 people being nominated each day the group of people completing the challenge would ‘exponentially grow’.

In addition to the themes that were used during this lesson the instructor also provided a range of instructional techniques. She implemented differentiated instruction by using pictures numbers and words while also providing the students with tactile manipulatives at all three stations.

I can see myself using student centred lessons similar to this in my future classrooms. Connecting the learning to students lives will not only allow them to understand the material but it will also challenge them to apply their learning outside the classroom. I feel as though it would be interesting to utilize open-ended questions in the consolidation of a lesson like this one. Challenging students to create their own viral trend or task and track the growth over a set amount of time would individualize the content even further. I look forward to exploring personalized lessons more in the future and enjoyed this 21^st century learning!

Mr. Moore