Assignment: Teaching Materials

For English 295, 296, and 297

Professor Bob Broad, Department of English, Illinois State University

Rationale for and orientation to this assignment

Composing teaching materials offer teachers several benefits.

• The process of developing materials helps teachers gain knowledge, insight, resources, and creativity
• Teaching materials help teachers move successfully with their students through weeks, months, and semesters of learning
• Materials and plans for a particular day helps the teacher be prepared, stay on track, and evaluate the success of the day’s lesson

In your "Secondary Education" course (C&I 216), you learned about and practiced (or are currently learning and practicing) developing and delivering units of instruction. Your Teaching Materials for this course will draw extensively on that previous knowledge and practice, even while the emphases and requirements differ somewhat. I also encourage you to engage critically with what you have learned before about planning for teaching, and to experiment and explore alternatives. Most good plans for teaching have much in common, and those are the things required of the plans you’ll develop in this course.

Guidelines and requirements for your Teaching Plans

1. Purpose. Your teaching plans should support the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts and demonstrate "best practices" in the teaching of writing and/or literature. Also aim to persuade other teachers to use the plans and to make those teachers’ use of your plans as successful and easy as possible.
   
2. Audience and Forum. The most important test for the success of teaching plans is whether an alert and intelligent substitute teacher could successfully conduct real, substantial teaching based on the plans. Remember that your teaching plans may be included in the sourcebook we will publish at the end of the semester. People who will likely buy and use that book include prospective, new, and experienced teachers of English.
   
3. Topic: The content of your plans should fit the course for which you are developing them. For English 296, develop plans for teaching literature. For English 297, make plans for teaching writing. In English 295, you should plan to teach both composition and literature.
   
4. Length: If you are writing a "unit plan" for sequential days of instruction, you should plan for ten (10) to fifteen (15) class meetings. If you are developing a collection of separate lessons and/or other teaching tools and resources (I call this "teaching materials"), emulate the 10-15-day guideline. Including your introduction and rationale and your Works Cited section, your teaching materials will probably run fifteen to twenty pages.
   
5. Write an introduction and rationale (about 500 words) for your teaching materials. Explain to your readers the topic and approach you will pursue with these materials. Persuade your readers that your materials are important, valuable, and deserving of the precious class time they will require. Show the sources that informed and inspired these materials. Note that the audience for this section (intro and rationale) should be broader than for the lesson plans themselves; write your intro and rationale for potentially skeptical administrators, parents, colleagues, and students.
   
6. Include a Works Cited to document your sources and to help your readers find your sources and other published teaching tools to which you refer them.
   
7. Assuming some of your teaching materials include lesson plans, every day’s plans should include eight elements:

• Orientation: How does this day’s plans fit in with those lessons preceding and following? (One or two sentences.)
• Learning Goals: What should students learn today? What should they know and be able to do as a result of their experiences?
• Preparation: What do students and teacher need to do to be prepared for the day’s lesson (i.e., homework and preparation)? Be quite specific regarding reading, writing, and other activities.
• Materials: What materials do students and teacher need for the day?
• Activities: What will students and teacher do during the class? Note: every day include an "extra," back-up activity in case another activity flops or goes more quickly than you expected.
• Time: How long should the students and teacher plan to devote to each activity?
• Evaluation: How will the teacher and students know whether they have succeeded in this lesson?
• Accommodations for Special Needs: For actual or imaginary students with special needs, explain how you will accommodate those needs.

Thanks to Professor Ruth Fennick, whose assignment for unit plans provided a basis and inspiration for this assignment.