Microteaching Assignment

from Kylene Beers's When Kids Can't Read What Teachers Can Do About It

20% of course grade

Goals

The purposes of this assignment are to give you an opportunity to

• become familiar and to actually experience several effective activities for teaching reading comprehension, as explained in Kylene Beers's book
• practice adapting these activities to your own choice of literature (to show that you can apply and transfer this knowledge)
• practice teaching, using one specific activity
• get some good ideas for your Lesson Sequence assignment

Assignment

Working in pairs, you have been assigned a specific activity to teach to our class. Your task is to demonstrate that activity by actually doing it with us, as if we were your students (college students, not middle- or high-school students).

Although your activity will be explained in Beers's book, you should read the whole chapter where your activity is explained to get a good sense of how this activity works and how it might relate to the activity that will be demonstrated right before yours. Instead of using the example literature in the book, you need to choose another piece. Make sure that your choice is age-appropriate for us, your "students" for this demo.

Your stage-time is limited to 20 minutes, although some activities may take only 5 minutes or less to do. Begin your teaching demo by jumping right in; don't give us extensive commentary or rationale for why this activity is effective. In closing, discuss circumstances (texts, grade level, genres), variations, and drawbacks of this activity.

Then you can entertain questions from the floor (not included in your stage time).

Each of you in the pair should contribute equally in preparing and executing the activity. Each should have an equal speaking part. And both of you must meet me in conference before doing your activity no later than 24 hours before you teach. Come prepared to show me your materials and walk me through your plan for executing the activity. Attending this conference and being prepared for it are included in this grade.

Rubric

1. You came prepared for your pre-conference with me, ready with materials and questions; you were ready when your assigned day came up; your teaching time did not exceed 20 minutes; you were well-prepared and well-rehearsed for your microteaching;

2. You found especially good, appropriate example literature for doing with the class, even doing some research, if necessary, and giving much thought, in order to come up with just the right piece to use for demonstration.  

3. You actually did an activity with us, allowing us to experience this activity as students—or at least did as much as was possible within the time limit, giving us a good taste of how the activity might play out; in short, you taught us well: we really understand how to do this activity.

4. You thoroughly understood the activity yourself, including the theoretical underpinnings, as evidenced  in these ways: you were able to field all our questions, to critique the application of the activity in a real classroom situation, to come up with variations you thought might work better or at least as well with less prep, and to offer other recommendations for implementation.