practicum lesson

Last Tuesday I taught my lesson for my practicum at Parkview. For the most part, I was really pleased with how it went.
The students had just finished the book Animal Farm, and the teacher Mrs. Weber wanted me to focus on power and whether power corrupts and that sort of thing. I wanted to make the book relevant to them and their own lives, so I started out talking about a subject that I hoped would interest most of them: superheroes. I brought up Spiderman and the famous line "with great power comes great responsibility" in order to introduce what power means and how to use it responsibly. I then had them think about people from their own lives and who had used power responsibly and who had not. I then moved onto a discussion of the characters in Animal Farm and who had the power and how they abused the power and whatnot. Then I had them get into groups (this was relatively easy, because they already had pre-existing groups from their litcircle projects) and consider a scenario: they were suddenly put in charge of the school. What commandments (a la the animals' commandments in the book) would they come up with?

I particularly enjoyed this part of the lesson. The kids seemed pretty engaged in the activity, and I had some interesting responses. Some took it really seriously and came up with some excellent rules. Others took it less seriously and came up with such rules as "clothing optional" and "look good." Dr. Franklin pointed out that many of them were corrupt with their power and how that was my whole point. She suggested that I should have brought this to the students' attention or had them come up with that on their own by having them compare the commandments. I thought that was a great idea and I wish I had done something like that, but by that point I was starting to feel as though things were getting kinda rowdy and I was eager to wrap things up. I also felt a bit awkard in my transitioning through the different steps of the lesson, and my brief lecture on Animal Farm could have been better prepared. But overall, I had a good experience and I think the students did as well.