Critical Thinking Lesson Plan Sample

Lesson Plan

Critical Thinking Lesson Plan

DESIGNER’S NAMES:Sajan Kumar Karn  (Nepal)Uzma Arshed (Pakistan) Type of course the Lesson is planned for (i.e. low-intermediate reading course for 16-year-old high school students): Low-Intermediate
Title of Lesson: My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold (A Poem by William Wordsworth) Length of lesson:45 Minutes
I.  Overarching goal of the lesson: This lesson aims to expose students to the creative use of language and to develop creative writing ability in them.
 
II. Prerequisites.  These are assumptions you are making about your students’ skills, knowledge, and experience for this lesson.  At the beginning of this lesson, students are expected to know or Should have experienced:

  1. What poetry is and its basic elements are
  2. Who Wordsworth was
  3. What a paradox is
  4. Rainbow after rain
  5. Nature and its human’s association with it
  6. Difference between concrete and abstract language within poetry.
  7. Poetry is different from prose
  8. Knowledge about similes and metaphors

 
 
III. Instructional Objectives for the lesson: Please write 2 explicit critical thinking objectives.  Be sure to use the ABCD (Audience-Behavior-Condition-Degree) model. Bloom’s domain and level CT Strategy(No more than 2 per objective)
1.  Given the poem, students will summarize the main ideas, explaining the paradox ‘The child is the father of the man’ and conveying the poet’s intent in a paragraph. Cognitive, Analysis Level  S-21 reading criticallyS-32 making plausible interpretations
2. Given the poem, the students will be able to compose a nature poem in two stanzas. Cognitive, Synthesis(Create) S-12 Developing One’s Perspective: Creating or Exploring Beliefs, Arguments, or Theories 
IV.  Lesson Description—This may include pre-, during, and post-activities, steps, or techniques that the students are doing.  Please cite ideas that you have included from Week 4 or Week 5 readings by indicating the author’s last name next to the activity or approach.  (You do not need to cite the 35 strategies list.)Pre-reading activities:

  1. 1. Set some pre-questions(Duron, Limbach & Waugh, 2006)

Teacher (T) shows the picture of rainbow and asks students (Ss) questions such as ‘What does the picture contain? Have you seen it earlier? Does it make you happy, if yes, why? Have you read any poem by William Wordsworth? What was the theme of the poem? etc.

  1. T asks the Ss to guess the meaning of the title individually.
  2. T helps Ss with difficult words such as piety etc.
  3. T asks the Ss to read about the introduction of the poet given in the book and ask a few questions such as, where was William Wordsworth born? What does he mean by poetry? What was his relation with nature? And so on.
  4. T asks the Ss to think and say what the poem is about and also for their reactions on it.

While-reading activities

  1. T asks the Ss to read the poem and find the words for the meanings such as deep respect, see, jump,
  2. T asks them to find the most unusual sentence in the poem. Tell them that it is a paradox( a controversial statement with some truth)
  3. Divide the students into 3 groups and assign them the task (Jones, 2004) and asks them to work on three tasks- summarizing the poem in one sentence, guessing meaning of the paradox “The child is the father of the man” in the poem and guessing the intent of the poem.
  4. T asks each group to make a sentence using these three pairs of words. (child-past, father-outcome, man-present)
  5. T tries to derive the meaning of the paradox from the students “The present is the outcome of the past and consequently the future will be the outcome of the present”.

Post-reading activities

  1. T divides the students into pairs and asks them to fill in the blanks on their own and share with their mates.
    1. The poem is about………………..
    2. The poem makes us realize that………………….
    3. The poet pays deep respect for…………………….
    4. The poem recollects……………………………………..
    5. According to the poet, nature is the source of ………
    6. T asks the Ss to discuss amongst their group members “A child shows a man as morning shows the day”.
    7. T assigns the Ss homework to compose a poem on nature (Encourage Creativity, Schneider, 2002).
V.  Continued development of critical thinking — No one lesson is going to fully cultivate critical thinking.  Based on the Lesson Plan, describe specific ideas for on-going development of critical thinking, such as student activities or techniques and/or teaching strategies or approaches.  These are broad terms, used in different ways.  They are intentionally general to encourage you to think creatively about further development of critical thinking.Through this lesson we would like to develop in our students

  1. The ability of guessing(reasoning)
  2. Questioning and respecting others’ views
  3. Discussing among group members and reaching a logical conclusions
  4. Encouraging students to compose a poem(creating)

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