Karrah Smith SCOPE

1e: Designing Coherent Instruction

As an education candidate, I understand the importance of designing Coherent instruction within lessons. Within my Cinquain Poem unit plan, I constructed a lesson which aligned with instructional goals and engaged students in high-level cognitive activity. I developed a Venn Diagram lesson where students compared and contrasted Haiku and Cinquain poems. This activity followed a coherent sequence with the lesson on Haiku poems that my cooperating teacher had taught the week before. We co-planned to make sure that students would be able to review some of the poems they have already learned which made sure they could visibly see the differences and similarities. In order to appropriately differentiate for individual learners I displayed the Venn Diagram on the board and had students discuss with partners and as a class, and then copy down what we agreed on writing in the bubbles. Once the Venn Diagrams were complete, I instructed students to write a sentence which described one difference between the poems and one sentence describing their similarities. As excelling students began to finish here, I was able to vary the instructional groups appropriately to ensure that all students were still learning. To do this, I instructed early finishers to write two more sentences describing the differences and similarities while I assisted students struggling with writing the first set of these sentences. This follows along with the Spiral Curriculum Theory established by Jerome Bruner. This research-based theory states that students are able to tackle challenging topics in age-appropriate ways. After viewing the Post-test results on the last day of my unit, my cooperating teacher and I were able to see that students were struggling with the difference between antonyms and synonyms. To work together on this, we gave students the opportunity to choose if they would rather play a Kahoot or a Blooket to practice these vocabulary terms. Based on the Data provided, we can see that playing this review game helped clear up misconceptions about what the words mean.
