L1+Flanagan+Andrew

**UNIVERSITY OF MAINE AT FARMINGTON** **COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, HEALTH AND REHABILITATION**  **LESSON PLAN FORMAT** **__Teacher’s Name__: Mr. Flanagan __Date of Lesson__: 1** **__Grade Level__: 11 __Topic__: Current Events** **__Objectives__** Students will understand that they each play a big role in their communities and their thoughts and actions have effects on a much larger scale. Students will know terms such as Bias, Journalism, and Associated Press Students will be able to recognize their role within the political system, and realize how they can effect change. **__Maine Learning Results Alignment__** Maine Learning Results: Social Studies. B: Civic and Government B1: Knowledge, Concepts, Themes, and Patterns of Civics/Government Grade: 9-Diploma Students understand the ideals, purposes, principles, structures, and processes of constitutional government in the United States and in the American political system, as well as examples of other forms of government and political systems in the world. B: Evaluate current issues by applying democratic ideals and constitutional principles of government in the United States including checks and balances, federalism, and consent of the governed as put forth in the founding documents. **Rationale:** This process is a simple way to keep the students aware of the world that surrounds them; it also helps them communicate their feelings about an article using multiple mediums **__Assessment__** **Formative (Assessment for Learning)** **•** At the end of the school week the students will be given a rubric at the end of Fridays class to see where they stand in terms of both comprehension and the format of the blogs. These forms will help me decide if this activity needs to be tweaked in order to fit the learning styles of each individual student. **Summative (Assessment of Learning)** •The student does research on a current event about any topic they personally feel strong with, which also deals with the American political system. Through this process students will create blogs and write about how these certain events have effects on the state of Maine and also on the students on a personal level. Giving the students a forum for writing their opinions and giving others students the chance to provide positive feedback to help develop each students writing skills. Also the students will be able to blog about their personal feelings about the material and the process as a whole so that it can be updated from student feedback for future classes. **__Integration__** **Technology:** This lesson uses YouTube, Different News Sources, as well as a Blogging Webpage. **Student:** In this lesson, students will use credible news sources (such as CNN, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Etc.) to find news stories about topics they find appealing in politics. Students will then take their findings and post a brief summary about what happened within the article, their personal opinion on the topic, and how it will effect Maine and it's citizens. After posting the blogs students will find external materials such as images, videos, podcasts, or other articles to get a better understanding on the topic. As students meet with partners to discuss the material they have researched about the topic, peer-to-peer feedback will be given in the forms of comments on their partner's blogs. **Teacher:** Using the student’s blogs as a way to give each student feedback on their entries, and include some different source information to help with research. This will help the student better understand the expectations as well as give the students a forum to ask me questions and revise their work for a better final grade. **English:** Students will be asked to do research by reading articles and interpret the text for comprehension of the material. The students then will be taking what they have learned and applying it through writing. Practicing these essential skills will help them within english classrooms as well as later on in life. **__Groupings__** The use of seasonal partners will help put the students into pairs for discussions of their current events. This style of grouping will make sure that students experience different perspectives and ideas by switching their partners once a week, and helps the students learn more about other students in the classroom. **__Differentiated Instruction__** **Strategies-** **Verbal:** The class discussion with their peers helps verbal learners express the reading with partners for a deeper understanding of the content. **Logical:** Can provide a story with a lot of statistics, numbers, and graphs to represent their learning style in a more effective manor. **Kinesthetic:** The physical movement to meet with partners, as well as an option to act out the article for those who find the normal discussion ineffective for their learning style. **Visual:** Within the blogs students can include relative videos/images that they found helped them understand the news story more effectively. **Naturalist:** Writing blogs about different environmental crises can get students excited about the blogs. **Intrapersonal:** The personal self-reflection within the blogs is the forte of most of these students, who do a lot of deep thinking when working alone. **Interpersonal:** Working with partners and talking about the articles is generally a more comfortable environment for these learners. **Musical:** Students can compose a song or jingle about the event, or include songs with lyrics that relate to the topic discussed in their blog. **Modifications/Accommodations-** I will review students' IEPs, 504s or ELLIDEPs and make the appropriate modifications and accommodations. **Absences:** When a student can not complete the lesson because of an absence from the class, it is the student's responsibility to meet with me as soon as possible to discuss the materials that they missed. Class notes will also be available on the Class Wiki as well as important links used within class discussions that the student has missed. **Extensions: Type:** II technology within this lesson comes from the interactivity of the student's blogs, also when the students research and dive deeper into the current event and it's effects allow them to gain new perspectives and think in a highly intuitive manner. **__Materials, Resources and Technology__** A Projector Laptop Computer Video Websites (such as YouTube) Image Search Engines (such as Google) iTunes (using the store for free podcasts) News Pages (CNN, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Etc.) Blog Website (Such as Word Press) **__Source for Lesson Plan and Research__** **Video Web pages:** The following websites will help the students find video responses to certain events, as well as footage that relates to the topic of research to expand the student's writing with different forms of multimedia. After researching the topic it will help spatial learners by putting a visual spin to what they have been reading in order to get a deeper understanding of the articles they have found. **http://www.youtube.com** **http://www.video.google.com** **Image Search Engines:** Students can use political cartoons, artistic renditions, or other visual aides to enhance their writing and help a larger audience understand their opinion. Use of these websites can make student's blogs visually appealing and gives students a chance to see other peoples opinions about the article they are discussing within their blogs. **http://www.images.google.com/** **http://www.elzr.com/imagery** **News Web pages:** Here is the content that students will be researching, by using these websites students will have to learn proper citation technique and in the process what makes certain websites "credible sources." These articles will help students get a better sense of what is going on in the world around them, as well as have options to pick the articles they find the most appealing. **[]** **http://www.nytimes.com** **[]** **Blog Websites:** These websites are the "canvas" in which students will "paint" on, providing a place for the students to create pages where they can write and receive instantaneous feedback from their peers and other members of the online community. These web pages allow the students to also customize their layouts to make their blogs more personal and will allow students to create professional looking pages while digging deeper into type II technology. **[]** **http://wordpress.org/** **__Maine Standards for Initial Teacher Certification and Rationale__** **//Standard 3 - Demonstrates a knowledge of the diverse ways in which students learn and develop by providing learning opportunities that support their intellectual, physical, emotional, social, and cultural development.//** **Rationale**: To bring comfort to all learners this activity will be conducted in several different ways. For those who do well in an environment filled with choice and spontaneity, many choices are offered when comes to picking topics to write about as well as having the ability to edit any post at anytime with the use of their blog accounts. For those who need structure with their lesson, a rubric will be handed out to see how their blogs and articles will be graded. There will also be strict due dates for their materials and current events will be continued weekly throughout the semester. For those with a more analytical thought process, the ability to discuss materials with their peers and dig deeper into researching the articles will be presented. Finally those who need comfort and sensitivity from their peers will be accounted for with use of positive feedback in order to enhance writing skills, as well as comfortable group work when getting together to discuss the articles. **//• Standard 4 - Plans instruction based upon knowledge of subject matter, students, curriculum goals, and learning and development theory.//** **Rationale**: This lesson addresses the facet of "having self knowledge", by letting the students pick current events that they find personally appealing and asking them to write about how the event has a personal effect on them. This takes the meaning derived from article and makes it come alive to the student in order to get a deeper understanding of the world around them. **//• Standard 5 - Understands and uses a variety of instructional strategies and appropriate technology to meet students’ needs.//** **Rationale**: Having a multitude of students within my classroom all of which have different educational needs, I have developed this lesson plan to emphasize and engage each of the eight multiple intelligences: **Verbal:** The class discussion with their peers helps verbal learners express the reading with partners for a deeper understanding of the content. **Logical:** Can provide a story with a lot of statistics, numbers, and graphs to represent their learning style in a more effective manor. **Kinesthetic:** The physical movement to meet with partners, as well as an option to act out the article for those who find the normal discussion ineffective for their learning style. **Visual:** Within the blogs students can include relative videos/images that they found helped them understand the news story more effectively. **Naturalist:** Writing blogs about different environmental crises can get students excited about the blogs. **Intrapersonal:** The personal self-reflection within the blogs is the forte of most of these students, who do a lot of deep thinking when working alone. **Interpersonal**: Working with partners and talking about the articles is generally a more comfortable environment for these learners. **Musical:** Students can compose a song or jingle about the event, or include songs with lyrics that relate to the topic discussed in their blog. The use of blogs engages the students by allowing them to express their opinion on the article by using a wide variety of creative mediums (depending on the student's strengths.) Using the blogs also allows the students to engage in a deeper research of the materials and lets them see whats happening in the world. Also these blogs allow students to have conversations about the articles and develop a deeper connection with the thoughts and opinions of their peers. **//• Standard 8 - Understands and uses a variety of formal and informal assessment strategies to evaluate and support the development of the learner.//** **Rationale**: The use of assessment is critical to each lesson plan to get an indication on where each student stands with the material, as well as seeing how much the student has progressed throughout the lesson. **Formative (Assessment for Learning)** • At the end of the school week the students will be given a rubric at the end of Fridays class to see where they stand in terms of both comprehension and the format of the blogs. These forms will help me decide if this activity needs to be tweaked in order to fit the learning styles of each individual student. **Summative (Assessment of Learning)** •The student does research on a current event about any topic they personally feel strong with, which also deals with the American political system. Through this process students will create blogs and write about how these certain events have effects on the state of Maine and also on the students on a personal level. Giving the students a forum for writing their opinions and giving others students the chance to provide positive feedback to help develop each students writing skills. Also the students will be able to blog about their personal feelings about the material and the process as a whole so that it can be updated from student feedback for future classes. **__Teaching and Learning Sequence__:** Students will walk into the classroom and see a U-shaped formation with the desks, this is so that during discussion everyone can see each other when conveying a point and so that I can keep an eye on everyone at the same time. Students will be placed into groups based on their ratings for the hot topic's chart covered in day one. * Video clip about a current issue in the American political system (5 minutes) * Discussion on the feelings the clip brings about, as well as answering any questions that arise (15 minutes) * Introduce and create the "hot topics" brain storming activity on the white board (15 minutes) * Do a quick survey (heads down, hands up) to vote for the top 4 class "hot topics" (5 minutes) * Have the students rate these topics on a scale of importance (5 minutes) * Students will be given a "seasonal partners" sheet and will be placed based on opposite scores (10 minutes) * Blogs will be explained as well as expectations on writing. Assign first attempt current event for homework, and allow time for questions. (25 minutes) * **(Day Two)** Students are placed with their partners to discuss their article; blogs will be explained and set up during class. (80 minutes) Current events entries (blogs) are a great way to learn about the world around all of us. For students to be learning about what is happening in the world of politics as soon as it happens, it makes some of the material come alive for some students and helps them feel relevance in what they are doing. Also by doing blog entries the students learn how to have a dialog with each other through a digital medium with the ability to hyperlink and embed materials from other sources to enhance your product and allow for a deeper understanding of the content. Students with this first lesson will be able to get a good chance to perform an activity to start out this lesson. Having students up, moving, and doing the logistics during the first lesson will hook students into getting more interactive with the material right from the beginning. This lesson will help the students understand the sense of community within the classroom and be more inclined to be outgoing towards the other students in the class. **Where, Why, What, Hook, Tailors: Verbal, Visual, Logical, Kinesthetic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal** Students will begin the process of learning some important vocabulary that will play a key-role in the rest of the semester, such as lobbyist, special interest group, and congress. The definitions will be explained to the students with an iMovie and a song so that both visual and musical learners can be engaged within this lesson plan. These key terms will show students these terms once defined during class will help the students understand some of what is happening in the political world. **Equip, Tailors: Verbal, Visual, Musicial** **Day One:** The process begins when the students enter the classroom on the first day, a projector will display a video about a current hot topic within our political system. After the video is completed there will be a brief discussion about the video to gain student perspective on the topic. After this discussion there will be a brain storming activity letting the students to begin to start thinking about the current hot topics in politics. Once the topics are on the board the students will be asked to pick 4 of these topics by a show of hands and then rate them on a scale of importance from 1-4 (1 being not important, 2 being somewhat important, 3 being important, and 4 being the most important.) Based on these scores students will then be placed into seasonal partners with students that have similar points of view. The next step is talking about how the students will interpret, write, and discuss this material with the use of blogs. Students will then be assigned homework to go out and try to find a current event that interests them. **Day Two:** The next day of this lesson is the classroom set up of the blogs students learned about the day before. Talk about the comment/feedback system for peer-to-peer discussion, and even how to customize the blogs for more visual appearance. We will also continue to discuss different topics as we have a class discussion of some of the articles the students found to share with the class. Some resources for the blogs will also be talked about during this time, to help the students in their search for great content to discuss. Also during this class we will talk about some strategies on how to be creative with the blog by using type II technology such as creating videos, making pod casts, making comic books. **Explore, Experience, Revise, Rethink, Refine, Tailors: Verbal, Visual, Logical, Musical, Kinesthetic, Naturalistic, Intrapersonal, interpersonal** The process of assessment will also be discussed during this block as rubrics are passed out on how the students will receive a grade based on these expectations. Also as previously discussed students will receive feedback from their peers by the use of the blog service's comment system, this allows each to go back and change any mechanical issues and gain more perspectives then just their own in this process. At the end of the block students will also be asked to self assess how they are doing with the material and how well they feel the process has been constructed. **Revise, Refine, Tailors: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal** **Content Notes-** **U.S. plan to buy toxic assets near** **Treasury chief Tim Geithner is poised to announce details of next step in rescuing banks: Public-private partnerships.** By CNNMoney.com staff Last Updated: March 22, 2009: 12:55 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The Obama administration on Monday will unveil a program to help banks clean up their books by purchasing their bad assets. The effort marks the next big step in Washington's six-month-old bank rescue, which has so far mostly entailed making capital investments in exchange for stock shares and insuring bank obligations. Investors have been waiting expectantly for details since last month when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced the framework of a plan to address two of the biggest problems in the banking sector: the toxic assets keeping banks from lending and the shortage of capital at major institutions. At the time, Geithner pledged to raise as much as $500 billion from public and private sources to relieve banks of toxic assets. But he didn't explain how the program would bring together buyers and sellers who have been locked in a stalemate for 18 months. Under the plan being considered, taxpayer funds will be used to effectively seed partnerships with private firms to buy up assets backed by mortgages and other loans. A Treasury spokesman declined to comment. Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser, said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that the plan would be announced Monday. The effort will involve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Treasury Department or Federal Reserve, two senior administration officials told CNN. The FDIC will set up investment partnerships and lend those partnerships about 85% of the money needed to buy toxic assets. Treasury will hire several investment firms to raise private funds, and also work with the Federal Reserve to expand lending. "We do know that banks have these so-called toxic assets on their balance sheets," Christina Romer, chairwoman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union." "They are making banks unwilling to lend, they're making private investors unwilling to come into banks," Romer said. "We need to get those off the banks' balance sheets." Getting private sector involved So-called public-private partnerships could accomplish two critical goals: luring private capital into the process of rescuing troubled institutions, and using market forces to set prices for hard-to-value assets. But some critics say public-private partnerships won't do the trick -- that the administration must take more aggressive action such as seizing control of banks. Another criticism of public-private partnerships: The government loans would pose too much risk to taxpayers. "[I]f you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won't work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote Saturday on his blog. The main concern: The government would be providing low-cost financing to buy the assets. And if the assets go bad, the government would be shouldering much of the loss. Because the money is cheap and downside risk is limited, private investors may be willing to pay too much for the toxic assets, increasing risk to taxpayers. Goolsbee, the Obama adviser, defended the administration's efforts Sunday. "One of the reasons you want to have a partnership is precisely so that the government doesn't massively overpay for these troubled assets ... and so that everybody's got skin in the game," Goolsbee said on "Face the Nation." In the end, the aim is to unfreeze the credit markets, which have been weighed down by consumer and investor fears about future losses at the nation's banks. The financial crisis, considered the worst since the Great Depression, was sparked by a rapid decline of housing prices leading to high levels of mortgage defaults. Banks and other institutions that bet on those mortgages, often in the form of complex securities that packaged up slices of loans, have suffered huge losses in recent quarters. Last fall, Congress and the Bush administration came together to pass an unprecedented $700 billion bailout plan, which has among other things pumped nearly $200 billion into hundreds of banks big and small. President Obama and Geithner have been working for months, even before Obama took office in January, to fashion a comprehensive strategy for rescuing the banks. Geithner's plans have been weighed down in recent days by congressional and public backlash against retention bonuses paid to employees of American International Group, a troubled insurer now majority owned by the government that has become a magnet for criticism. -CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry contributed to this report. First Published: March 21, 2009: 12:24 PM ET **Handouts** **[] (**is a very good tutorial on creating blog accounts**)** **For Rubric (**see attachment on lesson presentation site**)** **For Time-Order Graphic Organizer (** see attachment on lesson presentation site**)** **Reflection:**