Objective First Student's Book With Answers Free Download
Donalvon Stilwell
Create a lesson plan for the first day or week of class that lists your goals and objectives, the steps or activities that you will undertake to accomplish those objectives, and the amount of time you will spend on each activity.
To assist you, we present a sample lesson plan for the first day of a course section and walk you through the activities that a GSI can use to accomplish the stated objectives. This sample plan suggests far more activities than anyone could complete in a single session, especially if your class period is 50 minutes, so select according to your primary objectives for the first day.
As students enter the room, you can hand out the survey form or index cards. Once students are settled, introduce the section (time, day, and number) and yourself. Tell the students your name, department, office hours, and email address. Consider telling the students some personal information about yourself, such as why you came to Berkeley, your academic interests, your hometown, undergraduate college, etc. By sharing information, GSIs demonstrate that they are personable and approachable. In deciding which information to share, however, keep in mind that you must maintain a professional boundary between yourself and your students.
Have class members go around the circle and state at minimum their name, major, and year. Take attendance as the students say their names, and be sure to write on your attendance sheet any variant names students want to be called that do not appear on the roster. Write challenging names phonetically to help you pronounce them correctly. Consider having the students say their names each time they speak for the first couple of weeks. You may also consider having the students write their names on folded pieces of thick paper (tent cards) that can be displayed on their desks for the first couple of weeks.
If you have discussed enrollment policies and procedures with the Instructor of Record before the first day of class, you will be able to deliver accurate and consistent information to your students on the first day. Do your best to gather current information and alleviate student concerns.
Announce the enrollment policies about adding and dropping the class, switching sections, students on the waitlist, etc. Will you drop students from the roster who miss a class during the first three weeks? When will you enroll people from the waitlist?
If you are distributing a section syllabus or information sheet, make sure each student has a copy. You may also want to post it to the bCourses site for your section of the class. It is important to thoroughly discuss the elements of this document with your students. A few pointers to consider when presenting the syllabus or information sheet:
Consider developing with the students a set of community agreements for class discussion. (You might take this up the second week when the roster has more or less stabilized.) We recommend a class activity to establish community agreements because it
If you decide not to conduct an activity to establish community agreements, we suggest that you discuss the statements you have written on your syllabus or information sheet about respectful discussions.
It is important to get the students talking to each other and participating in class the first day or week. Many GSIs accomplish these goals by conducting an icebreaker activity. Whatever the format, you want to invite all voices to speak while keeping the level of self-disclosure appropriate and comfortable. Sample icebreakers include:
Students (and GSIs) often come to the first day of section with their heads still on vacation. An effective way to ease people back into school (and keep them talking to each other) is to have them do a group activity dealing with class material. Here are some examples of activities for various types of courses:
The activities should not be pitched too high. The objective of the exercise is not to test students or point out gaps in knowledge but rather to introduce students to the course material and have them work through a problem together with peers.
Make sure students have clear information about any assignments they should start working on and what resources are available for it. As much as possible, link the assignment(s) to the learning objectives or major concepts of the course.
The first day of class always creates some nervousness, even for seasoned instructors. It helps to have a mental checklist of objectives to accomplish so that you and your students come away with the impression that the course is off to a good start.
First impressions can be long-lasting, and they are usually based on a thin slice of behavior. Before you even start teaching, your students will have already made some decisions about you, so it is important to understand what those impressions are based on and how to manage them.
This is probably the most important objective. Cleary laying out expectations starts to orient students toward the kind of effort, learning, performance and classroom behaviors you expect from them, and it helps them use their time productively. It will also help those students who are shopping around in deciding whether to take your course or not.
Inexperienced instructors sometimes make the mistake of lecturing at the students for a few weeks, then try to have a discussion when the first big unit of the course is finished, only to be surprised at the lack of student participation. This is because students have already been socialized to just listen in the course.
Some instructors simply hand out the syllabus and dismiss class figuring that the enrollment has not yet stabilized and it does not make sense to cover material. While there is truth to that argument, the first day of class is a great chance to stimulate interest about the course and to activate relevant prior knowledge students have about the material. Here are some suggestions for activities that orient students to the content:
Mrs. Shell has been teaching eighth grade math for twelve years. She has deep content area knowledge and wants to provide all of her students with authentic activities and tasks to relate the significance of the mathematical concepts that she teaches to their lives. Mrs. Shell has always felt successful at teaching her classes but this year has been different. Her sections include students with more diverse backgrounds than previous years, particularly more English learners.
Generally speaking, academic English is the language of schooling and the language that helps students acquire and use the content area knowledge taught in schools (Anstrom, DiCerbo, Butler, Katz, Millet, & Rivera, 2010).
In my work supporting general education and ESL/bilingual teachers who provide sheltered instruction for English learners (ELs), I have met many teachers like Mrs. Shell. While these teachers want to provide effective instruction for their ELs, often they don't see themselves as language teachers and so they aren't sure where to begin with their students.
These teachers aren't alone, however, and they are facing a challenge shared by teachers across the country. We know that for school-age students, academic language is crucial for school success (Francis, Rivera, Lesaux, Kieffer, & Rivera, 2006). In addition, research allows us to state with a fair degree of confidence that English learners best acquire English when language forms are explicitly taught and when they have many opportunities to use the language in meaningful contexts (Goldenberg, 2008).
Yet while the explicit instructional support that ESL and bilingual teachers provide is essential to English learners' academic language development, English learners receive a majority of their instruction from general education and content area teachers who may not have experience teaching academic language development.
The question becomes then: What do general education classroom teachers need to do in order to support the academic English development of language learners in both face-to-face and virtual environments, especially when English learners are one of many types of students they serve?
One principle that teachers of English learners can begin to apply immediately is creating and posting language objectives for their lessons (whether in the classroom or online in a virtual space. Many teachers are familiar with using content objectives to identify what students will learn and be able to do in the lesson. However, they are less likely to include language objectives that support the linguistic development of their students.
Implementing language objectives can be a powerful first step in ensuring that English learners have equal access to the curriculum even though they may not be fully proficient in the language. This is because the second language acquisition process requires opportunities for the language learner to be exposed to, practice with, and then be assessed on their language skills (Echevarria, Short, & Vogt, 2008).
Language objectives are lesson objectives that specifically outline the type of language that students will need to learn and use in order to accomplish the goals of the lesson. Quality language objectives complement the content knowledge and skills identified in content area standards and address the aspects of academic language that will be developed or reinforced during the teaching of grade-level content concepts (Echevarria & Short, 2010).
Below are examples of language objectives for different content areas and grade levels. They come from the Common Core State Standards for Math and English Language Arts (2012) and state standards in New York and California.
Language objectives are directly correlated to content objectives. Once a teacher determines the lesson topic from the appropriate content standards, the teacher will want to begin thinking about the academic language necessary for English learners to complete the tasks that support the content objectives. This identification of the academic language embedded in the lesson's content will become the basis for the lesson's language objectives.
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