Direct Instruction Lesson Reflection

This blog is a couple weeks late as to the actual date when we performed our lesson, but I'm going to talk as if it had just happened today, because luckily I remember it just like it was yesterday!!

          Today was our first lesson, we taught the students about what makes up a good commercial using direct lesson instruction plan. We started off the lesson by having the students watch a thirty second commercial from the movie Monster's Inc. We asked students to watch the clip and then, using the commercial for help, we wanted them to tell us what THEY think makes up a good commercial. We were looking for students to say things such as: there's a narrator, they're are pop up actions that catch your attention by surprising you, there's music, they reveal the problem of the movie but not the solution, etc. The students were able to provide us with such answers, but they missed most of the terms that we were about to teach them, so it kind of worked out well still. 
          After the students gave us about eight examples we moved on with the lesson and introduced the terms that help define what a good commercial contains.

 We explained each term to the students and provided examples to them. After we did this we told students that they were going to rewatch the commercial they just previously watched. This time we wanted students to watch it with a keener eye because they knew what they'd be looking for. Once the commercial was over, we were able to relate the terms to the commercial and have students prove comprehension when they told us how each term was used in the commercial.
          Next we introduced students to other important terms when it comes to making a movie, terms that their businesses should keep in mind when creating their movies.

We provided the students with examples of each term. It was a struggle for us to think of terms for intellectual property, because our understanding of it was a little confusing. I thought that was interesting because when I was a young, naive, student I thought teachers knew everything and that they didn't really struggle with teaching us because the information was so easy to them, but this helped bring me back to reality. It's difficult teaching some subjects, because although we've learned it all before, we may not have had the best teacher teaching it or we may have not comprehended it as well as we should've. Luckily, Dr. Smirnova even helped us come up with an example for the students to understand it.
          Not going to lie, we kind of went through the terms very quickly because we needed to get onto the next part of our lesson; students creating their OWN movie commercials!! We explained to students that they'd be creating their own commercials today and that they had to include the following in their commercials.

 Students then broke off into their groups and worked on their commercials. We ended the lesson by informing students that in the next class they would be performing their commercials in front of the class! I'm excited to see how their commercials turn out because it seems that majority of students in the class, with an exception to a few, are really enjoying this project so far.