Lesson Plan on What Does a Student Teacher Do: Part One

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices. This is one of many lessons we will be sharing on teaching Judaic content, lesson planning, models of teaching, differentiated and individualized instruction and learning activities designed to transform the classroom into a Jewish community of cooperative learners. The title of this lesson is “What Does a Student Teacher Do??” Since there are 13 elements in each lesson plan we will divide this lesson plan into two parts. Here is the first part of this lesson on the roles and responsibilities of the student teacher.

Title of Lesson: What does a Student Teacher do?

Enduring Jewish Knowledge Rationale for the Lesson: A teacher is one who engages students in the study of Torah. From our perspective, a student teacher is a pre-service teaching candidate (i.e. a 12^th grader, Hillel participant, or undergraduate Jewish Studies major) who is learning the art and science of actively engaging students in the study of Torah through (a) observation and discussion with a mentor teacher, (b) small-group instruction, and (c) teaching mini-lessons to the entire class of the mentor teacher. Refer to lesson number one for a supplemental rationale for this lesson.

Essential Question/s: What does a student teacher do?

Assessment/s: (Initial, ongoing, and final activities designed to measure what the student has learned)

Students individually, in pairs, via classroom discussion and as a homework assignment discuss the answers to this essential question. What does a student teacher do?

Objective/Learning Outcome: (What the student is supposed to learn from this lesson) The student will be able to define in his or her own words the answer to this question: What does a student teacher do?

Name of the Active Learning Procedure: Simple Jigsaw

Note: You can use the Round Robin cooperative procedure or the Simple Jigsaw (Aronson et al, 1978) cooperative procedure that is described in the closure segment of this lesson.

Anticipatory Set: (Motivation activity that prepares students for the learning outcome)

Suggested Motivational Statement:

“For today’s lesson we are going to do something different. You will be a member of a team of four detectives. Each of you will have a different clue, and your objective is to put the clues together and determine the answer to the mystery question. Here’s the mystery question. Who is this person?”

Introductory Activity: (Initial exercise to focus on the objective/learning outcome)

1. Place students into cooperative groups of four, also termed a quad. There are many ways of forming cooperative groups including:

· Teacher selected groups: teacher determines the group membership.

· Student selected groups: students determine the group membership.

· Random formed groups: group membership is determined arbitrarily; for example, students line up according to their birth date with students born in January at the front of the line, and students born in December at the line’s end. The teacher then forms the groups according to student birth dates.

· Fake random formed groups: group membership appears to be determined randomly; for example, students line up according to their birthday from January 1^st through December 31^st. However, knowing that certain students do not work well together, the teacher selects students from different months for group formation.

Note: If you do not have four students to make up a cooperative group, one group may contain three or five members. In addition, you might want to pre-select students to serve as floaters. These are capable students who work well in cooperative groups and can take the place of a student who is absent.

On the next post we will begin the second part of a lesson entitled, What Does a Student Teacher Do?”