Closure:
What is closure and why is it important? Closure is what you do at the end of a lesson to summarize the lesson that was taught and is also a last chance to check for understanding. As a group, some research that we found on closure stated that it is also a chance for you as an educator to see if additional practice is needed, whether you actually need to re-teach a topic or if it is ok for you to move on to the next lesson. The specific types of closure activities that we spoke about and considered for our lesson were the ideas of journaling or using exit cards. A journal can be used as a piece that stays in the classroom that at the end of each class or period a student has to journal about two or three things that they learned for the day and then the teacher can review those journals each day to make sure that your messages are getting across. The idea of the exit card is to pass out index cards to each student, have them put away all materials from the day and then give them a few questions pertaining to the topic to see how much actually sank in. Once these things have been finished, you as an educator now can see where each student stands in comprehending the subject at hand.
Anticipatory Set:
The research that we used for the idea of the anticipatory set basically stated that it is your introduction and hook into the lesson that you are about to teach. It also is a time that you have the opportunity to link to previous knowledge, the last lesson you taught or whatever information that has already been discussed that helps to understand the lesson that is about to be introduced. An anticipatory set basically gives you the chance to get your students interested in the topic by relating it to something that they already know in an interesting way. An example of an anticipatory set for introducing how to figure out a discount at a clothing store (using percents) may be to say “How many of you have bought something on sale before? Do you remember when we talked about decimals yesterday? Well today, I am going to show you how to figure out how to use decimals to figure out how much money you will save when stores are having sales on merchandise”.
How did we use this research in our lesson plan?
We used prior knowledge that students have about things around them in the world that may be real life examples of decimals, fractions or percents. By asking students to recognize which of those concepts tied to the examples in the anticipatory set it got them thinking about the subject by linking with their previous experiences, just like described above when asking about how many students had bought something on sale before. For closure, we used the idea of the exit card to make sure that they understood the concept that we taught and if they didn’t or wanted more explanation they could also write questions on the card. We discussed and agreed that these examples worked best for our anticipatory sets and closure.
Below are a few of the websites we visited and that we think are good resources for the topics that I just discussed!
http://edc448uri.wikispaces.com/file/view/40_ways_to_leave_a_lesson.pdf
Ian, Job well done !!!!
ReplyDeleteArticulate descriptions of Closure and Anticipatory Set, and appropriate applications to your ongoing Lesson Plan.