Shaping a lesson

Sometimes students sit in class waiting for the bell to ring. And time slows almost to a standstill until students wonder if the clock has stopped working. Teachers tend not to notice this time drag as much because they are busy thinking how to finish the lesson before the bell rings.

While this is bound to happen to all teachers once in a while, you try not to make a practice of it. So, how do you design a lesson that keeps students involved?

My advice is short: "Make students work." One of my professors said it another way. He said "in a good classroom, the students are working harder than the teacher." This does not mean that teachers don't work hard, but it does mean the goal of school is not for teachers to learn how to work hard, and for students to learn how to listen. The goal of school is for students to learn, and learning does not happen without some work.

Now the work does not need to be a drudgery. I think this is the biggest misconception about schoolwork. On the whole, I think students prefer meaningful work to boredom. However, you might need prep them to get them to that point.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is not complicated. There is a universal law for preparing someone to work well. Show them the problem, explain what you would like in the end, and give them the tools/info they need to get started.

So, for this lesson, the problem is that wealth in countries can be very unequal. Too much inequality is a problem. I can show them this by buying candy and splitting it very unevenly among the class. (2 or 3 students get half the candy, the rest get to split what is left.) The majority of the class should be able to name the problems with this! However, we'll discuss this as a class to make sure everybody sees it. We will also watch a video clip from The Great Divide by Globalpost that puts faces to this problem.


Now, what I want two things from them. I want them to tell me why inequality happens. I also want them to identify in which countries inequality is the worst. To do this, I need to introduce them to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Per Capita GDP,  and the Gini Index. I'll need to explain how these tools work, and how to find reliable sources for these statistics online. The CIA World Factbook is great for this. This could even be a homework assignment.

And that's it. If you want to see what these details look like in a lesson plan, check out my Latin America Inequality Lesson Plan page. There are many ways to organize a lesson plan, but this is a template that works well for me.