Marzano Lesson Plan
For my pre-seminar lesson from Marzano’s Classroom Instruction that Works, I decided to do a lesson on using collaborative learning all outlined in chapter 8. I decided to use this chapter for two reasons. First, although I employ cooperative learning often, I’ve gotten kind of lazy at judging its effectiveness. I’ll fully admit it at this point of my career I take a lot of my lessons and techniques for granted. This was a perfect opportunity to critically look at a method I employ often. Secondly, I needed to cover a lot of material quickly n my A.P U.S History class all the AP exam was looming only a few weeks away.
I separated my AP class into 5 groups where they would read about, study, and report back to other groups about their findings.
The groups were:
1. women and the feminist movement
2. Latinos
3. Asian-Americans and Native Americans
4. The counterculture of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and
5. The environmental movement and consumer protection.
I personally picked the groups myself. Though I didn’t spend much thought forming the groups, I did try to separate my better readers and more driven students into different groups. I usually try to do that hoping they will bring students up in terms of reading and even attitude towards the content. I was glad to read that Marzano’s research contains the idea that students of low ability perform worse when they are placed in homogeneous groups with students of low ability. This confirmed my suspicion on the importance of heterogeneous groups. I asked each group to answer the basic questions who, what, where, when, and why while conducting their readings. For example, I had them answer questions like:
-who lead the feminist movement?
-what was the American Indian movement?
-where was the countercultural concentrated?
-why did Latinos employ the tactics that they did?
-where did the feminist movement take place?
Once all the groups met together and decided which information was important to share and what to leave out, they quickly formed an ad-hoc jigsaw group in which they presented their information. Although I always get worried about lower-ability students presenting vital information on their own, they have their groups’ script they can use, and they usually do a good job, as was the case with this lesson. Almost no information was left out and everyone felt like somewhat of an expert on their particular topic in their ad-hoc groups. Overall, the lesson was a tremendous success. In my opinion these groups had most of the defining elements of cooperative learning (pg. 85). They encouraged positive interdependence, they promoted face-to-face interactions, there was both individual and group accountability, and there was interpersonal and small group skills used (although this could have been developed somewhat). I have to admit there was little time for group processing because of our time constraints and I didn’t really find it necessary.
Brett Boberg, Bingham High School