Unit Overview
I created this lesson plan with the assistance of a colleague, Olivia Williams, as a project for a Technology for Teaching and Learning class. The objective of the project was to demonstrate our abilities to purposefully integrate technology into our lesson plans to add value to our instruction, class assessments, and students’ learning. Knowing that Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give is a rich resource for teaching students about the conscious consumption of media images (as media creates and perpetuates stereotypes and biases) and activist art (as the work deconstructs these stereotypes), Olivia and I used the TPACK model to ideate how we could integrate a technology-infused, media literacy lesson into our unit on the novel. We decided to use technology tools that would allow us to:
- Bring diverse perspectives on one topic into the classroom to challenge the idea of naïve realism (and therefore, combat stereotypes and culturally-constructed “truths”).
- Allow teachers to assess students’ progress in considering a set of key terms and their definitions from multiple lenses and within multiple mediums.
- Ensure students were not just consuming media images but creating, analyzing, critiquing, and revising their own pieces of mass communications to learn about media literacy concepts.
Activities & Assessments for Mastery Learning
We organized the unit’s learning activities in a continuum to promote skills mastery, labeling each as an original instruction activity, a feedback instrument, or an assessment. Between the feedback instrument activities and the assessment activities, we built vertical and horizontal enrichment activities and correctives into the learning plan. Using the data we collected through the feedback instrument activities, we planned to individualize students’ instruction so that they were either gaining more practice with a concept or expanding their concept knowledge. Through this continuum, we ensured each student had access to the appropriate supports needed to master the skills the summative assessment evaluates.
Discipline-Specific Knowledge
Within this unit, students learn how identify the main point of informational texts, analyze literature from a critical race theory lens, use symbols to represent their ideas, and understand the definition of key terms, such as equity, deficit theory, white supremacy, etc.
