A Reality Check for Lesson Planning
By Lindy L. Johnson & Grace MyHyun Kim
Lindy Johnson is an assistant professor at William and Mary. Grace MyHyun Kim is an assistant professor at UTexas in Austin. They are our guest writers this week, sharing their experience in having their preservice teachers play a game called Reality Check.
Designing lesson plans. Learning to design lesson plans is a central goal of preservice teacher education programs. In English methods courses, undergraduate and graduate students are generally new to teaching and lesson planning. Through their coursework and field placements, preservice teachers (PSTs) often develop lesson plans and try these lessons out in their field placements.
Reality Check. Reality Check, is a card game designed by the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning and MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab. The game is designed as a low stakes “practice space” that enables novice teachers to learn key skills in teaching. Its objective is to help preservice teachers critically evaluate lesson plans in order to design them to be adaptable and adjustable based on a series of challenges that classroom teachers often face. For example, a game card of Reality Check presents the challenge of a sudden fire alarm that shortens the class period. Prior to playing the game, players sketch a lesson plan as a storyboard. During the game, players must adjust the story based on whatever setbacks they draw.
How to play the game. All players should create lesson plans before the game begins. The lesson plans are created as “storyboards”, with different frames that depict aspects of the lesson such as “give a short introduction to the activity” (frame 1), “split into groups and start building” (frame 2). We printed out a few copies of the set of Reality Check game cards so that peers could respond to the lesson plan using the cards.
Our experience with Reality Check. We began Reality Check in our respective courses by first introducing students to the concept of storyboarding. Many students were already familiar with storyboarding and indicated that they appreciated the opportunity to think through their lessons in visual terms.
After spending some time creating their storyboards, students then moved into small groups to begin game play. During the game, students rotated through the role of a “Revision Responder,” which asked them to consider reality checks such as “The planned discussion prompts fall flat and generate only 1-word answers” and “A student asks ‘but why do we even need to learn that?’ when you introduce the learning objective.”
Our students found the various prompts to be helpful in thinking through unanticipated responses from students. The scenarios on the cards asked students to practice being flexible with their plans. One of our preservice teachers said, “I never would have thought through these scenarios on my own.” Other students recognized the scenarios because they had actually occurred in their field placements. The cards also gave the PSTs ideas for specific and meaningful feedback.
Our PSTs told us that playing Reality Check helped them think through scenarios that they wouldn’t have thought of on their own and gave them new ideas to revise their lesson plans. Perhaps most importantly, the game provided a fun, low-stakes space to share and support one another in further refining lesson plans prior to implementing them with students.
After playing Reality Check, students revised their lessons based on the possible revisions suggested by their peers during the game. Some students also expressed an interest in adding games into their teaching as the experience of playing Reality Check reminded them of the importance of enjoyment and creativity in classroom curriculum.
One change we would make in the future is to try and make sure that students are far enough along in their unit/lesson planning before playing. A detailed storyboard helps players participate in the game. Each student can take a turn as the storyboard to be “played” during the game. We both plan to use Reality Check again the next time we teach methods courses.
