For the Micro Teaching assignment, we (Susan and I ) are going to teach a lesson that will help students understand how Children’s Literature can be utilized to teach concepts in Educational Psychology to pre-service teachers.
I found an article in a journal called Teaching Educational Psychology, titled ‘Once upon a theory: Using picture books to help students understand educational psychology’ by Debby Zambo and Cory Cooper Hansen (Click to read: using_picture_books). In our lesson, we use this article as our starting point to give students an overall idea of our learning objectives. This article elaborates on ways an instructor might use picture books to explain theories and concepts in Educational Psychology. According Zambo and Hansen (2005), pictures books may be used in Educational Psychology courses to accomplish the following objectives:
1. To introduce theory
2. To build background knowledge
3. To make theory more understandable
4. To create images of concepts
5. To help students make connections between theory and their work with children
During our first meeting, I told Susan about some of the Educational Psychology concepts that I felt could be explained with stories within the Children’s Literature genre. I had the following concepts in mind – self-efficacy, self-concept, individual differences, culture and diversity. I explained these concepts to Susan and for our second meeting she brought some picture books that she felt could be useful to us. I read these books and found that we could definitely weave in psychological concepts into two of these picture books – The Dark and The Rainbow Fish (Click here to listen to the audio version of the books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt2cFIg65Gk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6S4IPMs5ZY).
‘The Rainbow Fish’ by is a story about a fish that had beautiful, multi-colored scales and was very happy with its physical appearance. The other fish in the water wanted to have scales like the Rainbow fish. One day, a small fish asks the Rainbow fish to give him one of its pretty scales. The Rainbow fish does not want to part with its scales and turns the little fish away. Soon, the rest of the fish are annoyed with the Rainbow fish for being unwilling to share its scales and they stay away from it. The Rainbow Fish feels upset and lonely. He goes to the wise Octopus for advice. The Octopus tells him that he should not be so selfish and share his scales with the other fish. The Rainbow fish then finds the little fish he had turned away earlier and gives him one of his scales. Very quickly other fish come to him to ask for a scale each. At the end of the story, the Rainbow fish has one of his beautiful scales but is still happy as he is well-loved by the other fish.
At first glance, The Rainbow Fish seems to be a story underlining the value of sharing with others and being part of a harmonious community. However, the story could also be interpreted in another way. The Rainbow fish loses its individuality by conforming to social expectations in order to be accepted by the other fish. We use this interpretation and link it to a concept that pre-service teachers learn about in introductory Educational Psychology courses – ‘Self-concept’. We use the story to demonstrate how our views of the Self are influenced by social expectations and reactions of other people. Most importantly, we highlight the link between self-concept and self-esteem. The message that we want our students to take away from this is that – as educators it is important to make students learn how to feel satisfied with their own qualities and not try to change in order to please others. Finally, we also hope that the students will be able to appreciate diversity among students in their classrooms and refrain from imposing a one size fits all approach in their classrooms.
‘The Dark’ by Lemony Snicket is a story about a little boy named Laszlo who is afraid of the dark. During the day, the Dark lives in the basement and at night the Dark spreads itself all over Laszlo’s house. Every morning, Laszlo visits the Dark in the basement, hoping that if he pays the Dark a visit, the dark won’t visit him at night. But, one day, the Dark comes to his room at night. It asks Laszlo to follow it as there is something that it wants to show Laszlo. Of course, Laszlo is scared and quite uncomfortable when he learns that the Dark want him to go into the basement. The Dark leads him to a chest of drawers that nobody ever opened. On opening it, Laszlo finds electric bulbs in the drawer. Laszlo thanks the Dark for its help and from that day onward he is no longer afraid of the Dark.
We use ‘The Dark’ to demonstrate a psychological concept called ‘self-efficacy’. Self-efficacy is the belief that a person has about his/her ability to complete a task successfully. In short, it is the belief that one can do something. One of the ways in which self-efficacy regarding a task develops is through mastery experience or the actual experience in successfully accomplishing a task. The story is good illustration of how the little boy overcomes his fear of the dark by gaining mastery over the situation through a direct experience of going into the dark with positive outcomes and eventually developing self-efficacy for venturing into the dark in future.
We created two videos to narrate the stories we were using for explaining the psychological concepts. I made a video narrating ‘The Dark’ and Susan made a video narrating ‘The Rainbow Fish’. Our goal is to show the video and follow it up with questions aimed at formative assessment. Here is how we will proceed –
1. Show ‘Rainbow Fish’ video
2. Ask the following questions (individual responses): a) What are the underlying themes of the story? b) What are your thoughts on how the story ended?
3. Explain ‘self-concept’ (use responses given by students in our explanation).
4. Divide the class into 3 groups to examine the following questions: a) As a teacher, how do you ensure that your students value their own qualities? b) How do you react to individual differences among students in your class? c) Has a student in your class who is different from others in some way ever made you uncomfortable? What did you do in response to your feelings?
5. Show ‘The Dark’ video
6. Ask the following questions (individual responses): a) What was the main theme of the story? b) What was the role of the character Dark?
7. Explain ‘self-efficacy’ (use responses given by students in our explanation).
8. Ask the following questions: a) Think of a task which you initially felt was beyond your capacity to accomplish successfully but with time mastered it. b) What do you think led you to change your beliefs about your ability to do the task?
9. Explain the sources of self-efficacy.
10. Ask the following question: What influenced Laszlo to overcome his fear of the dark?
Finally, we will end the lesson with the following activity aimed at summative assessment:
11. Discussion questions: a) Can you think of using content from a different discipline to aid your teaching? b) How would you do it? c) What are the pros/cons of integrating different disciplines in teaching?
Here is a draft of the PowerPoint presentation (made by me) which we will use for our lesson on Thursday: Microteaching 2. The videos Susan and I made will be inserted into the presentation on Tuesday. We plan on doing a trial run of the entire presentation on Tuesday. After our Tuesday meeting, we will decide on whether we want students to watch the video before class or show it in class.
Final PowerPoint presentation: Microteaching 2