My hypothesis is assuming whether the Complex Competence Task (from hereon CCT) by Wolfgang Hallet (2012) can cover all essential aspects and reduce the expense of planning a lesson for various learners in a heterogeneity classroom.
At first, I want to analyze and briefly describe the lifeworld aspect I want to cover. Moreover, I will explain my chosen planning instrument, the CCT, and expound its purpose. Additionally, I will pose my hypothesis and finally lead over to the practical part of my paper. The plan mentioned above covers the theoretical part of the term paper. The second part will include the entire practical work of planning my lesson with the instrument and step-by-step explanations for the procedure of this lesson. Furthermore, the whole unit will be described with the main and subgoals, topics and subtopics, activities, and tasks for the students. For a qualitative lesson, I will also include examples of products to emphasize my expectations and give an insight of how the lesson might be. Finally comes the conclusion, therefore the reflective part of my paper, where I briefly sum up what I did in the paper. Further, I try to reflect my hypothesis and the usage of the Complex Competence Task. The final steps will be criticizing the planning instrument in a constructive way and giving examples of improvements for this instrument.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Theoretical Part
Practical Part
Conclusion and reflection of the lesson for various learners
Material
Works Cited
Introduction
Imagine, next week you are a teacher in a school, but you have no idea how to plan a lesson appropriately. Maybe you would search for help on the internet or ask your friends for help. But this does not imply the work of being pedagogically correct and covering all the needs of your students. This is a task that a lot of teachers struggle with every single day. It is a difficult question to answer what instrument or model teachers should use for their lessons or projects. For that reason, scientists around the world try to enable new possibilities of planning lessons. These instruments try to simplify planning a lesson while including all the distinctive demands students require. What I want to find out is if a planning instrument, such as the Complex Competence Task, can cover all essential aspects while planning a lesson. For teachers it can be challenging to include every category required for teaching in the lesson planning without a frame. Therefore, it would be great to have a Scaffold for teachers to facilitate the timeconsuming part of planning a lesson. I expect that the Complex Competence grid by Hallet is covering these important aspects.
My hypothesis is assuming whether the Complex Competence Task (from hereon CCT) by Wolfgang Hallet (2012) can cover all essential aspects and reduce the expense of planning a lesson for various learners in a heterogeneity classroom.
The structure of my term paper goes as follows. At first, I want to analyze and briefly describe the lifeworld aspect I want to cover. Moreover, I will explain my chosen planning instrument, the CCT, and expound its purpose. Additionally, I will pose my hypothesis and finally lead over to the practical part of my paper. The plan mentioned above covers the theoretical part of the term paper. The second part will include the entire practical work of planning my lesson with the instrument and step-by-step explanations for the procedure of this lesson. Furthermore, the whole unit will be described with the main and subgoals, topics and subtopics, activities, and tasks for the students. For a qualitative lesson, I will also include examples of products to emphasize my expectations and give an insight of how the lesson might be. Finally comes the conclusion, therefore the reflective part of my paper, where I briefly sum up what I did in the paper. Further, I try to reflect my hypothesis and the usage of the Complex Competence Task. The final steps will be criticizing the planning instrument in a constructive way and giving examples of improvements for this instrument.
Theoretical Part
In this term paper I want to combine the two aspects Scaffolding and media in my specific lesson. The reason I chose two aspects is a simply one. While brainstorming and planning for my lessons, I had the idea of making a project about racism. I do not only want to cover the fight against systematic racism in the USA, but also in Germany. At my school we had a similar project about racism and could collaborate with all students from our grade. This was a refreshing work, because it was an unlimited task so that the students could weigh their workload, tasks, and products. In my term paper, I try to create a creative and complex task, too. I will analyze and see the advantages as well as disadvantages of a complex project work.
In ,,Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt” written by Alfred Schütz in 1932 (translated in English (1967) as The Phenomenology of the Social World) he mentioned that the lifeworld is just covering the ‘common-sense reality of the social world', which means that the term lifeworld can be seen as a reflection of the daily life activities and surrounding that an individual is enveloped in (Harrington: 341). This definition emphasizes that the lifeworld of a student is as much as important to be taken into consideration as the topics they should learn about in school. The two aspects are inevitable connected to each other.
I chose the lifeworld-oriented aspect media, because in the 21st century we are surrounded by media input every day. Furthermore, a lot of students use their smartphones and other digital devices every day. A new challenge for teachers, parents and adults in general are social media platforms. These inventions make searching for facts or knowledge way easier than only 15 years ago. But it is not clear that young adult or teenagers use these devices only for learning purposes. This is where my media concept in the classroom comes into play. We, as teachers, need to develop too in our job. Furthermore, flexibility is one of the core features that a teacher needs to have to teach spontaneously. Moreover, teachers need to be near to the student's reality, or in other words, understand and include the student's lifeworld into the classroom. If teachers are still only teaching with books in recent years, it is maybe not as lifeworld oriented as the students wish it to be. On the other hand, this does not mean that books would not be a fantastic way to gain new skills, but - for instance - for the introduction of a new topic, media can be a flexible assistant in the 21st century classroom. Finding an interesting and catching introduction of a new topic can be challenging sometimes, that is why I will use videos of speeches in my lesson and not only texts of the speeches. Additionally, the students must write down their thoughts on the worksheet I have created for them.
First, in our seminar ‘‘Life - World - Relevance: planning lessons for various learners'' we learned about three instruments to use for planning a lesson. The three instruments are the Universal Design of Learning (UDL), Differentiation Matrices (DM) and the Complex Competence Task by Wolfgang Hallet. In my lesson planning process, I used the CCT.
Thereupon, I will continue with explaining the Complex Competence Task (,, Die komplexe Kompetenzaufgabe'' ) by Wolfgang Hallet from 2012. First, Wolfgang Hallet is a professor for Teaching English as a foreign language at the Justus Liebig University Gießen. Therefore, he knows exactly what learners of a foreign language in our classrooms need to learn. According to Hallet, competences are an essential part of learning a foreign language. It is undeniable that students need certain competences, like reading, writing, listening, and understanding to communicate well in another language. Notwithstanding, Hallet mentions the importance of meaningful and relevant complex learning tasks that are not only tasks to build specific competences. Furthermore, complex competence tasks require a problem and a student trying to solve this problem with a real-world focused view on this topic. This is exactly what I tried to realize in my lesson. This means that students not only understand the importance of what they are doing, but also the skills they are gaining while doing this task. Moreover, Hallet says that already existing skills are activated and applied onto the task. Therefore, complex competence tasks are highly demanding for the learner because it always requires critical thinking, common sense and a way of thinking that goes beyond ordinary school tasks. Hallet talks about „de-schooled tasks” in his book, which is connected to the lifeworld-oriented aspect. It means that these tasks and topics should come from the real world outside of the school. Thus, the competence tasks are based on real-world discourses to examine the competence that students must solve these real-world problems. Nevertheless, these competencies are based on the given topics and competences from the KMK Bildungsstandards” (Kultusministerkonferenz), whereas Hallet tries to adapt these competencies to a more meaningful and relevant concept.
For my lesson I used the CCT to plan and structure my ideas. The question now is if the model can help creating a meaningful lesson with a relevant topic and a lifeworld- oriented aspect. Further, this plan should also reduce my expense of planning a lesson, which is a complex and time-consuming process itself. I want to find out if this theory is fitting for a lesson planning for various learners in a heterogeneity classroom. Particularly students with weaknesses in learning foreign languages or with other mental or health issues should be addressed.
As mentioned earlier, the introduction of the lesson is an important part of the lesson to activate our students. But we also need to observe the exposure level and reference standard orientation. According to Wisniewski, the student's lifeworld-oriented environment can be guaranteed through sensible topics and choice of tasks (Wisniewski 2019: 173). There are different types of learning processes based on psychological scientists. My way of teaching is based on the theory of constructivism. This is a theory significantly influenced by Jean Piaget and Hans Aebli. Thus, it strengthens the belief that every human has their own subjective and individual perspective on the world with its problems, structures, concepts, and social forms. Constructivism forms the hypothesis that the world, as we see it, is only the result of an invention of the reality we live in. On the other hand, it does not mean that the reality is denied, but it is questioning our perception of the world and surroundings around us. Furthermore, the learner is an active learner that processes new information. Based on this, there is an exchange of information between previous knowledge and new material. The students in my lesson must connect their foreknowledge from previous lessons with their newly gained understanding for this topic. For my lessons, this implicates that I always make clear where we are in our unit to the students and how it is built on each other. Moreover, it must be clear that there is prior knowledge, and that scaffolds and feedback methods support the students individual learning processes. (Wisniewski 2019: 203ff.)
„Der Weg ist das Ziel.“ (“The path is the goal.”) is a common slogan when it comes to reaching goals. In our task to plan lessons, goals are a significant component. The goals define the procedure and the products of the lesson. Whereas the word “method” is actually Greek and means “path or journey” (Greek: hodos). This shows us that the methods for lesson planning are just ways to teach knowledge properly. Even more, it proves that teaching is always a journey of asking essential questions, a place to improve critical thinking and find possible answers to problems. Often students are forced to have the best outcome or product in a lesson, but the more important part is what the students learned. Moreover, it is even more important for how long they remember this lesson, topic, or skills they learned about. (Schardt 2009: 67)
When it comes to heterogeneity in the classroom, additionally, we need to construe a picture of every indivudal student in this classroom and cannot look at the class as a homogeous group. Every student has its indivudal needs and thinking structures which must be taken into consideration when planning a lesson. It is extremly important to plan certain key questions for individual students to being able to unfold their full potential. Another important aspect is giving enough time for thinking about the questions to make sure that more thoughtful and measureable students have the opportunity to answer. If the questions are too difficult for the students, we should let them unfold the question by themselves. The goal is that the students gain skills to understand and even answer challenging questions. (Schardt 2009: 25ff.)
Practical Part
Coming to my practical part of this term paper, I want to show my ideas for this lesson and the project I would want to work for. As I planned a lesson for various learners, unfortunately I can only give the outline for this big project due to length purposes. Thus, I planned a unit for a class of 9th or 10th graders, this would depend on how they are willing to work for this project and on other external conditions. The time frame for this project involves three to four weeks, which would be a whole school project. In this practical part, I will only explain and describe one lesson with 45 minutes in detail. Furthermore, my central goals and tasks for this lesson are that my students learn what a good, convincing speech is made of and how they can distinguish this from a bad example of a speech. In further lessons, we would improve our writing on own speeches and oral presentation skills with a lot of group and partner work. For the lesson, I prepared some work material which consists of two videos, which includes one TED Talk and one video from YouTube. It is important to engage with the lifeworld that the students are currently living in. This means that social networks should be included, but also new forms of using media (TED Talks) should be taught in a heterogeneity classroom. To specify the media I chose, I need to explain what and why I chose these videos. The first video from TED Talks is called How to use family dinner to teach politics from Hajer Sharief.
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