In my lesson, my students and I examined the question How do Artists Construct Political Cartoons to Convey a Message? Learning from the constructive feedback from my last lesson, the “Political Cartoon Activity” lesson went much more smoothly than my first lesson I presented, especially in the second half portion of the class.
The biggest positive from this lesson occurred in the final activity, as the lesson wrapped up in a conclusive and definitive manner. As opposed to last time where I didn’t have a clear ending to our lesson, there was a hard stop time, where the students presented their political cartoons for the entire class. Another positive to this class was that I was a more adaptive in my lesson, as when I realized during the lesson that we were running short on time, I decided to make the final activity a group activity to speed up the pace of the class.
A part of my teaching that can use quite a deal more refinement, which I’ve noticed from the delivery of this lesson and my time working at my high school, is modeling my directions for key activities. While deconstructing the political cartoon at the beginning of class in a sense was a model for how to construct a political cartoon, I could have clarified the creation of political cartoons activity by making one myself and using it as an example.
Although this activity was designed for only 25 minutes, I can easily imagine scaling it to the 91 minute period lessons I use for my high school students. Making it an individual activity would slow down the pace substantially, and the biggest positive to having a longer time period would be the ability to talk about the political cartoons afterwords, as many students created clever cartoons that sparked discussion questions.