I was, unfortunately unable to complete week 5: day 5 of Zadina’s workbook, but looking over the activity now I wish I had been able to find the time. I reappropriated a lesson I found online that is very similar to the activity described for interviews in which I am to teach a mock lesson. In my lesson, we study a poem. The learning goal is for students to use their visual, auditory and artistic skills to analyze  a poem. It can be any poem, but the poem used in the original lesson was “Storm in the Black Forest” by D.H. Lawrence. To begin with I have the students write down a word from the title, say “storm” and ask them to define it and write words they associate with it to the side. Afterward, the main crux of the lesson begins and I instruct the students to draw what they hear as I read the poem aloud. This is the section of the lesson that is most similar to Zadina’s Pictionary activity. The idea of my lesson is similar to that of Zadina’s. We know now what an important role visualization plays in the understanding of concepts. We also know from Zadina’s book that, “Reading is not natural” (141) That is, reading does not occur naturally in the brain, it is not a normal function of the brain such as sight or hearing. This is why the visualization exercise is so important for students, especially those of a young age. Having them draw what they see (no matter their artistic competency) allows them to both visualize the poem’s setting and therefore better understand its themes and tone.

I had the opportunity to teach this mock lesson at two separate interviews and once for a group of genuine 8^th graders. They all said they enjoyed how the lesson was presented, but more than that they were all engaged, thinking critically about the poem and most of them seemed to consider it closer to art than to English. However, they all knew the poem by the end of the class, could dissect its meaning and identify key elements of its tone and themes. By asking for connotations of a specific word, the teacher is actively searching our prior knowledge, which is built on past experience. In ch. 7 of his book, Zull talks about the need for teachers to find old neural networks, those that have been created through past experiences and use them to build new knowledge. This has been an invaluable concept for me. I wish I had come across it while I was in my theory class over the past summer. This idea that as teachers we need to focus, not on the new content but firstly on what the student already knows to be true. His example questions on p. 120—“What does this make you think of?”—are verbatim what I asked my students during my mock lesson.