Lesson Plan

When I turned in my Marzano-based lesson plan, I neglected to write a reflective blog on its purpose, makeup, and implementation. So here goes! I was having some challenges with my students remembering the general concepts of history. As I read in Marzano's book, I was impressed with the section on summarizing, as well as the section on non-linguistic representations (or picture maps). I decided to combine the two strategies into one with the intent to not only assist students in retaining underastanding of the major concepts, but also in providing students who are visual learners with a medium for better retention. The results? I am very pleased with how students generally have improved their understanding and retion of the primary concepts of history in my class. Furthermore, I discovered that while the visual-learning students were were helped when using this exercise (as expected), many other students also used the picture-map portion of the strategy with enhanced success. The general success of this has encouraged me to develop additional non-linguistic-based activities for my students.