Second task work

In Special Didactics, there is content related to lesson planning. For doing the review of the material, I decided, instead of the common debate, to play a version of “Who wants to be a millionaire”. This activity is a combination of several workshops, since it involves promoting reading and therefore checking their comprehension through oral discussions with the rest of the class; and I think I also applied some stuff about motivating and awarding students for their achievements as well. It was planned a couple of weeks beforehand, since I needed to recollect the reading material and check it out before assigning it. And so, I gave the links to my students a week before applying the activity. I told them to read the material and any other text they had related to lesson planning, since we were going to discuss it in class the following week.

I prepare the questions and I used a template found on the web from a teacher’s website, and adapt the instructions given. The main change were the prizes given: For every five correct answers, students were treated with a 5% extra points from the total of the grade obtained in any evaluation of their choosing; then 10% for the next five correct answers; and finally 15% for the final 5 correct answers. The prices had expiration dates, just for the sake of it, since I only have my students for a semester; I guess High School teachers should actually mark them with expiration dates because they have their students for a longer period.

It did not go so well, since students failed to answer the first question correctly, and therefore lost all their prices. However, we continue to play anyway, just because they got caught in the format of the game. They still lost big time (only a total of 3 correct answers; the students later confided me that, even though they got the links and the information, they didn’t read them completely, if nothing at all. The positive outcome of this was that they later started looking and reading the information beforehand and participating

For later applications, I would like to change the order of the questions and maybe change some of them; also, I would like to add some other reading material, preferably related to the changes that are being applied on this new school year here in Venezuela. In addition, I would offer extra points for every acceptable explanation for the correct answer to any of the students. The students didn’t have any trouble understanding the questions (grammar and syntax) but I wouldn´t outrule rewriting some or all the questions either in the future.

This is a time-consuming activity preparation wise, in relation to application difficulty and resources needed. But it is worth the time spent organizing it since students will want to continue participating, even though they missed and won’t win any prices, and is a satisfactory moment when you realized the students continue challenging themselves and working together to improve themselves. They didn't prepare themselves for this surprise activity even though they were given the tools for doing it; but for the rest of Summer classes, they looked for the information related to the topics studied, and I didn't have to remember them to do it, upgrading the quality of their answers as well as the amount of participation in class.