Designing and Planning a Multimodal Lesson

Welcome back to a new entry!

I hope you are all staying safe at home during these circumstances that we are currently living.

For this entry I will be sharing with you the original Multimodal lesson that I had planned for the students to complete in the classroom; even though that, for obvious circumstances, I will not be able to teach it.

I had planned it initially for sixth grade before the schools closed, so in this entry I will be sharing with you the model and way I was planning to teach it in the classroom. Keep in mind that now the lesson is meant to be for fifth grade, so I had to make some adjustments to make it easier for the students. Once again, in this entry I will be explaining the original multimodal lesson and then, I will write another entry in which I will explain the modified one with the feedback and results that I get back from the students.

First, let’s dive a little bit into the importance of multimodality, considering that it takes a huge role in lesson planning nowadays due to the society that we currently live in and the mindset that rules it. We live in a constant rush to be somewhere, to keep moving… We are constantly receiving new information from different sources and focusing on so many things and details at the same time. This affects children as much as it affects adults and, as a result, the educational demands have shifted as well; which has resulted in the implementation of multimodal resources in the classroom that engages learners in the lessons in a whole different way than standard methods and approaches. Therefore, for this lesson plan, I followed the multiliteracies pedagogy approach that is comprised of four knowledge processes: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying.

For this lesson (as well as for the modified one that I am going to send to fifth grade), I decided to plan it around a picture book called The Lion who Wanted to Love by Giles Andreae. There are many reasons why I chose a picture book as a multimodal text to based the lesson around. First of all, children love stories. They usually show great excitement to listen to new stories and, for this reason, they want to make sense of the story and the meaning, which is easier for them when looking at the illustrations and images that go with the text. Another reason is that stories help children relate new things to what they already know and it is useful to help them develop new thinking skills. Let’s also not forget that telling the story of a picture book to students involve role-play, which scaffolds their learning and understanding of what is happening in the book.

Now, why did I choose this particular picture book, though? Giles Andreae is one of the UK’s most famous and popular pictures book authors with many bestselling and award-winning titles to his name. His stories often teach about self-steam, negative stereotypes, and love (among other great and important values), all of which are important topics to discuss and work with our students. And what better way to do so than through English?

This particular picture book that I chose tells the story about a lion cub who is different from any other lion. Instead of feeling the need to hunt, be fierce, and feel strong, Leo wants to make friends and love everybody. He’s different and, even though at first he is not accepted by everyone and is expected to act like what is considered a normal lion, he sticks to his personality and decides to spread love.

Another detail that caught my attention was that the author was inspired to write the book from a poem that he wrote himself a couple years ago but then put aside. The poem is the following:

After writing said poem, Giles Andreae continued to write lots of other poems and stories, but he could not shake away the lion cub who was out of the ordinary, and so finally, one day he decided to sit down and write his story. This little detail really meant something to me due to the current society that we live in, where fitting in and living up to the expectations set by others can often rule our lives.

In order to be able to give you an idea on how the three sessions were going to work and the activities that I had originally planned, I decided to film a follow-along lesson. My idea was to send this video to the students so they could complete the exact same activities at the same time that they were visualizing the video. Nevertheless, after sharing the video with the headteacher and since I couldn’t teach it to sixth grade, we came to the conclusion that it was better for me to send only the storytelling part to fifth grade and make some changes in the lesson, but that is for another entry.

In the original video, I filmed the way I would introduce the picture book, me telling them the story, showing the book, telling them when to complete all the activities, and giving every necessary instruction. As expected, the video turned out to be a bit long, but it is still the same length as a regular session and with the added time of completing the activities, it would have taken around three forty-minute sessions to complete.

Just like I mentioned before, when choosing the activities I followed the Multimodal approach. This meant that I had to make sure that the students were going to be able to develop some kind of emotional connection to the topic that I selected, which was possible through the implementation of four processes of the multiliteracies pedagogy approach proposed by Kalantzis et al (2016): experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing and applying.

For the experiencing process, I had planned pre-reading exercises and activities, which would have led students to get in context with the story, understand the main idea as well as the topic that we were going to discuss in the session, and to start engaging them meaningfully. Therefore, I was going to start the lesson by telling them that I was going to read them a story about a lion cub. Then, I was going to ask them to write down where they thought that the story was going to take place (the jungle). Afterwards, I would have asked them a bit about lions, since the main idea of the story is to understand that Leo is different to regular lions:

"How would you describe a lion?" "Are lions friendly, cool, or...?" 

The activity was to tell them to write down 3 to 5 adjectives that can be used describe lions. To continue with the experiencing process, The students had to write down what the title of the book suggested to them and what they thought the book would be about. It is also worth mentioning that there is a lot of new vocabulary in the book that I was going to introduced in this part of the lesson, so they would have familiarized with it before listening to the story.

From here on, I moved to the conceptualizing process through the reading part of the lesson and storytelling. I was nervous about this part, considering that during the lesson I would have had to make sure that they were going to make sense of the story and, consequently, produce meaning. Therefore, I would have tried to emphasize the words as much as I could and thought necessary to make it easier for the students to catch everything.

Next came the analyzing process, in which I was planning on presenting a series of questions to get the students to reflect on the author’s writing and relate it to their own experiences and perspective. But first, to work on the new vocabulary, I was going to present to the students a list of new words that I wanted them to remember and learn the meaning of. They could have written them down, looked for the meaning, and finally made a little drawing beside the word that would have helped them remember the definition. This is an activity that my primary teacher would make me do every single time we read a book and found new words; I can honestly tell you that, to this day, I still remember some of the words and drawings I had on my notebook. Moving on with the analyzing process, the questions that I would have urged the students to reflect on where going to be the following:

"What makes Leo different?"  "How do you think that Leo felt when his mom sent him away?" "Have you ever felt left-out and different, just like Leo did?" "Write about how Leo's mom changes her attitude towards Leo from the beginning to the end of the story." "And the ending? What do you think that the following lines mean? YOU HAVE GOT TO BE STRONG TO BE DIFFERENT, AND WHEN YOU’VE GOT LOVE ON YOUR SIDE YOU’VE GOT THE MOST VALUABLE GIFT THAT THERE IS, WE WANT YOU AS KING OF OUR PRIDE."

Lastly, finishing up with the applying process, I had come up with three final activities that would have allowed the students to elaborate their own interpretations and carried out new practices in new contexts. For the first one, learners were going to be given the following quote:

«Love conquers all»

The main idea was that students had to draw what came to their mind when they thought of this quote. It could be anything from a quality that they notice on their parents, something nice that someone once did for them… anything that love and its power might suggest them and evoque from them.

For the second activity, students would have drawn once again and described with short sentences a moment or circumstance in which they felt like Leo at the beginning of the story and struggled to meet expectations or felt different from the rest.

And last but not least, in order to wrap up the session and to practice speaking, I would have asked the students to tell me how they could be more like Leo: loving and helpful to those who surround them.

I am not going to lie, it was a little bit hard planning the lesson and making sure that everything was explained correctly and clearly. It also saddens me that I am not going to be able to teach; I was looking forward to it.

I am sure that you will notice certain things that I could have done differently to improve the lesson, too. Nevertheless, I am proud of it and I was hoping for amazing results once the students got to do it. Here is the link to the video that I filmed for you to visualize better the way the lesson was going to work, in case you want to check it out: https://youtu.be/QjSCW8a-Znk

Thank you so much for reading!

Mariana.