Reading in the Middle, Junior and Senior High Schools, Spring, 2010

The lesson plan for Censorship in the Classroom: Understanding Controversial Issues is overall very thorough and beneficial for the students, but it has a few minor flaws.
This lesson plan focuses on learning about why books are banned, implications of civil rights when a work is banned, how to detect media bias and propaganda, and how to use this knowledge to convince people to accept your point of view on a topic. The ultimate goal is to learn about media biases and then create their own advertisement campaign supporting or condemning a banned book.
This lesson plan caught my eye as something that is controversial enough to keep the attention of the class while teaching them very important information. I feel that it is very important that children know that there is biases and propaganda being used in the media and how they can detect it. This lesson plan will teach them to think more critically about advertisements and literature. Also, part of the activities concern empathic activities that require students to put themselves in various points of views to see why someone would want to defend or ban a book. The activities heavily rely on class participation to think about why things are banned, or how the media is portraying certain subjects to influence our thinking. This class participation allows for the students to figure out the answers on their own first rather than forcing them to learn pure facts. There were many great resources for the students and teachers alike, and there are many books for the children to choose from. The majority of the assignments are relatively easy, such as the Analyzing Advertisement handout, which can be completed by watching commercials while they watch TV at home. I especially liked how thorough the creator of this plan was. They had the foresight to make sure the teacher checks with the principle about the assignment as well as talking to parents, so that the chance of later problems occurring is reduced. While talking about civil rights, there is a tie in with history, which helps the children with applications outside of this one subject. This plan also qualifies for use in North Carolina and meets six standards, which seems to be the average number met. The project also called for a
The flaws that I found are mostly minimal. Firstly, I am not overly thrilled that this plan relies so heavily on internet access. The majority of the assignments involve taking the students to the computer lab, which was not addressed in the preparation portion of the plan. There is also a dead link for the “Analyzing TV Ads” site. If I was teaching in a poorer school, I would probably not be able to complete this activity without printing out unholy amounts of handouts. I also don’t like that there is not a section about discussing the morality of using biases and fallacies in advertisements. It seems that by telling them to use these techniques in a presentation without telling them that they are improper means of auguring a point is setting them up to continue the behavior. Besides that, I believe there should be time allowed after presentations where the students try to find the biases of the arguments.

I thought that the "Anticipation Guide" was pretty useful. During the post reading part, I realized that quite a few of my previous beliefs were changed, or that the reasons were changed. It was interesting to see how an article can change what you think. The only things that I can say against it was that I found it funny that an article about the internet giving us concentration problems was surrounded by flashing advertisements including one placed so that the article text was displaced by it. Overall, I liked this assignment and lesson plan style.