This lesson plan was created as an assignment for the course on college teaching offered by the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign in the spring of 2017. Each student was provided a chapter or two from the book ‘Small Teaching’ by James Lang in which to read and summarize into a 15 minute lecture. This lesson plan is for chapters 3 and 4 on interleaving course material and how we make knowledge connections.
The overall plan was to spend the first moments linking the material into the overall class structure, and then quickly dive into the background facts and details of what is the concepts of interleaving and connections. After the background was covered, the next step in the plan was to introduce research studies and discuss the effectiveness of the two concepts. Finally, towards the end of the lesson, a video was included that demonstrated college aged kids failing to answer trivial questions. This video precipitated a discussion on how interleaving course content and knowledge connections could have played a role in the failure of the students to answer the questions.
