My Flipped Lesson
I designed this lesson for an introductory level Japanese class. I would include this lesson in the syllabus email prior to the beginning of the course or as part of the first in-class lesson. The learning objective is to teach some simple but useful Japanese greetings that the students can learn quickly and will use regularly for as long as they are speaking the language. I feel that this objective is best met through flipped learning because it allows me teach the class before the course actually begins, giving the student a chance to step into the classroom with some useful vocabulary under their belts. Also, through the use of videos, I can incorporate “experts,” i.e. native Japanese language speakers as teachers and models for expression and intonation.
First Exposure
I included three elements of first exposure or direct instruction in this lesson. The first is a video by the good people at the Japan Society in New York, with a native teacher defining and modeling each greeting. The second is a list of greetings from A Piece of Sushi, a Japanese language learning site that helps students prepare for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). For my third, I included a dialog practice with a key that focused on what we will be using daily in the classroom. Finally, I included another video with a native speaker demonstrating Japanese greetings from JapanesePod101.com
Accountability
Students are held accountable for learning the lesson by completing a diagnostic pretest. Not only does the pretest show me who has completed the lesson, but the use of the tool over the course of the class will provide me with analytics that will give me timestamps showing when students are completing their lessons and other learning trends.
From Blended to In-Class
After the lesson is completed, the students will use these greetings daily in class, during regular classroom interactions, in roleplay and other creative situations, and in communicating with students in a sister class in Japan. On the first day, we will practice saying each of the greetings and using them in small group role plays before beginning a grammar lesson. For the next week, we will devote three to five minutes of instruction time to a greeting review to help the students become more comfortable using them. While some of the greetings are common courtesies, others have deeper meaning and applicability, which we would explore in future lessons.
Using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide, the higher order thinking of the lesson could be defined as follows:
Remember: The students will need to Remember each greeting and Understand what they mean, both with they say them and when they hear them. They will Apply this information in the classroom when greeting other students and the teacher. When greeted by others, they will need to Apply their understanding of the greeting (situational understanding and use) so that they can greet or respond correctly. They will need to Analyze and Evaluate their situation to be able to use the proper greetings and responses. Finally, they will begin to be able to use these greetings as a foundation to Create conversations in Japanese.
My Lesson
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