Title: School in the 21st century

Lesson plan elaborated by: Magdalena Trysińska

Topic:

School in the 21st century. On visions of the future a hundred years ago.

Target group:

8th‑grade students of an eight‑year primary school.

Core curriculum

I. Literary and cultural education.

2. Receipt of cultural texts. Student:

2) organises information depending on their function in the message;

3) interprets works of art (painting, graphics, sculpture, photography);

6) defines the aesthetic values of the learned cultural texts.

III. Creating statements.

1. Elements of rhetoric. Student:

1) functionally uses rhetorical means and understands their impact on the recipient;

2) collects and organizes the material material needed to create statements; edits the compositional plan of his own statement;

7) agrees with other people's views or polemicizes with them, substantively justifying their own opinion.

IV. Self‑study. Student:

1) reliably, with respect for copyrights, uses information;

4) participates in educational projects (eg creates various presentations, exhibition designs, implements short films using multimedia technologies);

6) develops skills of independent presentation of the results of his work;

8) develops the ability to think critically and formulate opinions.

The general aim of education

The student gets acquainted with the old visions of the future and designs his own.

Key competences

• communication in the mother tongue;

• communication in foreign languages;

• social and civic competences;

• cultural awareness and expression.

Learning outcomes

Student:

• develops the ability to justify his or her opinion;

• gathers and arranges informations needed to create statements;

• describes and interprets iconic visions of the future presented on postcards in the early twentieth century;

• compares the dreams of the future of people from the beginning of the twentieth century with the dreams of modern people.

Teaching methods / techniques

• problematic: directed conversation, discussion;

• programmed: using a computer and e‑textbook;

• practical: exercise exercises;

• exposition: analysis of iconic texts.

Forms of work

• individual activity;

• collective activity;

• activity in groups and pairs.

Lesson plan overview (Process)

Introduction

1. The teacher determines the purpose of the classes and gives students the criteria for success.

2. The teacher informs the students that at the beginning of the last century, colorful pictures that would foster visions of the future appeared in Europe. The teacher talks about accelerated industrial and technical development as the reason for the emergence of dreams and visions of the future.

Realization

1. The teacher asks students to look at selected cards presented in 1900 at the World Exhibition in Paris. The cards picture the visions of the future. It provokes a discussion about them. He/she teacher asks questions:

• What did people dream about at the beginning of the 20th century?

• Which of the visions presented in the illustrations have been implemented?

Which ideas are still in the realm of human dreams?

2. Students, working in groups, create a vision of the school of the future. They prepare descriptions, collect photographic or graphic material. They prepare a short presentation on the results of their work.

3. The teacher displays on the board an illustration showing the vision of the school of the future (abstract). Students talk about it. They answer questions:

• How did the French cartoonist at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries imagine the school of the future?

• Which of the motifs captured in the drawing belonged, according to you, to the reality of the early twentieth century?

• Was any of Jean‑Marc Côté's ideas later realised?

4. The teacher asks students to do a task, thanks to which they will check what the students remembered from the introduction of the lesson (supplementing the sentences with the given words).

5. Students carry out a task in abstract, which consists in creating meaningful, correct sentences. Then the students read the created sentences with the appropriate intonation, reflecting their jocular character.

6. Using the sentences from task 7. students describe their attitude to the illustration on the school of the future.

Summary

1. The teacher asks students what they have learned today, whether the lesson was interesting for them. He or she asks them to evaluate their own work during the lesson.

2. Students write in the notebooks the key words they consider the most important.

Homework

Choose one of the graphics in the abstract. Write a story that you could illustrate with a selected picture.

The following terms and recordings will be used during this lesson

Terms

Texts and recordings

School in the 21st century

At the beginning of the last century, colourful pictures appeared in Europe, propagating a vision of the future. Between 1899 and 1910, several series of instructions were released on different types of packaging. Some of them were used later as postcards. All of the cards depicted a vision of the world in the year 2000. The first of them were displayed in 1900 at the World's Fair in Paris.