ABSTRACT
The previous three chapters focused on the ways students experience the informal curriculum comprising the body of suggested lessons in the NewsHour Extra and Rethinking Schools portals. Chapters 1 and 2 presented the pedagogies that the two informal curricula draw from and analyzed the language activities in the suggested lessons. Chapter 3 analyzed the embedded ideologies in the media and other texts that function as reading texts in the suggested lessons. The emphasis in this and the next chapters shifts from students to teachers and the ways teachers experience the curriculum through their engagement with the lesson plans. This chapter starts with a conceptualization of lesson planning as a historical and cultural practice and a suggestion for reading lesson plans within their sociohistorical context. It provides a brief review of related research concerning what we call the traditional lesson plan and moves to an analysis of the genre of lesson plan in NewsHour Extra, by illustrating its organization. I suggest that NewsHour Extra lesson plans constitute a sophisticated version of traditional lesson plans, which are descriptive and procedural, follow a strict format resembling that of a technical document, and have formal and “objective” language. The second part of the chapter presents a brief account of the reflective lesson plan, which I describe as an alternative to the traditional lesson plan. The analysis that follows explores Rethinking Schools’ lesson plans as retrospective versions of the reflective lesson plan, because they have been written after a particular class has been conducted, and they use personalized language addressing
colleagues and describing their personal experience, including personal evaluations, uncertainties, failures, and successes.
