Many Hunter College English majors either plan on becoming teachers of English and Language Arts in the K-12 system, or are at least interested in the possibility of teaching as a viable career path. If students can engage course content in a way that directly benefits their future career paths, then what better way to do this than inviting them to complete a detailed lesson plan on one of the authors/texts read and discussed over the semester in lieu of a more traditional essay?

Students who complete this project are asked to pick one author that they might like to teach in the future and come up with a detailed lesson plan on how they would approach teaching that author/text to a specific population. Most of the time, this population is hypothetical, though on occasion Hunter College undergraduates are already embedded in teaching roles across New York City.

Let us imagine, for example, that a student is interested in teaching a cluster of thematically related poems by Emily Dickinson. In this case, students are asked to think about how they might go about teaching these poems to high school students, for instance, in New York City, and maybe even how they would teach it to a specific population within a specific borough or school. They ask questions such as: Why is it valuable for students to learn about Emily Dickinson and how can I as a hypothetical teacher make Dickinson valuable/meaningful for them?

Since I am not a K-12 teacher, and since I do not have any experience teaching in this field (though I am certainly very interested in this field!), I look to my students as experts in the formal aspects of this assignment, while nonetheless providing as much feedback as possible from the standpoint of my own teaching experience. I constantly find myself learning from and in awe of my students’ creativity and pedagogical innovations when it comes to how they imagine themselves in the classroom. To complete this project, students are provided with sample lesson plans from previous semesters. In some cases, they ask friends and/or co-workers for guidance and models.