Essential Question: How will you design and enact relevant and meaningful instruction and assessment to develop students’ identities, knowledge, understandings, skills, and dispositions to bring creativity and innovation to the world’s most pressing issues? 

Lesson Plan: Chinese Legends Puzzle

This lesson plan reflects my belief that meaningful instruction should be student-centered, collaborative, culturally responsive, and rooted in authentic engagement. Designed through the principles of backwards design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), the lesson asks students to explore Chinese legends in order to better understand how stories reflect cultural values, beliefs, and ways of knowing. Throughout the MTTL program, I developed a growing appreciation for instructional practices that invite students to think critically, problem solve collaboratively, and actively construct meaning rather than simply receive information. This lesson incorporates groupworthy tasks, intentional scaffolding, differentiated supports, and performance-based learning experiences designed to honor students’ diverse strengths and learning needs (Cohen & Lotan, 2014; Darling-Hammond et al., 2020; Berger, Woodfin, & Vilen, 2016). Ultimately, this artifact reflects my commitment to designing learning experiences that foster creativity, collaboration, cultural understanding, and joyful intellectual engagement.

Literature Review: Strategies to Increase Reading Motivation and Joy

As a lifelong reader and ELA teacher, I am naturally curious about my students’ relationships with reading. Over time, I increasingly wondered about reading joy. Do my students enjoy reading? If so, what inspires their love of reading? If not, are there things I can do in my classroom to cultivate greater motivation and reading enjoyment? These questions led me to examine the research surrounding reading identity, motivation, and aesthetic reading experiences.

As educators, it is our responsibility not only to assess student learning, but also to assess our own instructional practices. The choices we make in teaching not just what we teach, but how we teach, and what we choose to value convey explicit and implicit messages to our students. Giroux and Penna (1979) describe this “hidden curriculum” as the “norms, values, and beliefs” communicated to students both formally through the content we teach and informally through the social structures within our schools can hinder or undermine student learning. I wonde about how this idea related to the messages students receive about reading in school. Do our instructional choices communicate that reading is primarily a task to be completed, or a meaningful and joyful experience?

Phillips and Carr (2014) describe researchers and scholars as “distant colleagues” whose wisdom can inform and challenge our thinking. Literature reviews provide an opportunity to reflect on pedagogy by examining how classroom strategies align with educational research. Through literature review, I sought to better understand how instructional strategies can support students’ identities as readers and cultivate a lifelong love of reading.

References

• Baker, L., & Wigfield, A. (1999). Dimensions of Children’s Motivation for Reading and Their Relations to Reading Activity and Reading Achievement. Reading Research Quarterly, 34(4), 452–477. https://doi.org/10.1598/RRQ.34.4.4
• Berger, R., Woodfin, L., & Vilen, A. (2016). Learning that lasts. Jossey-Bass.
• Cohen, E. G., & Lotan, R. A. (2014). Designing groupwork: Strategies for the heterogeneous classroom (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Cooper, M. (2025). Can We Turn the Page? Liberal Education, 111(2), 18–25.
• Cremin, T., & Scholes, L. (2024). Reading for pleasure: scrutinizing the evidence base – benefits, tensions and recommendations. Language and Education, 38(4), 537–559. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2024.2324948
• Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., & Osher, D. (2020). Implications for educational practice of the science of learning and development. Applied Developmental Science, 24(2), 97–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2018.1537791
• Davis, J. R. (1992). Reconsidering Readers: Louise Rosenblatt and Reader-Response Pedagogy. Research and Teaching in Developmental Education, 8(2), 71–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42802433
• Ferlazzo, L., Stuart, Jr., D., Alber, D. R., Sullivan, K., & Hamm, J. (2020, November 13). 22 Strategies for Encouraging Students’ Intrinsic Motivation to Read. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-22-strategies-for-encouraging-students-intrinsic-motivation-to-read/2020/11
• Gambrell, L. B. (2011). SEVEN RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: What’s Most Important to Know About Motivation to Read. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 172–178. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41331594
• Giroux, H. A., & Penna, A. N. (1979). Social education in the classroom: The dynamics of the hidden curriculum. Theory & Research in Social Education, 7(1), 21–42
• Gonzalez, J. (2017, December 3). How to Stop Killing the Love of Reading. Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/stop-killing-reading/
• McMillan, J. H. (2018). Classroom assessment: Principles and practice that enhance student learning and motivation (7th ed.). Pearson.
• Phillips, D. K., & Carr, K. (2014). Becoming a teacher through action research: Process, context, and self-study (3rd ed.). Routledge.
• Rice, H., & Richardson, E. (2022). One for the Books! Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 88(3), 62–67.
• Ryan, K., & Dagostino, L. (2017). The Coding, Scoring, and Analysis of Teachers’ Responses 13 Following Exposure to Louise Rosenblatt’s Theories of Reading. The New England Reading Association Journal, 52(2), 35–104.
• Tricario, D. (2025, June 22). Dusting Off an Old Practice to Make Reading Fun Again. Cult of Pedagogy. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/silent-reading/
• Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd ed.). Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
• Zygouris‐Coe, V. (2024). Strengthening Students’ Reading Motivation and Engagement with C.A.R.E. The Reading Teacher, 77(6), 1035–1038. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2325