Genres within Education: State Standards and Lesson Planning Genre awareness as a reading strategy is a common lesson in most

grade schools. I remember being taught how to write in different genres and also reading in different genres, in other words literary genres but I was not taught that genres are forms that affect our everyday lives. In Anne Beauforts words, genres are constantly changing in our everyday life to fit the necessities of a given structure and to accomplish the indented action (p. 104). In a similar vein, Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin identify the concept of dynamism as the ways in which genres change according to their users needs and community (p. 479). These communities are groups of people sharing a common goal that they achieve with one another. Because of this recent research in genre, we now know that understanding writing in specific genres necessitates the understanding of how those genres function and change in a community. One community in which genres are constantly changing is that of public education. To become better writers and users of genres, teachers especially need to understand the way the genres change and adapt to the needs of the community using them and also are both flexible, for some freedom, but stable, to form a baseline. Teachers can learn to develop better lesson plans and improve their strategies to incorporate content standards as they gain genre awareness within their discourse communities as well as forming the dynamic genre to the specific situation. In the following analysis, I examine the genre of the lesson plan to further our understanding of how this genre is constrained by community standards and how teachers need to be aware of the ways in which the genre might need to adapt to changing conditions. I ultimately

demonstrate that the genre awareness, including knowledge of dynamism and the discourse community, can help a teacher reach full potential in the classroom. Teachers have a huge role not only in the classroom but also in society because they are responsible for educating next generations. In grade school students are pushed to be creatively expressive and reflective in writing. In the work place, genres are much more focused on taking action. A genre important in the education field is a lesson plan. Lesson plans are very important in the classroom because they set the agenda and tone of the lessons each day. These lesson plans are made up from content standards. The content standards show what each student should acquire in a years time. Lesson planning and content standard are two very important genres in the field of education. These genres also work hand and hand; the content standards reveal what should be in each lesson plans. The discourse community within the educational field is made up of teachers within the same department. Other communities teachers are apart of are the grade, school, and district community. The difference in lesson plans among subject is a direct reflection of how genres are dynamic as well as constrained by content standards. As a future teacher of Middle Childhood students, I will be teaching in either a math or science classroom. A math classroom and a science classroom are dynamically different. A lesson plan in a math class would consist of many activities, practice time as well as practice problems. The concepts are concrete and I will have to provide my students with examples to contribute to the lesson. A science class can be very hands on in comparison to a math class. Certain lessons will be able to have experiments

incorporated with the lesson. They are similar in the fact that they both have calculations; some science lessons have mathematics embedded in it, for example any calculation with a formula needs some background algebra skills. The difference between the genre of a math lesson plan and a science lesson plan can further be explained with Berkenkotter and Huckins coined term of dynamism. Genres are dynamic forms that develop responses to the situation and present a structured experience that also gives it meaning (Berkenkotter and Huckin p. 479). Among the differences in a math and science lesson plans there is still a stable form of the genre that gives both of the subjects a common ground while being dynamic. Regardless of the difference in lesson plans, each subject has its own content standards. Content standards are only used in the educational field. They are developed by the board of education and differ upon states. These content standards are give both math and science classes a baseline and structure to lesson plans. This is the stabilization of dynamism. The content standards tell the teacher what objectives need to be met through the school year in each subject. Teachers create lesson plans based on content standards. Lesson plans are used to provide teachers with a written schedule and outline of how the class should run each day. They are topic specific; each lesson plan has a goal of teaching a specific content standard. Each lesson plan is designed with the student(s) in mind. How it is formed is truly based on the teacher and subject so lesson plans vary in form. A first year teacher would create a much more elaborate lesson plan than one that has been teaching for many years. A typical lesson plan has many components, the first is the content standard that is being met,

this is very important because every lesson has a reason it is being taught and that is because of the content standard. Another component is the objectives. They aid in being clear to the students what is being taught and what will be learned. The materials used in the lesson plan are drawn out ahead of time as well. This is so teachers have everything ready for the students as for what they will need during the lesson and to meet the objectives. Resources, assignments and activities are also in lesson plans. Teachers include their plan for evaluations of students. Finally, accommodations are included in lesson for students that might need extra help or students that are advanced learners. Having these components planned out helps a teacher facilitate the classroom and promotes a successful day of learning. This also keeps the teacher organized and the students on task. There is a general outline of a lesson plan that teachers can follow but it is completely to their discretion of how they run the classroom. Lesson planning is a skill that every teacher will gain in his or her years of experience. A first year teacher would have a much more detailed lesson plan than a teacher that has been in the classroom for twenty some years. Lesson planning is where teachers have a lot of freedom in their classes, as long as content standards are met. Because the content standards are set by the state, an individual teacher doesnt have control over what the standard contains, they are just expected to teach it to the students. With experience, teachers learn to meet the standard as well as incorporate their own style of education into their lesson plans. This takes understanding of both structure and flexibility. Berkenkotter and Huckin would agree. They claim genres must be flexible and dynamic, capable of modifications

according to the situation but they also must be stable enough to capture an aspect that tend to cycle (p. 68). This is shown very well between the genre of lesson planning and content standards. Lesson plans are fluent enough that style and tone of the teacher can be added as long as the content standards are put in place for a baseline and structure. Experienced teachers and new teachers can come together in their department to form lesson plans. Within a workplace, coworkers create a community. The community in educational fields is the department. In a school, there are multiple teachers that have classes in the same subject and these teachers make up a department. This community is formed because they have to teach the same standards but do not necessarily have to use the same lesson plan. Teachers have a different type of style in their work and it shows through lessons. Teachers create their own lessons but they can create them along with the department to strengthen and solidify them. The community can help with understanding and clarification of the content standards as well. The department and individual teachers are responsible solely for teaching the very important content standard. Therefore the department working together would be in each teachers favor. Berkenkotter and Huckin believe that genre knowledge is not complete without the full knowledge of the discourse community (p. 135). Without all the teachers in the department working together all the knowledge is not presented. The different knowledge, viewpoints, and styles come together to make a very strong lesson plans that successfully meet the content standards.

Education is such an ever-changing field that directly affects the youth. Teachers can learn to develop better lesson plans and improve their strategies to incorporate content standards as they gain experience with lesson plans within their subject departments. Also forming each lesson plan to meet the content standards and incorporated their own style and tone into class each day. Teachers will learn to create lesson plans that fulfill both their own needs as well as the desired needs of the content standards for the specific lesson. The field of education is constantly evolving and it is very important for teachers to continue to stretch their brain and learn new strategies to better then classroom. As I have demonstrated, a teacher can become better prepared to write lesson plans and be more effective in the classroom with specific genre awareness that includes dynamism and the discourse community to understand both content standards and lesson plans.

References Beaufort, A. (1999). Learning new genres: The convergence of knowledge and action. In Beauforts Writing in the Real World (pp. 103-137). New York: Teachers College Press. Berkenkotter, C. and Huckin, T. (1993). Rethinking genre from a scociocognitive perspective. Written Communication. 10(4), 475-509.

Lesson Plan genre example:

Appendix

Content standard genre example: http://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Academic-Content-Standards

Reflection I believe that this assignment has given me a lot of insight into my future. I really enjoyed doing a project on something that will be affecting my life after graduation. It also made me think more realistically about my future classroom as a teacher. I believe that this assignment helped solidify all of the concepts, such as genre awareness, dynamism and discourse community, from the readings because I had to really understand what each writer was trying to get across to work them into my own piece. I really enjoyed finding quotes from the reading that I could mold to match my thesis for support. I feel that I used the writings well and that I really had a strong argument. Looking further into lesson plans and content standards is preparing me to write them in the future and is making me think about the necessary steps I will need to take to be successful in that. I learned that my discourse community in my future profession is going to be very supportive because we are all working for the same thing and we will be able to help one another through both understanding content standers and writing lesson plans to meet the content standards. I have never been a strong writer but writing about something that I love and have confidence in has helped me be successful in this assignment. I am very proud of where my piece has progressed form the first shitty draft to now the final draft.