Since I am working at the SSC, I do not observe any lessons. Therefore, I will be using a lesson that I remember from high school for this blog entry. This lesson was part of a Psychology course taught by Mrs. Gappa, a teacher at my high school. We were covering Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and the three main objectives, as I see it, was to (1) identify and be able to list to the teacher (retell) the most common symptoms of it, (2) memorize and also be able to recite the statistics concerning this disease in the US and worldwide, and to (3) synthesize our newly acquired knowledge of DID with the previous knowledge on other mental disorders (i.e. schizophrenia, OCD, and bipolar) in order to be able to tell which (imaginary) patient has which disorder. The hook that the teacher use was a trailer for the movie Split (which was coming out that year). In a nutshell, the storyline follows a man who has a severe case of DID and struggles to have control over it, which results in aggressive and violent behavior. I remember that most students at my school knew of that movie and were excited to see it, so the hook really worked for the students in my class, including myself.

The teacher did not provide much intrinsic motivation. Mrs. Gappa was always one to point put extrinsic motivations, such as how much this unit would factor into our final grade or how to earn extra credit on it. My school was generally very product- and GPA-oriented, so her approach did not surprise me much. She did briefly mention that to know about DID is to be responsible members of society because we would be in a positon to provide help or empathy to the people suffering from DID. This comment was brief, half-hearted, and textbook-like, and I am fairly sure that not many students internalized it or paid attention to it at all. I guess one could say that such explicit focus on solely extrinsic motivation actually diminishes intrinsic motivation for learning and interacting with the material, but at the time it did not seem to matter. Looking back, I realize that it causes to only remember the material for the assessments, but not many things really stuck.

The lesson had a fairly simple structure. The duration was 50 minutes. We started by watching the trailer for Split(the hook) and discussing it, which took about 5 minutes. Then the teacher pulled up the slides for her lecture and went over the DID statistics and the pathophysiology of it (including the symptoms); the lecture took about 15 minutes. Then Mrs. Gappa passed out some worksheets which contained little descriptions of patients’ symptoms and backgrounds and we were supposed to work in small groups and identify what condition they most likely had out of the ones we had covered so far (i.e. schizophrenia, OCD, bipolar, and DID). The group activity took about 15 minutes. Then we discussed our “diagnoses” as a class, which took roughly 10 minutes. Mrs. Gappa finished off by assigning us homework, which was a short multiple-choice take-home quiz about what we had learned from the lecture on DID. She also recommended us some useful resources with more in-depth facts about DID and some of the other mental disorders. As a preview for the next lesson, Mrs. Gappa hinted that we would be talking about the next disease on our list, which was major depressive disorder (MDD), as far as I remember.

The structure as a whole felt fairly intentional, but still quite dry and textbook-like. It felt as if Mrs. Gappa just found the most generic template for a class and adapted it to our specific topic. However, this impression might have to do with the fact that Mrs. Gappa herself was never particularly enthusiastic in the class and delivered the information in a logical but extremely monotonous way. Nevertheless, I think the lesson worked for the purposes it was supposed to accomplish. She wanted to give us every opportunity to get good grades (it was considered to be one of those “GPA-booster” classes at my high school, and I am sure Mrs. Gappa was aware of that) and as far as I know, most people did end up with solid grades in the class. I also do like that she had a variety of activities available to us during the lesson as it covered a wide variety of the students’ strengths and learning styles. We got the necessary information from her lecture, and then had the chance to implement it during our small group work, which we then discussed as a whole class. I think that lesson had something for everyone. I wish Mrs. Gappa helped us gain more intrinsic motivation, but considering the overarching goals of the school, it made sense to me why she was so focused on our grades rather than our knowledge.