Discussion Lesson Plan Analysis: Using Fairy Tales to Debate Ethics Over all, this lesson plan is very

strong because it is creative, clearly organized, and thorough. I really like how this lesson plan uses fairy tales to explore ethical dilemmas because stories help students understand the concepts better. I also like how they included a lesser known Tibetan story, From the Elephant Pit, to add diversity to the lesson. Another strength of this lesson plan is that the teacher uses a graphic organizer to display the students answers. The only weakness that I found in the lesson plan is that it says that this lesson can be used for grades k-8, but I think that they topics covered are too advanced for most younger children. According to Piaget, children from ages 6-12 are in the concrete operational stage, which means that they can think logically about concrete objects, but have difficulty understanding abstract concepts. I think that children in this age group would still benefit from reading the stories in this lesson plan, however, it would be difficult to explore ethical issues as deeply as this lesson plan calls for. The aspects of this lesson plan that relate to the discussion model are: content, the learning objectives, group discussion, and assessment. The discussion questions in this lesson plan relate to moral dilemmas in the fairy tales: Is trickery ever justified? Was Jack justified for stealing the giants goose and eggs because the giant wanted to eat him? Was the hunter better off because he rescued the man from the pit, why or why not? These questions are all controversial and lend themselves to good class discussion. The learning objectives in this lesson plan are for the students to be able to: 1.) listen to or read three popular fairy tales, 2.) respond to questions those tales raise about ethical issues, and 3.) take a stand on the ethical question raised by the story From the Elephant Pit.