This is a lesson plan I wrote in 2024, to align with the F-10 Australian Curriculum for an English class. I wrote the plan for one of my university assessments, so I’ve put the research receipts down the bottom of the page if you want to look closer into the background information.

I’m just a student teacher studying my Master of Education, so please feel free to provide kind, specific feedback. 😎

How to use this lesson plan: I designed this with multiple parts that you can mix and match if you want to run a single lesson … or you can run all parts over a few classes or a double period.

Duration (mins): 70 minutes per class, designed for 2 class sessions or a double period.

Resources needed:

• PPT and projector
• Downloaded video clips (for when the WiFi fails us)

Before we get into the lesson plan, though, I just want to clarify one very important question…

Why learn about the patriarchy in English class?

Understanding how the patriarchy perpetuates domestic and family violence (DFV) in Australia is a key part of being an active and informed citizen in 2024. Students are learning empathy as part of the personal and social capability general capability (GC) in the Australian curriculum, and we know that students can build empathy and advocate for others by learning about past and present human rights violations. And because adolescent students are often having their first romantic and sexual experiences, talking about the red flags of abusive relationships helps to protect them from harm.

In a future post, I plan to show you a lesson plan for a Year 10 Psychology class, about how harmful messages in patriarchal societies have affected most people’s implicit biases. Learning to spot our own implicit biases is one of the easiest places to start when learning self-awareness and learning to create psychological safety in our society.

Content for today’s lesson

This lesson focuses on spotting and analysing literary devices and understanding how audiences view a text differently depending on their social and political context. We’ll look at the song Labour by Paris Paloma, which I love as a teaching tool for two reasons.

See YouTube for the official music videos for
labour and cacophony (labour)
by Paris Paloma

First, many students already know this song because it went viral on Tiktok (and then on the rest of social media). So they’re familiar with some of the lyrics, making more brain space available to do the “thinking” analysis tasks of this lesson.

Secondly, it’s often easier to spot literary devices in poetry texts than in prose like articles or novels, and song lyrics are a highly-effective form of poetry. So teaching Labour as a poetry text means again, students can put more energy towards learning or remembering the content.

If you’re an education student like me, this reasoning provides evidence of you meeting Australian Professional Standards of Teaching (APST) number 2: knowing the content and how to teach it.