Module 10

 

Making Content Connections                           Your Name: Alicia Leninger  Date: 6/29
Lesson Goal:	Complete the Unit Activity Packet- Understand Civil Rights in the Modern Era
Content Area:	USVA History	Specific Topic:	Modern Era- Civil Rights
Grade	11th and 12th	Estimated Time:	45 minutes
Strategy	Jigsaw/ Think- Pair- Share
Describe how the strategy is used as a before-during- and/or after-reading activity   (List steps of strategy)	The class is divided into groups and each group is in charge of one activity in the packet (assigned by the teacher). Within each group, students are assigned roles: note-taker, speaker, time taker and so on. The students will have 20 minutes to complete their individual group activity and then the remainder of the time, the group will nominate one individual to travel to the other groups to share their knowledge they have of their assigned activities. Basically, the students become an “ expert” on their activity and teach it to their classmates until the packet is completed in its entirety.
Describe how you would incorporate the strategy into a content lesson   (application of strategy)	Basically, the Unit would start off with a basic 10-minute lecture introducing the topic. Students will take notes and follow along with the teacher. After, the teacher will guide the students through one activity and model what the students will be doing on their own. They the students will divide into groups to complete individual activities and then the groups will cross share to ensure that everyone has all the activities completed. Having the students complete the packet on their own would a. take too much time and b. result in one student doing all the work and then simply letting the other copy off them. By dividing them into groups and assigning them roles we can ensure that there is whole group and individual accountability.
Please attach any materials needed for explanation of the strategy.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SQZDeh68_-0iNi62RWszksbm1WS_V-T4kl9zUoGmXf4/edit?tab=t.0

When I was in school, I always looked at groups activities as a horrendous ordeal and some sort of divine punishment. I would rather work by myself then trust anyone else to do the work. 9 times out of 10, it would be me doing all the work and my classmates simply putting their name on the final product. Flash forward to modern classrooms and students absolutely love group projects. Why? Because they sit back have let one student do all the work and they simple copy from them.

As a teacher, this is incredibly frustrating. How can these copiers be retaining any of the information they are copying? Answer: they’re not! For this reason, these readings this week were very helpful to me because now I feel like I have a solid strategy to combat this. I learned that students nowadays are very slow, it takes them YEARS to complete an activity that would have taken me one class period. For this reason, it is almost required that teacher’s break-up the work if we want to cover anything in class. I learned that for group work to well work, you need to assign roles to each of the students. This makes sure that there is not only group accountability, but also individual accountability.

 Above, I use the jigsaw and an iteration of Think-Pair-Share, but I would also like to try out some other strategies such as Round-Table, and Reader’s Theater.  I think especially for History, acting certain parts would be easier than explain it. Round table gives me Socratic Seminar vibes which normally is only associated with English, but I after reading, I think History may benefit from having group discussion like this. Finally, I think it is important to have a variety of different activities for the students because if you do the same thing over and over, they might get bored. However, it would be essential for us to model appropriate behavior if we really want it to work. Finally, one question I have is I am really interested in using the Reader’s Theater for history, but many of the topics are very sensitive (slavery, holocaust, ect). How would one pick and choose which activities are appropriate. Furthermore, how to we even student to interact and move into groups that they may or may not like?