The Lunchroom Fight: Historical Perspective

I came across this lesson on the Stanford History Education Group website and thought it was a great way to teach historical perspective and bias.  The lesson basically gets students to think about how history is constructed by considering the different accounts from witnesses of a lunchroom fight.

I modified the lesson a bit for my own purposes by actually writing out fictional transcripts for the fight from different student perspectives.  I like the activity because it gives students very concrete examples of bias and perspective.  Students can see how witness accounts can be unreliable and this leads to a great discussion about evaluating sources for credibility. The lesson works well at the start of the year to get students thinking about how difficult it truly is for historians to piece the past together.

Here are the resources I created for the lesson.  Feel free to use them or modify them.


Student Interviews

Student Observation Form

Events Puzzle

A key concept for middle school social studies is understanding the cause and effect relationships between events.  I created a small exercise for my students to practice this skill for our unit on slavery.  I call these exercises Events Puzzles, though I'm sure I am not the first to come up with this.  The idea behind the exercise is very simple.  I gave my students 10-12 cards, each with a description of a historical event or fact related to slavery in the United States.  The cards were in a random order, but they all connected to each other in some way.  Students worked in groups to create a mind map with connecting words and arrows for the events.

It was interesting to see the different connections each group made and no two groups were the same.  Some students created a very methodical chain of events with no two events having more then one connection, while others had complicated webs with multiple connections for each event.

Rather then correcting the students puzzles, I had students wander around the room analyzing other groups puzzles for ideas.  Once they had seen each puzzle and recorded observations and ideas, they went back to their puzzle and made adjustments.  We had a discussion afterwords about why there were so many different ideas and if there was one correct way to do it.  We decided in the end that although some connections were wrong, there were many ways to solve the events puzzle.  It all depended on the connecting words.

I like these kinds of activities, because they really facilitate collaboration and problem solving.  Students learned from each other during the exercise and got a chance to review events we had studied and saw how they were connected.  I would love to find a way to expand on these kinds of exercises.  I think this would work well with Smart Boards or tablets (if only we had them!).

Here are the events I had my students make connections with.  It isn't a perfect list and I would be happy to hear suggestions of events that could be changed or added.

Events Puzzle

An Alternative to PowerPoint and Posters...Please

I have been experimenting with infographics as an alternative presentation format to the usual suspects of PowerPoint, Prezi, and the classic poster.  Infographics are visual representations of information with the intention of presenting complex ideas in a simple and easy to understand format.   What really separates an infographic from a poster is the idea of simplicity in the presentation of the information.

My 8th grade classes have been studying slavery in the United States and I wanted an engaging way for them to research and present their understanding of living conditions for African American slaves during the 19th century.  I teach in Vietnam at an American international school with an almost exclusively Vietnamese student population.  Teaching American history can be a bit challenging because there is a lack of context and background knowledge.  I turned to infographics as a tool to both engage students with the topic and to get them thinking critically about how to best present their knowledge.  I was very pleased with the results of the project and the discussions that sprang from their research.

Here are a few of the final products.

  

This project was not only a great way for students to present their findings, but also an opportunity to touch on visual literacy skills.  We are living in the digital age and how we communicate ideas and information is constantly changing.  Students need to be equipped with knowledge about visual aesthetics and how it can effect how efficiently their ideas are communicated to an audience.  For this particular assignment I stressed to students the importance of color choice, contrast, font, alignment of objects, and style repetition.  I also had them look at a number of exemplar infographics to get an understanding of how they differed from a simple poster.

The program I used for the project was easel.ly.  It is a free program and simple to use.  The one limitation I found with the program was the small size of each template.  Many of my students found a way around this by creating multiple slides that they later joined together using photojoiner.net.

Visual Literacy

This post is from my COETAIL blog.

Currently in my 8th grade social studies class we are examining the time period when Europeans and Native Americans first came into contact.  The emphasis of the unit is “Constructing the Past.”  Student look at a variety of sources and historical perspectives regarding a particular event, and using skills to evaluate sources for credibility, they piece together the event.

When students first learned of the massive Native American death toll due to European diseases, I was a bit underwhelmed with their reaction.  Maybe because it was the first block of the day and they were still waking up, but I had expected a bit more shock when they heard up to 90% of the Native population was killed by disease.  I realized of course that my students are not heartless, but they needed a more visual way to understand these figures.  I knew that they had studied the Black Plague the year before, and they knew it was a devastating disease.  I decided that a side by side comparison may help them understand just how volatile European diseases were to Native Americans.  I wanted students to first see the number of deaths compared, and then the percentage of the population killed.  These two figures tell very different stories.  Seeing only the numbers of dead would lead one to believe both epidemics were on the same level.  It isn't until you look at the proportion of the population killed that you can see the massive difference.  These figures are of course estimates since there are no accurate records of either epidemic.

After showing this image the next day there was a notable difference in their attitude.  Students began asking a lot of questions about why the Native Americans died, but not the Europeans, and if the remaining Native Americans were able to rebuild.  This began a good discussion about immunities, the spread of disease, and historical perspective.  It made it very clear to students that Europeans and Native Americans probably see the colonization of America in a very different light.