Yesterday, I posted NPR’s Robert Krulwich Provides Another Excellent Idea For A History Lesson. I didn’t try that idea out today, but tried another one that I had previously posted (“Let’s Play ‘History As A List’” Is A Fascinating Idea).
And, actually, I didn’t try it out precisely as I had described, either. Nevertheless, it went well, and here’s what I did.
We’re just finishing a unit on Reconstruction in my U.S. History class for Intermediate and Beginning English Language Learners. I had seven minutes left in class, and I asked students to simply list three words that represent Reconstruction, and then follow it with three sentences describing why they picked each word.
I did a quick model by doing one describing me — handsome, smart, strong (all to great hilarity).
Students grasped it quickly. Here’s a typical example of what they wrote:
Money
Change
Discrimination
I picked money because Congress used it to build schools.
I picked change because things were different after the Civil War.
I picked discrimination because the southern government made unfair laws for the blacks.
It worked as an easy formative assessment.
It wasn’t the “higher-order thinking” version that I discussed in my original post, but using it like this provides a good starting point.
For all I know, teachers may have been using this kind of exercise for years. But it was new to me and, perhaps, new to some of this blog’s readers….
Great idea. It might be nice to try this technique with some sample cloze sentences to encourage different sentence structures (e.g. I choose ________ since __________________. ). Just a thought.