In my previous post, The Best Resources For Teaching “What If?” History Lessons, I shared my experiences in having students create “What If?” slideshows about United States History and what a positive experience it was for my IB Theory of Knowledge class (I also shared important links from other teachers who do similar projects).

In that post, I mentioned that I was arranging for my IB students to come one day to my History class with ELL’s and help them to create similar slideshows. Well, we did that yesterday, and it went extremely well. You can see all seventeen of their slideshows in the comments section at our U.S. History class blog here. And here are two example:

North Korea won the Korea war

More presentations from yongquan

ferlazzo

More presentations from Austin Lorm

It only took a couple of class periods, and was an excellent opportunity for students to practice reason and logic, as well as creating opportunities for them to make “multiple touches” on material we had covered previously. In fact, it went so well that several of my colleagues and I are now planning to use this project a number of times in our ninth-grade English classes next year (in our unit on Nelson Mandela, for example, students might choose to do one on what would have happened if Mandela had died in prison, or if the white South Africans had not ever released him).

You might also be interested in seeing Photos Of Our “What If?” Project Day.

In addition to adding this post to the “What If?” best list I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’m adding it to The Best Posts On Helping Students Teach Their Classmates.