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I was off-campus for almost four days last week while directing our senior Kairos retreat for September, as I have been doing every year. With my seniors, I’m able to simply assign a chapter in the textbook with the directions, “Teach this to yourself,” and they do it; with sophomores, I felt the need to create daily assignments.
My modern world history students, for example, read about the Zimmerman telegraph and summarized in three sentences, or compared or contrasted the Spanish flu pandemic to the Black Death in a single paragraph. To pull it all together upon my return – and to spare me from having to plan a lecture – I set up debates around WWI.
Students knew which topic they were assigned and which side of that topic they had to prepare for. The first ten-minutes of class was for groups to organize themselves into roles for the debate and prepare for their specific role.
After the debates, students were assigned to write a paragraph for each of the topics they had not debated.
As with other activities in World History 2, I’m trying to be as conscientious as possible for our shared class time together. We’re all in the same room at the same time for a reason; and the corollary is that if we don’t need to be in the same room at the same time, then we don’t need to be. As such, following the debate, students were welcome to write their paragraphs in the classroom, or they were welcome to go elsewhere to do it — or work on a higher-priority task for another class (the paragraphs were due to Canvas at 11:59pm).
All in all, I think the lesson went well — from beginning to end. The workload seemed appropriate for the days when I was away on retreat, and the closing activity – the debates – worked quite well as a summative performance.