Across the thirty-odd interviews of teachers and administrators across the country that Paul Totah and I conducted for our book, one of the common threads has been student choice. I have tried to keep that in mind while designing learning experiences for my own modern world history course.
Last week, for example, we were studying the self-determination of Britain’s colonies around the globe, and so I designed a learning activity that allowed students to choose which country they wanted to investigate further. They could choose between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. You can see the page for activity.
A simple jigsaw allows students to hear about every country even though they had only read deeply about one.
One final element that I like about this sort of activity is that when it comes to assessing the material from this portion of the textbook, I have to remember that not everyone read deeply about every country and cannot therefore be held responsible for it all. My questions must therefore be far more open-ended, asking students to address the general issue of political self-determination, and allowing them to incorporate the examples of their choosing to support their response. This lends itself, in my opinion, to better, more flexible, assessments.