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Maryfrances Troha - Short Essay BClassroom Success Story Teaching U. S. HistoryFor high school students, the 1920s has great appeal because nearly all of the students are familiar with organized crime figures featured in motion pictures and television programming. Some are familiar with “flapper” girls and the Charleston dance craze. However, beyond these two examples, they know very little about the era. In conjunction with teaching the novel The Great Gatsby , I designed and implemented a project to increase the scope of their knowledge base of the 1920s so they could better understand the context of Fitzgerald’s novel and the big questions he raises about the Jazz Age.Day one : Preparation and orientation to assignment: • brain stormed a list of what facts, names, or things they knew about the 1920s (allotting five minutes); • shared items from their lists; some had sports or popular entertainment trivia but most knew very little except for gangster related material; students added new concepts to lists; • viewed a list of the next day’s research categories on the overhead projector: S & D - Science and Discoveries N & E - News and Events / National and World: crime, wars, politics, leaders, revolutions - Arts - literature and writers, visual arts and artists, music and musicians; P E & R - Popular Entertainment and Recreation: movies, radio, dance, sports, fads D L - Domestic Life: fashions, lifestyles, transportation, economy and salaries, gender roles
• Students copied the categories and abbreviations into notebooks.
• Students worked quickly in pairs to classify information on brainstorm lists into categories. • Students worked quickly in pairs to turn the information into a question suitable for a Jeopardy quiz question with answer. Students shared questions and discussed the scope of the categories all students felt confident that they understood the process. • Homework assignment: Each student was to prepare at least five 4x6 index cards or measured pieces of paper. On one side of each card, the student would write one of the category abbreviations centered at the top of the card . On the opposite side of each card, his name was to be written in the lower left area. In addition to the prepared cards, he should have had with him his category definitions and his Guide to the Research Paper booklet containing Work Cited formats. As part of the preparation for the this assignment, he was to refamiliarize himself with Work Cited formats. Day 2 - Library media center - preselected books on cart / inter net available • In the library media center, each student was to: 1. find at least one piece of information per category; 2. neatly write the information in one or two clearly worded sentences under the centered abbreviated category heading; 3. write the correct Work Cited entry below the sentences to identify the source of their information; 4. as homework,write an appropriate question on the name side of the card. All cards and questions were due the next day. • Five completed cards, one card per topic, was the minimum requirement equivalent to a “D” grade. Five cards per topic was the maximum accepted. Any students submitting identically worded sentences or questions lost the point value of these cards. Day 3 - Classroom - five groups formed after all cards were collected • Each group received a stack of randomly divided cards and was instructed to sort them into categories and rubber band them together. • The class period was spent quizzing each other within groups on the stack of cards the group had. At a signal from me, each group passed its stack to the next group. • Near the end of the period, each group selected an order of panelists to participate in the next day’s Jeopardy Contest. Day 4 - Classroom - 5 desks were arranged at the front of the room. Team members sat in rows in order of participation during the five rounds. • I chose the first question of Round 1 in the category I selected; the first panelist to correctly answer the question chose the next category and so on for the next four questions. • Round 2 began with the category choice of the 2nd set of panelists from the highest scoring team and continued through five rounds for a total of twenty-five questions selected at random by me from the students’ stacks. Day 5 In class writing activity: in this short analytic writing assignment, students responded to the following: • What generalizations can begin to be made about the 1920s based on the information gathered by the class? • What categories were you most curious about and what more would you be interested in researching? • Speculate on what aspects of the 1920s could be woven into an interesting plot conflict and setting. Observations on the success of the exercise This assignment accomplished many learning objectives for me. Among them were the following: • students had ownership of the overview of the novel’s background rather than the traditional approach of depending on me for an orientation lecture with them passively note taking; • student’s familiarized themselves with sources of information on the 1920s in a hands-on context that was easy, fast and offered little threat; • everyone shared everyone’s research thereby establishing a common knowledge base upon which to draw in later discussions of the the novel; • students were keyed into searching for mention of their interest area as they read the novel; • upon completion of the novel, students were asked to do a multiple intelligence concept project of their own design based on a value or cultural attitude depicted in the novel. Although some of the projects were creative in nature, most of the projects were historical research-based and stemmed from interests the students discovered in this introductory assignment.
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