Rationale
Every January and February, through their core Language Arts class, the students at Thoreau choose an influential person, research that person, present their person in the form of a living history museum (referred to as Brotherhood), and write a biographical essay. During this year's research and production phase of the project, I paid attention to how my students went about gathering and processing the biographical information necessary for the project. It was not any surprise to me that of the students who had seemingly unsuccessful portrayals, the majority were my students. Once I processed the performance of my students (both in the living museum and on their biographical essay), I realized that they did not really know how to go beyond the superficial information to make their biographical project any richer. The core language arts teacher is not as able to spend one-on-one time with students as I am (they have between 40-50 students per class).
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