Contemporary American Indian History

Classroom Activities and Implementation

The strategies I will employ during this unit are designed to lead students to thoroughly research and analyze text to determine how the Menominee achieved tribal sovereignty and self-determination. Students will reach this goal by actively engaging in a number of strategies and class activities throughout the curricular unit that are intended to increase student knowledge on the content, empower students and help them achieve mastery of the Common Core State Standards designated for the unit.

Strategy 1: Anticipation Guide

Before delving into our curricular unit on the Menominee tribe, I want to activate students’ background knowledge on Native Americans in general. While I anticipate that students will have limited and generic knowledge on Native Americans in general, I know they will have no knowledge of the Menominee tribe. However, it is still a good practice to poll the class to assess what students already know and build interest in the topic.

In an effort to assess student background knowledge and hook them on the unit of study, I will distribute an anticipation guide. Traditionally anticipation guides are used to uncover a student’s knowledge on a particular topic and fosters great discussion. It helps to set the tone for the particular unit as the statements that students will discuss are related to the content and major concepts of a unit. This works particularly well with controversial topics that will elicit strong opinions and debate within the classroom. Considering that my students are opinionated and get extremely engaged when it comes to debatable topics, this is the best course of action.

In addition, anticipation guides help to set a purpose for reading as students. This is important for my students because often times they dread reading texts, especially if they are lengthy. This activity will increase their interest in our topic and will heighten their desire to read the text so that they can look for information within the text that either affirms or conflicts with their initial responses on the anticipation guide. Lastly, they foster active reading and critical thinking.³⁵

Though there are typically anticipation guides that one can google search, I prefer to create my own for this topic (Appendix B). The statements are intended to be controversial in nature so that students will immediately form a strong opinion, and be willing to share them in the class discussion that will follow the anticipation guide. Students are typically willing to share their thoughts and opinions when activities are opinion based and there is no right or wrong answer. In this case, the anticipation guide includes statements that students will either mark as true or false. While there is a great chance that students have no background knowledge on the Menominee tribe, the goal is to get a general consensus on what knowledge students have about Native Americans in general.

Strategy 2: Annotating and Analyzing Text

Annotating text is a strategy that I live by in my classroom. I notice that when students are actively annotating the text while they read, they better comprehend the text and it allows them to better analyze texts. Annotating text increases student engagement as they are required to mark the text using designated signals.  The purpose of annotating the text is to increase student comprehension, engagement and interest of the text. I use annotations in various forms throughout the school year.  At times, students are required to only abide by the signals we’ve established for the class. As the year progresses, there may be a focus question, either self or teacher selected, that students aim to answer as they read.

For this unit, we will read multiple texts many of which will be primary sources and informational texts. It is important for students to encounter primary texts like the Menominee Treaties of 1854, newspaper articles that represent the time period and transcripts of interview of tribal members petitioning the government to restore their treaty rights. At the same time, they will encounter secondary text as well to supplement the primary sources, give us a basis to compare and contrast the information and build more knowledge and information regarding the content. 

Strategy 3: Interpreting Political Cartoons

Another strategy that I will use during the unit is interpreting and analyzing political cartoons. This is another effort to engage students and get them to think critically. This strategy allows all students to access the content since this includes very few words, yet they have to connect what they are learning about the topic in order to properly analyze the cartoon.

Using the College of the Menominee Nation’s Special Collections, we will access the DRUMS newsletter from that has a political cartoon on its front page. Students will analyze this cartoon independently first. Later students will turn and talk to discuss their findings.

This will require students to critically observe the image to determine the illustrator’s intended purpose and message. Students will begin by writing down what they observe in the image, paying particular attention the image and the words that supplement the image. Then students will reflect and analyze the political cartoon drawing connections to and citing evidence from the text we have read. Lastly, students will discuss their analysis amongst their classmates first before sharing out whole class.  

Appendix A

RI 7.1 Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

RI 7.2 Determine two or more central ideas in a text and analyze their development over the course of the text.

RI 7.6 Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how the author distinguishes his or her position from that of others.

Appendix B: Anticipation Guide