Teaching Strategies
Ancestry Study
Students will begin the academic year with a three-week structured beginning segment on ancestry, wherein they will be completing a rubric based, research and presentation project exploring a chosen Ancient Kingdom of Africa once they have learned about and explored each one. Students will begin this three-week intro on Day one with a survey about their feelings on ancestry and learning about their history. The time after the survey will be spend in classroom discussion. Day two of the ancestry project students will learn about the origins of man through a power-point presentation with images and archeological findings. Day three of the intro unit will be a walk through the resources portion of the African continent. Students will be given an exploratory task. A picture of the coded regions of Africa based on resources will be displayed on the board. Students will then be given a scavenger hunt sheet with different resources on it to complete. The scavenger hunt list contains objects that represent all the different resources that are currently found in Africa. Students will write a reflection piece about the scavenger hunt where they will answer a series of fact and opinion-based questions within their writing. The subsequent three days will be a presentation on the Seven Kingdoms of Africa (with extensions on Egypt and Cleopatra’s Kingdom, The Empire of Ghana: a cosmopolitan and Islamic History, as well as the Twelve Sultans of Kilwa) using a power point, text and photos. On Day six of the two-week introduction, students will take a quiz on and choose one of the Seven Kingdoms to create their own presentation board and research project on. The next four days will be allocated for the students to work with the teacher to complete their presentations and essays. The presentation boards and essays will be graded using a specific teacher-created rubric. The following week, three to five students will be presenting their projects per day. Each student will give a ten-minute presentation with five minutes for questions and giving feedback, as well as a class rating chart for each presentation to facilitate that feedback. Every student will also self-report their own interpretation of the grade they should get based on their work and feedback of their writing and presentation (the teacher will use a rubric and student conference to give feedback on the writing components). The goal is to immerse students as much as possible in their ancestry and cultural history, as well as to connect them with parts of their identity so they will eventually apply historical context to this in a responsible, effective and purposeful way.
Student Courtroom Debates and Discussions
The Historical Events listed above will be delivered on a timeline. This timeline will be handed out following the three-week ancestry project (see Figure 1). The unit will take form as we spend the first week discussing the elements of debate, as well as the rules and expectations for our Student Court-Room. Day one of this set-up week will be to discuss what a student court room is and consists of. This will contain a teacher-created power-point presentation, as well as some written outlines for the students to use as a structure. At the end of day one, students will discuss and write about what it means to argue a point responsibly. This will be structured around the concept of getting one’s point across through debate. Day two will be the Student Courtroom Rules Document. This will be a teacher and student created document that will be transferred to a poster that will act as the “Rule Book” for our courtroom. The students will use the rule outlines the teacher presents for a traditional debate if adding their own input to the document. At the end of the second day of the opening week, students will sign the document of regulations for the debates. Days three and four of the opening week will include a practice debate with the students using the debate components. Day five of the opening week will consist of a class reflection followed by individual write-ups of the practice debate. Once the Student Courtroom has been established, students will begin learning about the historical events listed on their provided timeline (see Figure 1). These events will form the basis and structure for the debates and discussions had in class.
Timeline
Figure 1: The Figure above is a timeline of all the events students will discuss, debate and learn about by participating in the student courtroom.
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