Both groups completed a short review of primary and secondary sources, but the heart of today's lesson was within new vocabulary and completing half of a Venn diagram. Regarding the vocabulary, I got new insight on a misconception that the entire class had with the second group today. One of the vocabulary terms is Genocide. One student asked if somebody shooting people at a concert was considered genocide because we discussed that it is large scale murder, among other criteria. It took a bit of explanation to get students to think more about the Holocaust and massive scale over an extended period of time rather than deaths in the dozens. This was valuable to me because there was such a misunderstanding on what "large scale" really means. Mr. Scott and I were thinking in the hundreds of thousands to millions while they were thinking in terms of hundreds. That was a valuable lesson for me.
Mr. Scott also provided me with a good idea on how to present bias. Students were really struggling with this definition until he provided context that they could relate to: playing a sporting event out of town and having both of the refs live in the town of the opposing team. This was something that every student could either personally relate to, had seen before while watching an event, or could wrap their head around how that bias could occur. While the example isn't perfect, it gave students an anchor to remember the definition.
The final relevant piece I witnessed today was changing plans on the fly. For the first group, they were given just the Venn Diagram and told to practice their note taking skills and jot down anywhere from four to ten notes that they thought were significant in the three pages in the textbook. Some students nailed it, but most seemed confused, got wrong information, or simply just didn't know where to start. As a result, it was taking forever and it was missing the point. Thankfully, there was a disruption as it was school picture day, so Mr. Scott was able to use that time with the students downstairs to adjust the plan. He created a structured Venn Diagram where he chose 8-10 pieces of information from the reading that he thought was essential and removed one or two key terms from the sentence, and students would fill it in as they came across the information in the text. This helped students to be much more successful in the following class. But there were still misunderstandings as many students still wrote that Christopher Columbus was from Spain and was the first European to explore the Americas. With this template, though, Mr. Scott and I were able to spot these misunderstandings much more quickly and address them on the spot.
First a quick comment about genocide: The other thing about genocide, is that it's intent is different from other mass killings (besides number). It's intent is to ultimately to make a group of individuals extinct...that's a big difference from other forms of violence.
ReplyDeleteLove that you're seeing such good modeling from Mr. Scott. It's also good to see that seasoned teachers need to backtrack and adjust their plans, too :)