| Teaching in a "21st Century Classroom" where everything is collaborative, technology is used for more than half of our day, and there are very few formal assessments can be tough for parents and administrators to completely understand at first. When their child comes home from school each day and talks about playing Minecraft for an hour and... |  Minecraft success! Anthony and Jack built the Washington Monument. |
 Introducing ourselves during a Mystery Skype. | ...Skyping with a class from Sao Paolo, Brazil, some might wonder what it is these kids are being taught these days! I want my parents and administrators to rest-assured that my students will not only be prepared for a vastly different world than we adults were prepared for, but they'll also be prepared for a typical middle school environment with worksheets, packets, textbooks, and tests. |
After all, I want my students to be successful in middle school and beyond and that means learning how to read a textbook, complete worksheets accurately, and prepare for difficult tests! Just because I don't use those techniques often in my classroom (anymore), doesn't mean that other teachers will do the same.
| So the way I decided to prepare my students for middle school was by finding a textbook that I actually liked that was written at an appropriate reading level for my students and had rigorous content where students would benefit from teacher-led instruction. I created worksheet questions that I felt promoted whole class or small group discussions, prompted deep thinking and role-playing, and utilized my students' literal comprehension skills as well as inferential comprehension skills. | |
 Click on the image above to go to the original source. | I wrote tests that didn't just rely on recall, but on a deep understanding of the important concepts from each chapter. Although some questions needed to be multiple choice and True/False (to prepare them for these in the future), the best questions I created are short answer and essay (Yes, I teach 5th graders, so I have varied expectations for each student. An Answer Key alone could not be used to grade these tests!). The topic of this curriculum is "U.S. Constitution and Government." I've selected more rigorous objectives and Big Ideas than our district requires because with increased teacher support should come a higher level of understanding. You can find our objectives here, along with some of the activities we will be doing in addition to the textbook. |
Our culminating activity will take several weeks. We will participate in a simulation where we colonize Mars! Wait. Hopefully, your first reaction is "What does colonizing Mars have to do with our Constitution and government?" Well, I'm glad you asked! Students will soon discover once on the red planet that life without rules and laws can be very difficult (thanks to some "events" that happen to make sure they feel that way!). They will want to create a formal government and might choose to use the U.S. government as a model, or they might not.
 | To get my students started, we had a whole-class discussion about what they think we needed to have in our government and what we didn't want to have. I suggested that they look at the U.S. Constitution's Preamble to see if there was anything in there that we wanted in our own government. It turns out, we liked a lot of it! I then handed out several other preambles to other country's constitutions (as well as the United Nations) and asked them to extract phrases out of those that we wanted as well. They could only use sections that they completely understood and could defend though. |
| We then created a Google Spreadsheet that I gave everyone access to, and projected it on the board. After teaching them about the stresses that come with editing the same document as 25 others, I let them add their direct quotes to the spreadsheet. We now had a long list of phrases that represented beliefs that we had about our government on Mars. |  Click on the image above to view the original document. |
 Click on the image above to view the original document. | I had everyone try to eliminate overlapping ideas on the spreadsheet, copy the remaining ideas over to a new shared Google Doc, and revise it so that it looked like a coherent paragraph (and then edit any mistakes). Believe it or not, our final product was pretty good! |
| So now that we had our beliefs expressed in our Preamble, it was time to explain how our government would work. So we decided to write the rest of our constitution! I pointed out that what we were doing is following a format similar to the U.S. Constitution and my students were pretty amazed! I helped organize the students at first, asking some questions that would get them all on the same page. Then, based on what they said, I suggested that they divide and conquer to get things accomplished. Last year, students wanted to base their Mars government on the U.S. Constitution rather than "go rogue!" I got them to the point where they suggested that they divide up into three groups like the three articles in our Constitution that explains the responsibilities of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, respectively, and they did! We used the same Google Doc from our Preamble activity, and each group started on a different page of the GDoc and typed how they thought their branch of the government should operate. Whenever their branch overlapped with another branch, they sent liaisons to the other group to discuss how they should proceed (some amazing collaboration here!). Throughout the whole process, I lurked on the GDoc and re-directed them whenever I thought they were getting off-track or going down a dead-end path. I made suggestions for collaborating with other groups and helped them with their wording when they needed it. |  Click on the image above to view the original document (scroll down).  Click on the image above to view the original document (scroll down).  Click on the image above to view the original document (scroll down). |
So often in the past, after spending a couple months learning the lessons in the textbook, I would happily move on to the next unit in social studies, but that's not what students need! They need the opportunity to apply what they've learned to a new situation, and our Mars simulation provides them with that experience. I encourage everyone to consider taking a content-area unit that they teach every year, and creating a culminating experience where the students can create something using what they've learned from their lessons. Only then will students hold on to the information that they learned from your instruction!
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