Planning

Differentiation – I am attempting to make this assignment engaging and accessible to as many students as possible by allowing a wide variety of ways that students may present their journals. My goal is to allow students to demonstrate their content know within a narrative framework. As long as the basic requirements are met, I am open to any formats that can be used.

Differentiation – I have rather enforced differentiation by assigning political leanings and ethnic origins to students. I chose to do this because when I conducted a similar assignment in the past around 80% of students chose to write as white Continental male soldiers. I believe that bring students outside of their expectations (and sometimes comfort zones) can provide rich learning experiences.

Assessment – The homework from the following learning period will let me know if the students are where they need to be in terms of content knowledge to complete this project. Since it is graded, the homework assignment will count as a formal assessment. Informally, having the students share character sheet responses gives me a brief idea of whether or not the students are grasping the assignment. The bibliography check lets me make sure that the students are researching, finding suitable sources, and are citing properly. The warm-up question responses give me an idea if the students are applying their content knowledge and they also provide an opportunity to prod procrastinators into action. Most of these assessments are aimed at higher-order thinking, except for the bibliography check and the homework from the previous lesson, which are more for housekeeping purposes.

Example of Student Product – Students may use Twitter, Screen-O-Matic, Wordpress, or Microsoft Word to create their final product. I would also be open to other tools; however, the students MUST obtain permission from me before using alternate tools.