It's been nearly two years since I have written anything of substance on this blog. The pandemic hit me hard. There were many days where I simply could think of nothing to say. It was both a blessing to get more time with my family and a disheartening two years. It was, as for so many of you, life changing. There is nothing like having life as we know it stop to make us think about how we want to spend our time.
Most of us don't want to start over. As we switch to distance learning, we are trying to balance our students' mental well-being with their academic needs. To that end I am thinking about what I had already planned to do for the last two months of the year versus what is realistic. Since, I don't know how long we will be doing distance learning, I am planning for finishing the school year remotely. I HOPE to see my students in our classroom to finish the year, but who knows?
Some changes I have made already:
- Instead of having a final exam, I am giving students a project.
- We will have one more exam (open note, open book)
- All quizzes are now open note, open book
- Independent student notebooks occur at home are followed by in-person discussions
- Altering some of the content pieces to make distance learning more feasible. For example instead of focusing on specific new content which is difficult for some of my new students to access, I am focusing more on skills such as writing, analysis, and synthesis.
- Changing collaborative activities to independent projects
It's this last one that I will discuss specifically in this post: changing a collaborative activity/project to an independent project.
The Civil Rights movement is an interesting era. My students argue that we are in a new period of the movement or that the movement never ended. For the purpose of this post, I’m referring to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. I’ve written about this era here and here. It is one of my favorite eras to explore with students in part because of its relevancy.
A key theme in our study is an examination of where we are today. We focus on three major groups that we have already discussed as part of our Civil Rights study: African Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, and women. Students can advocate for other groups such as gays, but they need to be prepared to do extra research to identify how rights changed or didn’t from the 1950s and 60s to today.
