Student Engagement Strategies
Presentation Strategies
Political Cartoons
Political Cartoons serve as a snapshot of topics within that time period that created debates and can spark discussions within the classroom of the implications on public’s opinion. Political Cartoons are created in response to an event or public sentiment on a topic. By analyzing the Political Cartoon students are learning the importance of identifying key details within the cartoon. The minimal use of words within Political Cartoons can help all students’ especially English learners to focus on the visually assessing the purposeful creating of cartoons. The Teaching History website provides guidelines to ensure the use of Political Cartoons as an effective student engagement strategies. The guidelines includes different aspects of the Political Cartoons that students can focus on such as the argument, manipulation of images, point of view and colors.
Communication Strategies
Read Aloud
Read aloud is communication strategy in which the teacher and students read the text that is broken into chunks to the class. As someone is reading the text they are talking to the text or annotating to help them identify the main topics. This strategy allows the teacher to teach students how to identify key themes of the texts, the effects of language, and tone. The teacher can model how to read aloud and provide instruction on how to analyze texts to improve student skills. All student benefit by learning how to pronounce terms they have not seen before. This helps auditory learners and English learners who may struggle with reading. Teachers will be able to recognize if there are any misconceptions during the discussions about the text.
Gallery Walk
This strategy helps students that are visual learners and like to move around. This allows students to walk around the room to look at posters, quotes, documents or pictures that the teacher put up to encourage discussion. This could be helpful to introduce them to a new lesson, by allowing students to formulate questions based on what they see to identify what subject area they are interested in learning about as well as any background knowledge they have.
Organization Strategies
Two-Column Note Taking
Two column note taking allows students to organize the information they are receiving into categories to emphasize the main ideas and the connections of the text to their own lives or ideas. Once note taking is taught to students they individually formulate their own notes. Students then create groups in which they discuss the process, the strengths and weaknesses in their own notes. Once they evaluate their notes they add on any important details they missed.
Interactives
Interactives
Interactives help students learn how systems of governments work, what types of decisions key historical figures made and understand the consequences of decisions made. By using interactives students learn different things people take into account before making decisions. Students see how things work before their eyes rather than just talking about it, interactives make it a real world experience for students. They gain knowledge through hands on experiences.
Collective Strategies
Primary Sources
Finding Primary Sources helps students recognize what a primary source is, the importance of primary sources and data collection. Students often wonder how people know so much about the past and showing them what historians have, pieces of the past can create more interest in learning about history. By looking at primary sources they can better relate to the past because they see something from that time period. Primary sources make history real for them, they can connect with the material knowing that they have seen the evidence and it validates that certain events did happen because there is proof. The Reference and User Services Association helps give instruction on how to find, evaluate and use primary sources.
Living Images
Living images is a strategy in which students analyze a set of pictures, make decisions about their characters and role play. It is a strategy for students to take notes in order for them to learn about their character’s beliefs, lifestyle and feelings portrayed by the picture. As students role play for the class they write down what they have interpreted from the performance, and also write down what they have learned during the preparation for the performance. The class has a group discussion and later evaluate what they have learned from that performance. They also reflect on their own experience of going through the process.
Collaboration Strategies
Project Based Approaches
Theses tools facilitate group work to design debates, organize ideas and create focused projects. Visually seeing the overall picture of the evidence allows students to create effective claims and work together more efficiently. In essence this strategy works as a way to promote efficient use of time, organization of ideas and creating a clear picture of what students understand collectively. As students are using these tools they will hear one another’s misconceptions on the topic and will foster clarification within the group on the content.