Need a new idea to enliven a class this last marathon month of the school year? Are students telling you they lack the motivation to engage with a difficult text? Are your typical reading checks just not cutting it? Burton Williams-Inman has got you: have students vote documents “off the island.”
In his 9th grade history class, Burton has always engaged students to a high degree in primary source documents. He creates entire interactive packets to scaffold students as they make sense of not-so-quickly-accessible content in contextualized and nuanced ways. DBQs or document-based-questions are staples in history AP exams, and this kind of work begins to pave the way for analytical, interpretive prowess. Students always did the packets, but Burton was interested in designing a follow up enrichment activity to put individual’s work on display for the collective. Enter, voting primary source documents off the island, a delightful play on the popular reality show, Survivor. I’m planning to adapt it to do something similar with my students at the end of the year about all of the books we read throughout. I sat down with Burton to learn how he did it:
- Theoretically everyone comes to the class with this packet of document analysis (see above) about all of the primary source documents completed. They begin it in class and whatever doesn’t get finished is homework.
- In class, I randomly(ish) put them in groups and assign each group a primary source document to defend. In small classes I had pairs and bigger classes I had 3 per group. I find that 2-3 is the magic number; more students and the work is less equitably shared.
- Each group gets 5-10 minutes to create a pitch with their groups as to why their document (A-F) is the most important in terms of the driving question. Last time the driving question was: What were the primary reasons for the Fall of Rome?
- Each group presents their 1-2 minute pitch. Students can then ask probing or clarifying questions after.
- Then, depending on how much time you have, we vote the first one to two document(s) off the island. You can switch up your emphasis on the criteria on the presentation (could be communication-based or content-based). I usually emphasize we are voting off “documents NOT people.” If you don’t, you will usually get students whose feelings are hurt that will vote vengefully in later rounds that will derail the lesson. You can either run it by “which documents were the least effective” or “the most effective.” I usually have students just raise their hands to vote.
- Then the remaining groups/documents that haven’t been voted off have 90 seconds to revise their pitch (and reduce it to 30 seconds) with their partner. If you want to, you could say that in this round, they can address other documents in their pitch if they like. The participants/groups that are voted off now are assigned another document to create questions for when they pitch next.
- The remaining groups do their 30 second pitch. Then two more group are voted off, and the fun continues until one primary source document is left standing.
- This is about the process, so all students that participate fairly and evenly get points for participating.
Burton is the first to admit that this is a time consuming activity that can be difficult to fit in if you are rushing through content and don’t have time to focus on skills. However, he has noticed that students that engage in this activity over primary source texts seem to demonstrate deeper understanding of them on the next assessment. All in all he has found that “it can be a great way to get kids more energetically or passionately engaged with some dry primary and secondary sources.”
Thanks, Burton. This teaching idea most definitely would NOT be voted off the pedagogical-teaching-idea island (ummm that would be an amazing island) if I had anything to say about it 🙂