# data[].attributes.body
One thing that students can do to promote Higher Order Thinking is to make a digital story about an important event or person that applies to the unit that we will discuss. The students can choose anything they want that applies to the unit, and use pictures and videos to teach the class what they have learned. We could even do this in groups to help eliminate the possibility of students not having technology to complete the project. This project would be about 5 minutes in length with facts from the research that they have done. It should be used to tell a story about a certain event or person that they are interested in.

# data[].attributes.body
One thing that we could do is learn about the life of someone like Eleanor Roosevelt. The students could get into a few different groups and go over  (1) Her childhood, (2) Her family life with Franklin and their children, (3) Her life after Franklin contracted polio, (4) Her work in the White House as First Lady, and (5) Her life and work after Franklin's death. When they come up with a few ideas, students will then get into different groups involving one person from the other groups. They will then teach their new group what they have learned about her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
OVERVIEW

The jigsaw classroom is a research-based cooperative learning technique invented and developed in the early 1970s by Elliot Aronson and his students at the University of Texas and the University of California. Since 1971, thousands of classrooms have used jigsaw with great success.

The jigsaw classroom has a four-decade track record of successfully reducing racial conflict and increasing positive educational outcomes such as improved test performance, reduced absenteeism, and greater liking for school.

Just as in a jigsaw puzzle, each piece - each student's part - is essential for the completion and full understanding of the final product.

If each student's part is essential, then each student is essential; and that is precisely what makes this strategy so effective.

JIGSAW IN 10 EASY STEPS

The jigsaw classroom is very simple to use. If you're a teacher, just follow these steps:

STEP SEVEN

Bring the students back into their jigsaw groups.

STEP EIGHT

Ask each student to present her or his segment to the group.

Encourage others in the group to ask questions for clarification.

STEP NINE

Float from group to group, observing the process.

If any group is having trouble (e.g., a member is dominating or disruptive), make an appropriate intervention. Eventually, it's best for the group leader to handle this task. Leaders can be trained by whispering an instruction on how to intervene, until the leader gets the hang of it.

STEP TEN

At the end of the session, give a quiz on the material.

Students quickly come to realize that these sessions are not just fun and games but really count.

ABOUT ELLIOT ARONSON

Elliot Aronson is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He has long-standing research interests in social influence and attitude change, cognitive dissonance, research methodology, and interpersonal attraction. Professor Aronson's experiments are aimed both at testing theory and at improving the human condition by influencing people to change dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors.

Professor Aronson received his B.A. from Brandeis University in 1954, his M.A. from Wesleyan University in 1956, and his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1959. He has taught at Harvard University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Texas, and the University of California. In 1999, he won the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, making him the only psychologist to have won APA's highest awards in all three major academic categories: distinguished writing (1973), distinguished teaching (1980), and distinguished research (1999).

MORE ABOUT
ELLIOT ARONSON

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The jigsaw technique is a cooperative learning approach that reduces racial conflict among school children, promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience.

# data[].attributes.body
Predicting, clarifying, questioning, and summarizing are the steps of reciprocal teaching. The assignment would be for students to look at the inaugural speech of President Roosevelt. In the video provided below, he goes over a close reading of the inaugural speech. Students are in groups and talk about the speech with their group. First, the students will read and annotate the speech on their own. After they do that, they will come back together as a group and discuss the things that they learned. Questions they have and things that surprised them. This is a lot of student involvement to help them understand the speech and FDR's plan for the Great Depression.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a great tool for the Civil war. In this lesson, the students were able to choose a topic that interests them. The author explains how the unit before this one took months to complete, so students had a previous knowledge of the Civil War. Students are to choose a topic regarding the Civil War and present on it. The projects that the students came up with below were amazing. This is a great way to get your students excited and motivated to do a great job because they are already interested in the topic. They can choose a person or an event. It just needs to be something about the Civil War and how it impacted it. They can make a presentation with a poster, visual aids, video, power point, etc. This way, the students are already excited about their topic and it will help them teach the class better about the topic that they chose. For example, a student could talk about communication during the Civil War and make a newspaper article to read to the class that involves facts from their research that they do.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A MiddleWeb Blog
by Jody Passanisi & Shara Peters
The idea behind Project Based Learning is that students will understand more if they make meaning through inquiry based creation. Project Based Learning can apply to any discipline.

We've tried it in our history classroom to varying levels of success. Being proponents of constructivism, Project Based Learning was not too much of a stretch for us to embrace, pedagogically. However, there are some challenges that result.

In this blog post we'll describe two eighth grade American History units (the U.S. Civil War and the Reconstruction Era) in which we incorporated Project Based Learning and share our reflections on those experiences.

Technology and the Civil War

Our Civil War Unit has always been something we weren't fully satisfied with, so it seemed natural for us to try out Project Based Learning with this unit. We had scaffolded the Civil War extensively with a "Causes of the Civil War Unit" that took months to complete, so students were primed with contextual understanding before beginning this unit.

While PBL often doesn't put parameters on the inquiry process, we did create a few parameters for the students. The framing question was about Civil War technology. Students were placed in groups according to interest in communication, medicine, espionage, weaponry, maritime warfare, etc., and told to explore and answer the question: How did (your group's type of technology) change the Civil War?

The students were only given two "rules": 1) Their projects should fully answer the question and be beautiful, meaningful, sophisticated, and enduring; and 2) They could conduct their research using books or the Internet engine SweetSearch, a search tool that limits results to academically vetted articles and avoids much of the "world wide web" served up by Google or Bing.

Curiosity and engagement

The research and inquiry process was incredible to see. Because the students were able to choose a topic that interested them, there was automatic interest on the part of the students - they were interested in the topic for its own sake. More times than not, students walked in the door to our classroom talking about their project, sat down and immediately got to work before the bell rang, and we did not even have to tell them that class was starting.

Also, the narrow and academically reliable nature of the results on SweetSearch allowed the students to assign more credibility to their search results, spending more time reading for comprehension rather than deciding whether or not to throw out a source. These factors, combined with the space for creativity that was allowed by the open-endedness of the prompt, made for a level of engagement that we have yet to see in any other independent work we have devised.

Examples of student work

Our students created informative and creative presentations that showcased their knowledge to their peers. While there were still the ubiquitous PowerPoints and (now) Prezis, there were also movies, skits, and game shows used as platforms for the students to share what they learned with their audience. One group, charged with conveying how communication changed the war, made a functioning telegraph to show just how quickly messages were sent using this new technology, in contrast to older forms of information transfer.

Another team, also presenting about communication, created a newspaper. In a fairly meta way, they explained how communication affected the people at home. They even included an obituary section and acted out a discussion about the names of the deceased. They showed an understanding both of the content, and more importantly, the impact of the technologies they chose to examine on the American Civil War and on modern war in general.

We had less PBL success during Reconstruction

Our subsequent experience with Project Based Learning for the Reconstruction Era was not quite as successful. Why? We have a few hypotheses. For one, the students did not have as much scaffolding for this unit as they did for their Civil War studies. Without the framing context comparable to what they had for the Civil War PBL assignment, students had difficulty figuring out where to begin their research.

Students seemed to find the concept of the Civil War a little more straightforward than Reconstruction. At the very least, there is an agreed upon beginning and end for the War, whereas even the chronological parameters for the Reconstruction Era are debated. Next time we teach this unit, we plan to provide students with more general context for Reconstruction before they break off into subtopic groups for independent research.

Project Learning pros and cons

There are some definite pros and cons when using PBL for history classes. We can see how this kind of approach might make some teachers, especially those who really feel like certain facts and events must be understood and mastered, go nuts.

The open-endedness of PBL, even with the inclusion of some project guidelines, requires the teacher to yield some control, and that is going to be a challenge for some of us who are more accustomed to holding the reins of facts and chronology pretty tightly.

Similarly, since PBL is most often done in teams, it is always possible for issues of work inequity to arise. (We have a system for equal sharing of responsibility in group work that we'll talk about it in a future post.) However, the amazing creativity, and the spectrum of that creativity, that you see with PBL is definitely worth giving up some of the control. And the student investment in the material cannot be understated. Isn't that what we want - for the students to really engage and care about this stuff? Another plus: Because of the nature of PBL (choice, student interests, teaming, etc.), differentiation and multiple modalities are built into its construct.

What we want in history class is to bring meaning and relevancy to these stories about things that happened long ago. PBL goes a long way to help with this: students are interested and driven to learn because of increased autonomy and the drive of inquiry. Students can make meaning from historical events- and even if it isn't the meaning that we intended in the first place, it is no less powerful, and probably more enduring.
How about you? Have you tried PBL in your classroom? What's worked? What's been a challenge?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A MiddleWeb Blog by Jody Passanisi & Shara Peters The idea behind Project Based Learning is that students will understand more if they make meaning through inquiry based creation. Project Based Learning can apply to any discipline. We've tried it in our history classroom to varying levels of success.

# data[].attributes.body
Something I could do for this is when I teach about the Civil War between the North and the South in the United States. We could have the class split up into two teams, do their research, and come back for a debate on the issue as to why their side should win the war. Students would be randomly chosen what team they are on. This way, students will gain a different perspective of each side and come up with strong arguments together. I could even be a judge and decide which side I think won.

# data[].attributes.body
An idea for cooperative learning would be making a digital story. Students can get into groups and choose between the life of a slave, plantation owner, or merchant. The objective is for students to tell a story and gain different ideas and perspectives. The research would include facts about slavery, real life journals, and opinions of how they want everyone to perceive their person of choice. This can be a real life person of someones life that they study, or it can be made up based on the facts that they have come up with through their research.