Recently I have been struggling to get students to include
more information in their writing. Many
of my students have been basing their essays on opinions and generalizations
with very little factual information. This
has particularly been a problem in my AP U.S. History class, which is very concerning considering that the three essays on the AP U.S. History exam constitute
half of the final score. By lacking
concrete, factual information students fail to prove that they have an
understanding of the significance of the era and thus do not meet the
requirements for an AP essay.
I have done previous lessons to address this problem, such as
having students examine essays with and without factual information (from the College
Board website) and the supporting a thesis activity in Michael
Henry’s U.S. History Skillbook
(this book is an excellent resource for history teachers), but after grading
the last set of essays written by my students, I realized that I needed another
activity to reinforce the importance of including facts in an essay. Not wanting to completely scrap the content
that we needed to cover, I decided to integrate this activity with our study of
the Progressive Era.
For this lesson, students were paired up and given a short
biography of a figure related to the Progressive Era (Carnegie, Debs, Du Bois,
Jones, La Follette, Paul, Rockefeller, Roosevelt, Tarbell--although there are
many other possibilities). Pairs of
students were given the biographical briefings that accompany the “Progressive
Era Thinkers Meet the Press” activity from History
Alive! Twentieth Century United States
History (biographies could also be found on online sources such as the
links gathered by Professor Robert Maloy and his students at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst -- http://resourcesforhistoryteachers.wikispaces.com/USII.8). After analyzing the biography of their
assigned individual, students were to determine what this person felt were the
most important issues facing American society and how these issues could best
be addressed.
Each group was then provided with an outline of a head (such
as the one included on the National Gallery of Art’s website -- http://www.nga.gov/feature/shaw/s6151a.shtm). Students were instructed to fill the head
with a mixture of text and illustrations to demonstrate the thoughts, ideas, visions, and
motivations of the person they read about.
I stressed to students that they
must include specific facts and details to create an informative representation
of a Progressive Era leader’s thoughts about American society and how to deal
with the nation’s problems. Below are examples of some of the historical heads created by my students.
After
students had a chance to complete their historical head, groups were instructed
to pass their project to the next pair of students. After giving students several minutes to
analyze the historical heads created by their classmates, I handed out a 2-3
sentence generalization of each Progressive leader. Using the information from the head completed
by their classmates, students added specific historical facts to the
generalization to make it a more complete statement about a Progressive Era
leader’s views on the problems facing American society and how to best address
these problems.
Through
this lesson, students not only gained a better understanding of the views of various
individuals from the Progressive Era, but they also had another opportunity to
recognize the importance of adding factual statements to their writing. At the end of class several students
mentioned that the process of adding specific historical information to an
existing generalization helped them to better understand what needs to be included
in an essay. Hopefully the next set of
essays will reflect this lesson!!
