This past week at school was extremely productive! I thought the snow day on Monday might foul up our schedule but we started off the week midway into our unit plan on identity and we were actually able to all but finish it too. The only day we have left in going to be Monday in which the students and I will have a chance to reflect on the unit together. I have an article that discusses “The American Identity” which will be given to the student immediately upon walking into the room. After they work on it for about 15 minutes we’ll go over it as a class and have a larger discussion framed around our identity timelines. The final step in our ID unit plan was to create our own personal identity timelines. The students were given an option to create a power point timeline, a standard linear drawn timeline, or write an autobiographical timeline. I figured that given them 3 options would appeal to the majority of the students being that most of them like to either work with computers, draw, or write. Every student was able to complete and hand-in their timeline by the due date which really impressed me.
One thing I tried out this unit was asking the students how they want to present their timeline. We had the option of doing whole class presentations or to break the class into groups and have smaller presentations. The class overwhelmingly voted to present to a smaller group of people so that’s what we did. As I walked around the room I noticed that students were very open with the things they included on their timeline and were willing to share to the groups they were in. Allowing student voice is a big thing in our school so it was nice for me to get a chance to see how it played out in the classroom!!

This past week in school was a bit crazy because we had a lot of guests come into our class for special lessons. My favorite guest speakers were these two undergrads from Penn who were trying to recruit for a Model UN team from Constitution High. They spoke to us on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday about issues going on throughout the world. It was an enthusiastic presentation and then we all participated in a simulation...very similar to the structure of Model UN. The two presenters broke the class up into 8 separate groups and had them each represent a country. The entire class was given an issue to deal with and had to come to some sort of compromise. Each country had a unique fact sheet about how passionate their country viewed certain issues and how much they were willing to budge from their current sticking point.   Simulations, if ran correctly, are one of the greatest methods for informing high schoolers. It was great to see most of the students working together with people they didn't normally converse with in class. The simulation also provided the space for students to negotiate with one another from neutral standpoints. Even though ultimately no compromise was reached in our class time I still believe that the students learned a lot from this exercise. Some of them were taken out of their comfort zone and showed the ability to thrive in a position they weren't use to performing in. Overall, it was a very impressive few days in class and I'm sure the students were able to come away from this lesson understanding a little more about international relations.