This post will describe an instructional sequence using the Numbers Mania EduProtocol, a corroboration activity, and a rhyming game to formatively assess student’s knowledge of the French Revolution. Numbers Mania is a lesson frame from Marlena Hebern and Jon Corripo’s book The EduProtocol Field Guide: Book Two where students create an infographic to demonstrate their knowledge of your subject. 

In this case, students used numbers to tell the story of a historical event. I use this lesson frame to motivate students into reading the textbook more closely than they would if they were just taking notes.  

Here they are specifically looking for numbers that can be pulled from the text and used to tell the beginning, middle and end of the French Revolution. 

For this assignment, my students had one class period to pull numbers from their textbook in order to tell the story of the French Revolution. This explains the lack of variation in their infographics. You can see an entire class period of Numbers Mania infographics HERE. On average my students created five stats for their story in one class period. There was a high of ten numbers and a low of 1 in the sample.

In the past, I have extended this activity by adding an annotated bibliography assignment. To evaluate the efforts of my students, I “graded” them on the number of statistics they included and the number of sources they used. Thanks to Ryan O’Donnell aka @creativeedtech for giving me access to his great templates. 

Corroboration

On the second day of this unit, students were given a lengthy Sparknotes reading on the French Revolution and asked to corroborate facts from that reading with events in their textbook. 

I ask my students look for areas of agreement in two separate texts. They document them in a Fact 1, Fact 2, Implication format. This helps high school students learn to analyze texts critically and to improve their explanations of quotes they select as textual evidence.

In one class period, my students could identify a low of two corroborations to a high of 16 corroborations of varying quality. The class average was five.

Rhyming Couplets

On the third day of this unit, students were asked to retell the story of the French Revolution in rhyme. They were allowed to work in groups or as individuals. Twenty-nine poems were created in two class periods. 

I have removed student last names in order to publish the poems. At this point, I can turn them over to my ELA teacher colleagues and they will follow up with helping the students review their rhyme scheme, improve their drafts, and polish their prose. Interestingly, when I asked students which activity they felt them learn the most about the French Revolution (numbers, corroborating, or rhyming) — they overwhelmingly chose the rhyming activity. It helped them remember more historical details.

Conclusion

The EduProtocols book series has helped my transition to a 1:1 classroom by making the learning in my classroom visible. This allows me to give students discrete skill builders that I can remix for coherence and consistency. This has helped me get off the lecture and test treadmill. What protocols or skill builders are you using in your classroom to help students demonstrate they understand the content you are teachng them?