Do It Yourself Projects February 4, 2008

There is a teacher I admire who never assigns a major research project to her students unless she has already done it herself.  By going through the expectations she has for her students, she can better prepare them for the pitfalls and challenges they might face.  She can understand the support they will need to be successful because she has faced them herself.  One strategy she has recently employed is to increase background knowledge on writing an historical fiction short story by reading sample ones with her students.  As part of our collaboration, I discuss with students how to use primary resources and pull from one of the stories she has read.  One story is set during the Cold War and touches on McCarthyism and Civil Defense preparedness.  I picked up on the mention of bomb shelters and modeled a keyword search around that topic as well as collected some great primary resources from the time period.  Students are better able to understand the expectations, when they have seen them modeled around something with which they are familiar. Building connections is key.