Teaching Civic Competence with Technology : Give Me the Facts!

A Direct Instruction Lesson

on the Causes of the American Revolution emphasizing the Domino Effect

Taught by Lindsay Roe and Nicole Bosi

Planning for Understanding of "Domino Effect": Creating a New Tool

In planning our direct instruction lesson, Nicole and I knew that we were responsible for providing students with the facts associated with the causes of the American Revolution. Similarly, we were also aware that students would better understand and retain the facts if they understood the relationship between them. Instead of a presentation of seemingly disjointed slides that talked upon events as separately occurring incidents, we consciously tried to plan for students to recognize the facts as an interrelated story. This led us to the concept of the "domino effect" or as a fourth-grade student described in the video above, "a chain reaction." It was at this point that we began looking for ways to illustrate the domino effect at play in the causes of the American Revolution. We turned to the world wide web to try to find a suitable teaching tool that would emphasize how each cause led to the next, but only found graphic organizers such as these:

We felt that these graphic organizers left something to be desired, especially as they did not physically show how one domino hits the next which we thought would be more meaningful and concrete for students. Thus, not having a tool at our disposal that we felt would optimally capture students' attention and enhance the concept of one cause pushing into the next cause, we decided to create our own three-dimensional domino graphic organizer that students could utilize to take notes during the development phase of the lesson.

Time to Teach: March 9, 2015

For the introduction of the lesson, using a Google Presentation, Nicole and I showed a video clip with scenes from the American Revolution. As it was the first lesson of the unit, the students shared vague understandings of the Revolutionary War, chiefly that colonists fought British soldiers for freedom. Many students volunteered to participate, and made statements that included what they saw in the video and what they thought the scenes represented. I think the students gave more general information as opposed to sharing specifics that they already knew, because I elected to use a video that encompassed many different ideas as opposed to pictures that pinpoint specific information. The more formal digital pre-assessment conducted prior to teaching provided more specific information as to students’ prior knowledge. As the students acknowledged that a war would occur and that the colonists wanted to be independent of Great Britain as part of the pre-assessment, I was easily able to transition to say, now I am going to present what led to war. Then, I introduced the concept of the “domino effect” by showing an example of the domino graphic organizer, which helped to describe that we would be discussing multiple interrelated causes today. One student quickly caught on, and said, “It will be like a chain reaction.”

A fourth-grade student takes notes on his 3D domino

graphic organizer while following the lesson.

For the development, students utilized the new and improved three-dimensional graphic organizers to take notes, as Nicole and I presented facts on the causes of the American Revolution. In the corner of each factual slide was a domino with a number that matched the numbers on the dominoes in their graphic organizers. For example, students would need to find the "five domino" for the Townshend Acts when the Townshend Acts slide showed a five domino in the corner. The hope was that students would be able to better self-regulate when and where to take notes. However, I did not anticipate how much assistance students would need in navigating the graphic organizer. I thought that showing the corresponding domino on the presentation and saying, “The number of the domino in the corner, is the number of the domino you write on for your graphic organizer,” would suffice as an explanation. After there was initial confusion on when and where to write notes, I modeled using a student’s graphic organizer. If I taught this lesson again, I would model the first two slides, stating, “I see only one dot on the domino in the corner of the slide, so I know I need to turn to my first domino. I will write down two details on the back of the domino.” When I turn to the second slide, I will say: “Now I see two dots on the domino in the corner, so I must turn to the second domino on my graphic organizer. Again, I will write two details on the back of the domino.” Another future change I would make is to better capitalize on students' eagerness to complete the graphic organizer. While in the throes of the lesson, I became more concerned with presenting all the content at a fast pace within the allotted time. Thus, I missed important opportunities to focus in on students’ questions about what to write for certain events. In the future, I will pace the content at a reduced speed, and provide students the opportunity to write more complete notes. I will be more flexible, and follow the students’ lead in how they want to engage the material.

Additionally, to check for understanding, we utilized "Contemplation Slides" complemented by an animated light bulb to signal to students that it was time to stop writing, and think. I found that the “Contemplation” slides were successful in making students think about how the causes relate to one another. The students’ answers indicated that students were following the content of the lesson and that by trying to verbally answer the questions, the students were making their own connections between the material: “An important finding from information-processing research is that students need to spend additional time rephrasing, elaborating, and summarizing new material in order to store this material in their long-term memory” (Rosenshine, 2012, p. 16). Requiring frequent responses, specifically student participation every

few minutes, “helps [the students] focus on the lesson content, provides opportunities for student elaboration, assists [the teacher] in checking understanding, and keeps students active and attentive” (Archer and Hughes, 2011, p. 3). However, some students were more eager to participate than others when I relied upon volunteers. When I opened up questions for choral responses, asking for certain words to be repeated or for an answer I knew everyone would know such as “Taxing what item caused the Boston Tea Party?” all of the students seemed more confident responding. Knowing this now, in the future, I hope to incorporate more choral responding. Also, to try to involve more students, I need to improve how I was asking students to agree or disagree. For some questions, I would interject the statement, “thumbs up if you agree,” but the way I asked and followed up with this request for responses was ineffective in engaging all students. I failed to provide students another option besides simply agreeing. In the future, I will want to emphasize the agreement or disagreement participation element by providing students with two options and presenting this element as an expectation after all questions. Beyond this, I think that the “contemplation” questions I selected were appropriate and focused students’ attention on the essentials I wanted them to take away from the lesson. In particular, on the last contemplation slide, I think that the sequence of the questions and how they lead into each other helped to stress the concept of the “domino effect.” I especially liked how when I asked students to “put pencils down and think” for the contemplation slides, most students seemed to respond and once pencils went down, they made more eye contact and appeared to be following closely along. Also, I think that by asking students to predict what would happen next in the sequence, helped to show which students were following along, which acted as a formative assessment, and drew their attention to the next slides to see if their predictions were correct.

For guided practice, we had time for two activities. First, we rolled a 10-sided-dice using Smartboard Notebook 11. The number the dice rolled corresponded to the number of the domino on the 3D graphic organizer that students would have to discuss with their neighbors. The idea in planning was that this would provide students a chance to clear-up misconceptions and add notes to their domino graphic organizers that they missed in the development. If ever attempting this activity again, I would want to ensure that the classroom was conducive to my being able to walk around the classroom and hear the responses of all students. When circulating, I would be able to provide immediate corrective feedback to students. Also, I would want to make certain that I could quickly regain students’ attention and have students quietly listening to the responses the students shared with the whole class at the end.Then, the next activity was designed to be more challenging, because “when students demonstrate success, you can gradually increase task difficulty as you decrease the level of guidance” (Archer & Hughes, 2011, p. 2). Using Google Presentation animation, we showed students pictures of the causes of the American Revolution that slowly came into focus or became unscrambled. Then, using a hand signal of five fingers to zero, students knew when to share their ideas regarding the pictures. The students remained engaged, and unlike during other activities, the students stayed with me and responded to the signal for attention. Also, I believe that this activity was particularly important because it gave us formative assessment feedback on how the students would perform on the independent practice assessment which also required students to describe pictures relating to the causes of the American Revolution.

For closure, as can be viewed in the video above, we utilized the Smartboard Jeopardy Template to create a Jeopardy game on the causes of the American Revolution for students to play in small groups. Categories from which students could choose to answer questions included: "Acts," which focused on acts passed by the British, "Mailbox," which focused on correspondence between the colonists and Britain, and "Blame the colonists" and "Blame the British" which focused on questionable behavior from both sides. Groups wrote responses on laminated paper using dry-erase markers, and thus, more students were involved than if students were called to the board individually. In this way, the game was both engaging for students and efficient at reviewing content. For next time, I would want to improve upon signalling students’ attention for responses, and quieting down the classroom so that all students may hear the correct answers. Also, I did not have time to administer final jeopardy which was designed to have students explain the causes of the American Revolution in terms of the domino effect, which I had hoped would be a perfect closure transition.

Lastly, for independent practice, students completed an "Instagram Captioning Activity," in which they were given pictures of causes of the American Revolution and had to hash-tag the name of the cause and provide two details for the cause in the caption to meet the learning objective for the lesson: "“Given an instagram template with four pictures representing the causes of the American Revolution, the student will write captions describing the pictures for at least three out of four pictures correctly.” The students were motivated by the infusion of "instagram" into the assignment, making it appear as more than just another worksheet.