Process for Teachers

Where this Fits: This LibraryQuest can serve as a performance assessment. Students will need some background information about this time period before they can analyze and interpret the documents. I plan to spend a week on an introduction to this time period focusing on industrialization, and a week on the problems caused by the transformation and reformers’ efforts to ameliorate these negative consequences. I will also do a short focus unit on immigration, since many of my students are immigrants themselves.

Preview Activity: Students will be asked to make a list of all the technologies they use during the day, and to rank order them in terms of importance. This will be followed by a pair-share discussion, then by a whole-class discussion. Students will then complete a short writing assignment where they describe what life would be like without these important technologies. As a follow-up activity for homework, students will be asked to interview parents, grandparents, or other adults about their introduction to some of the newest technologies, and ask them to identify some of the costs and benefits associated with them.

Part One: Creating the Museum Exhibit
Students should be assigned to teams of two or three to research one of the following aspects of this transformation: business, communication, growing cities, home life, government and politics, leisure activities, people and communities, technology, transportation, and work. You will find a link below for each of these aspects.

NOTE: the links in the table below will open the Student's Process pages in a new window.

Creating Groups? This will depend on the make-up of the class. It would be helpful to pair students with different learning styles and strengths, for example, a visual learner with a written/verbal learner, or an able reader with a reluctant reader. However, there may be some categories where similar students could excel together. I have designed the galleries to allow for differentiation. In the table above, I have rated each category according to its challenge level, and tried to give some indication of the kinds of documents within each.

Day One: Preview Activity Above

Day Two: Introduction

• Assign students to teams. In their small groups,they will share their findings from their parent interviews, and create a chart compiling what they have learned about the costs and benefits of our “new technologies.”
• Review task, introduction, and process with class.

Day Three: Complete Document Preview

• Students meet in teams to preview the documents in their research gallery and to choose who will analyze which documents.

Day Four: Document Analysis

• In computer lab, students will work individually at their computers to analyze their three documents. (This step could be expanded to require more documents, or to give students more time.)

Day Five: Discussing and Planning

• Teams share what they learned about the documents with each other and complete the What We Learned summary.
• Students decide which three (or more) documents best represent the changes during this time period and should be included in their exhibit. Teams complete Exhibit Planner to explain which ones they chose and why. Students decide which document they will take responsibility for.
• Homework assignment: complete Individual Storyboard. Due Day 7.
• At this point, it would be great to invite a real museum curator to talk to your classes about how they choose artifacts for inclusion in exhibits. As a follow-up, it might be nice to have this same person come back to give the students feedback on their exhibits.

Day Six: Interpretation and Pre-Writing Activity

• Teams will create a chart, like they did on Day 2, listing the changes or “new technologies” they discovered, and analyzing the costs and benefits of them as a whole.
• Teams will complete a guided pre-write activity on the question: Is progress good?

Day Seven: Creating the Pieces of the Exhibit

• Students work individually in the lab to create their individual PowerPoint slides- one for each document. These slides must include a representation of the document along with a description of what the document is, what it means, and what it tells us about this time period. (This step can be expanded to allow students to complete more than one slide, or have more time.) Instructions for using PowerPoint. Students use the Artifact Text Panel Rubric to guide their work.

Day Eight: Putting the Pieces Together

• Student teams come back together in the lab or in the classroom using laptops to complete their Exhibit Storyboard and to combine their individual slides into one presentation. During this session, teams create a title slide, a conclusion slide based on their Interpretation Pre-writing Activity, and a slide with credits and bibliographic information.

Day Nine: Putting the Pieces Together

• Teams complete exhibits.
• Teams complete an Exhibit Self-Evaluation Rubric and a Group Process Evaluation.

Part Two: Visiting and Evaluating the Exhibits

Day Ten: Visiting and evaluating the exhibits

• Student teams will set up their exhibits on laptops in the classroom or on computers in the lab.
• Teams will rotate through all the exhibits at 4-5 minute intervals (depending on number of groups) to evaluate the exhibits and take notes on the exhibits.

Part Three: Putting it all Together

Day Eleven: Putting it all together

• Students will complete an individual, guided three-paragraph essay answering the essential question: Is progress good? Students will use information from the class exhibits to support their positions. (You might be able to team with the English/Language Arts teacher here to help you structure the essay, and to give students time to write a rough draft and a final copy.) Individual Essay Rubric

Variations and Adaptations:

The possibilities are endless. Assign each student one document or a whole gallery to investigate. Gifted and Talented students could skip some of the introductory lessons and jump right into this activity, using it as a springboard for inquiry. Skip the essay. Make the essay longer.

Minneapolis skyline from Nicollet & Seventh, Aug. 23, 1911. From Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991 from American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digitized Library. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/i?ammem/pan:@field(NUMBER+@band(pan+6a06841)):displayType=1:m856sd=pan:m856sf=6a06841

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