Teaching Specialization using “A Long Walk to Water”
Standards: 1)Montana Standards for Career and Vocational Education — Content Standard 2 — Students demonstrate an understanding and apply principles of Resource Management (i.e. financial, time, personal management). 2)National Standards for Business Education — Economics and Personal Finance Standard VI — Productivity — Explain the importance of productivity and analyze how specialization, division of labor, investment in physical and human capital, and technological change affect productivity and global trade.
Objective: Given internet access and online word processing programs, students will work together to create an artifact and demonstrate the ability to work together synchronously and asynchronously. They will also demonstrate an understanding of how specialization can lower costs and save time, to help people do more with fewer resources.
To start off the lesson, have the Grand Challenge written on the board, “How can specialization help bring better lives to people throughout the world?”
Part 1 — Reading — Students will be assigned to read the section in their textbook about Specialization and then read chapter seven of “A Long Walk to Water” focusing particularly on pp. 42–43. Before they begin reading, the teacher should explain to the students that they will be using what they read to create a script for a Readers’ Theater. According to Stephanie Weisenburger, in Education Digest, using a Readers’ Theater is a good way to help students understand others’ perspectives (Weisenburger, 2009). It will also help them to read conscientiously as they focus on their end goal.
Part 2 — Writing — The students will use Google Docs to write a Readers’ Theater script. Having students sitting at separate computers and using Google Docs will reduce the risk of unrelated talking while the students are working. This will also help prepare them to work on global projects in the future. The students should infuse their product with text from both the textbook and the novel. Students will have to supplement the dialogue from the novel as this chapter is mainly description. A short example might look something like this (the “expert” dialog coming from the textbook):
Expert: Specialization is the dividing up of a large job into smaller jobs.
Uncle: Okay, we need people to cut reeds, some to cut grass, some to weave rope, and others to assemble the canoes.
Salva: My job was to carry reeds from the cutters to the builders.
Expert: Each person learns to do one job quickly and efficiently.
Uncle: If your home was near a village or a lake, you will assemble the canoes. If you own a knife, you will cut reeds.
Expert: In this way, work is done more efficiently.
The students will be challenged to answer the Grand Challenge in the script they write. Some ideas they might convey are that specialization saves time, so volunteers and workers can help more people in a given amount of time. They could also note that specialization saves money so that donated money goes farther. Although money is not mentioned specifically in the book, they might equate it to the reeds needed to build the boat. By having those who knew how to build the reed boats do the building, they wasted fewer reeds than they would have if novices were trying to build. A short sample of this might look something like this:
Expert: In this way, work is done more efficiently.
Salva: Uncle, I am tired of carrying reeds. I would like to help build a boat.
Uncle: Salva, by letting those who have experience building the boats, we will save many hours and be able to cross the river sooner. Also, we will not waste the reeds others have worked so hard to cut.
To extend the lesson into oral communication, students might also perform the Readers’ Theater, or share excerpts and explain their choices to the rest of the class.
