Student Questions for Purposeful Learning: ALWtW

As a social studies teacher, I am very fortunate that I could very feasibly teach an entire unit on ALWtW. This unit would serve well to look into African Studies while also touching on general social studies requirements. Therefore, I have chosen a strategy from the 50 routines that I could use to introduce this book at the beginning of a unit. For this post/ lesson I will be using student questions for purposeful learning. I would introduce this activity for the day as a bellringer — the statements that I might write would be:

• “War is always fought due to a lack of resource.”
• “There are certain moral standards that exist in warfare.”
• “Societies that lack technology lack the time to create a distinct culture.”
• “Education is a gateway to success.”

Obviously not all of these statements are factual, but instead are intended to be question provoking. As described in 50 routines, I would have students pair up and, based on the statement, ask the pairs to generate two or three questions they would like answered. The questions must be related to the statement and can also be stated in the form of another statement. After 10 or so minutes when all student pairs have thought of their questions, ask someone from each team to share questions with the whole class. As they are read aloud I will write them on the board. As written in 50 routines, “eventually, similar questions will be asked by more than one pair. These should be starred or highlighted in some way.” From here my lesson could be altered depending on how I approach the unit. These questions could be recorded and put onto a list to save and reference throughout reading the book in or out of class. Students could answer the questions themselves and then we discuss them in class, or it could be recorded in a journal and graded at the end of the unit.

Montana Social Studies Content Standard 1: Students access, synthesize, and evaluate information to communicate and apply social studies knowledge to real world situations.

End of Grade 8: 2. assess the quality of information (e.g., primary or secondary sources, point of view and embedded values of the author).