PEEL in Junior History

USING PEEL IN JUNIOR HISTORY CLASSES

Sharon Welgus

Laverton Secondary College

These are some techniques I use in Junior History classes to train students in independent methods of learning. Students who come into Year 8 or 9 having used a more structured. passive approach in the past need to be led step by step into having more confidence in their own thinking and ideas.

TWO MINUTE BURSTS

This is an exercise I find useful for getting students to think and to generate ideas for a piece of writing. It also provides feedback from less vocal students. Recently, in a Year 9 History class, we had spent a lesson summarising on the board what we had learnt about the everyday life of the Vikings, using headings such as HOMES, FOOD, HEALTH etc. This was done well, but the problem was that about eight students had been the main contributors. I wanted the class to make links between their own lives and how the Vikings lived, but I also wanted the quieter students participating more. What I did was write statements on the board that the students had exactly two minutes to write about in note form. For Junior students, thinking hard for two minutes isn't bad. I wrote on the board statements such as:

"Viking men were stronger than men today"
"Women today don't work as hard"
"The Vikings did less damage to the environments"
"Life is much safer today"

After two minutes, the students volunteer points that agree or disagree with the statements, underline, then I write up the next statement. This helps the students 'get into it' and they make better links as the process continues. At the end of the lesson, the students hand in their sheets. It gives me valuable information about their level of understanding and when the sheets are returned, the students have a set of points that can be used in a useful way. In this case, they wrote a page on life in a Viking village compared to life today. They got straight down to it, without the dozen or so hands up for help that would have been there if they had gone in cold.

Like any technique its effectiveness would be lost if used too often.

WORKBOOK ASSESSMENT

To feel in control of their work and to make the best use of handouts, students need to have organized workbooks, EVERYTHING gets written down in or stuck in their workbooks. (This is also good training for VCE journals.) From time to time, students assess their workbooks using the following assessment sheet. This serves also as a checklist of what they should be doing. I check through their books and their self- assessments, but rarely have to change their marks. If anything, they are too hard on themselves, and I adjust marks upwards. For me, this is much faster than working through a big pile of workbooks from scratch, since detailed comments have been made by the students themselves.

USING VIDEOS MORE CRITICALLY

When you give students a list of questions to answer after watching a video, the person who has been most critically involved in watching it is you! The students sit and watch - and who knows how much they are concentrating? - then answer your questions as quickly as they can, with most likely a fair bit of reliance on the answers of a few fast workers, To involve them in a more active way, try these two techniques

1) Students prepare the question sheet

During the video, students write down ten questions about the video that the rest of the class could be expected to answer. At the end of the screening, after discussion, they complete their list of questions - no questions with yes/no or one word answers are allowed. From each student's sheet, I select one question, so that a range of questions are finally written on an assignment sheet. After each question. I write the student's name, so, by the time there is a question from every student in the class, there are about 25 questions on the sheet. Students then choose ten of the questions to answer. They are assessed on the questions they asked initially, and on their ten answers. As they answer the questions, they automatically discuss them, as in

"What sort of question is this, George? You can answer it three different ways! You should have made it clearer." or
"I'm answering Kim's question because it is interesting and there's no right answer."

After this exercise, you should also be prepared for students to be critical of questions you set. I encourage this, as long as they can suggest a better alternative, and are not just looking for an easy way out of thinking.

2) Media Watch Sheets

Historical movies can be very useful for giving students a feel for costumes, housing, social life etc, of a particular period. However, directors usually take liberties with the plots and some of the historical facts. I give students a sheet with two sections. On one section, they have to list the things that are probably true. On the other section, they write the things the director probably put in to make it a better story. This is a good way to train them to watch a video critically. EVERY twenty minutes or so, I pause the video to give them a chance to make notes (practice in writing things down in point form) and for brief discussion. At the end, we check out the suspected inaccuracies. Students can either do this individually, or if research material is limited, we do it as a class. Students have practiced being critical, taking notes, taking part in a reasoned discussion, done historical research and gained a more accurate picture of an historical period - and they don't see it as work because they are criticizing somebody else's work, that is the director's.