The purpose of this project is to develop a student writing assignment along with a rubric for primary trait scoring of the assignment and to incorporate feedback from a colleague leading to modifications in the project. The subject area chosen for the assignment is history; the specific topic is the ôColumbian Exchange,ö or the interactions taking place between European explorers and colonizers such as Christopher Columbus and the indigenous, Native American peoples of the New World. The lesson plan targets students in Grade 6.
All students will be asked to read textual materials focused on the encounter between Old and New World peoples. These materials will be drawn from Bill BigelowÆs (1993) Rethinking Columbus, a 196-page book that includes 80 articles, poems, historical documents, resources, and classroom activities to teach about indigenous rights and American history. The teacher will select three document from the text and ask students to assist in developing three essay questions, one of which must be answered by students in the classroom.
The strategy used for preparing for the project is PORPE, which stands for: 1) predict, 2) organize, 3) rehearse, 4) practice, and 5) evaluate. This five-step process involves students in the following sequence of activities:
Predicting potential essay questions.
Organizing key ideas using their own words.
Practicing the recall of key ideas in a self-assigned writing task that requires analytical thinking, and
Evaluating the completeness of the essay in terms of the self-prescribed essay question (Readance, Bean & Baldwin, 1998).
In the first step, students will complete reading of the specific texts for which essay questions are to be developed. Students will then create potential essay questions, particularly those that elicit higher order thinking through a process of analysis, comparison, and critique. In this step, the teacher conducts a short ...