Prepare to Present

The last task of my collaborative group document analysis is always Prepare to Present. The idea is simply that all student groups are preparing to be the teachers of the document. I will give students 5-10 minutes prepare to present. All students in the group will have to participate in some way.

If the class is taught live and in person, I would give each student group two 5x8 index cards. On each index card they would add the details below for their best piece of evidence. Once the group completes their first index card, they would repeat the process with their second best piece of evidence.

When students know that everyone in their group has to participate, they are more engaged in the group preparation discussion. The Prepare to Present cards force students to reevaluate the evidence they have collected as a group. These qualitative discussions around evidence greatly improve their presentations and ultimately their writing.

When it is time to present everyone in the selected group participates. One student might be responsible for prepping the doc by drawing a box around everything he sees, writing the DBQ question on top of the box and drawing arrows by the document title, and any source, note or caption. Another student might be responsible for asking the class the sourcing questions. The point is whatever thinking routines you are developing with your students, their group will be responsible for modeling the routines on the document for the class.

Students do not just have one person read their card aloud. They have to show the class where they found the evidence in the document, explain what it means, and discuss their thinking around how they bucketed the specific details from the document.

To finish up I have the students actually bucket their index cards into physical buckets. I only have one group present, but after their presentation I will ask if any other group has a different detail they would like to bucket. Even if no one else has anything to bucket that is where the discussion ends.

We will continue to bucket evidence throughout the week as we go through other documents. I have found it helpful to use lunch bags inside the buckets that I swap out by period. Later in the week when students are writing their essays, they are welcome to come up and review the evidence collected in the class buckets.

If only one detail is bucketed by one group, I might be a little sad. I would likely reflect on the student collaborative task that I assigned and considering revising, but I won't do the thinking for them. Remember they do not have to get every nuance of every document. Your job is to help students build skills where they get better and better at selecting evidence overtime. Students really do learn by teaching.

Amie Polcaro

The DBQ Project