Pre-Active Strategies

This week we started the Cold War in my 7th grade Social Studies class. This is a topic I certainly feel less that confidant in teaching, and thus I was suspicious my students may feel weak in this area as well. My suspicions proved accurate as my students could not even identify the Vietnam War as a Cold War event without some hints!!! Anyway, I still wanted to use a preactive strategy, so I decided to do a very basic web on the Cold War. I would be willing to write down just about any connection, even if barely qualifying, that my students could make to the Cold War. This actually went pretty well, and students were able to come up with several topics that related, like the fact that no actual fighting was meant by the phrase "Cold War" and that propaganda was used throughout the event (something we had talked about with the end of World War II). I had my students copy down the web as I made it on the board, and save it in their notebook. I then decided to make the task more authentic by coming back to it the next day after lecturing on the topic. My students had lots to add to their webs, and felt a lot of achievement in noticing how much they had learned just from the past day.

I am really excited about this technique. I think often as teachers we do things on the board, especially graphic organizers, that we never come back to. I learned while doing the KWL chart that my students can definitely pick up on the fact that some of these things are just to take up time, and that we as teachers don't really value them for learning. By coming back to the web the next day, my students took more ownership in it. I think this may be a good technique. I certainly was happy to see what all they had learned - plus I had two "Focus and Review" activities out of one prep!!