Evaluate the Strategy for Use in Your Own Classroom

Discuss with your colleagues the challenges and benefits of using this session's strategy with your students or reflect on them in your journal.

1. The three sample activities (word association, time period association, and textbook scan) work as stand-alone activities, but can also be combined over two class periods to more fully prepare students to learn about the Progressive Era. What are the benefits and challenges of involving students in a fairly extensive three-part "introduction" to a topic?
2. In the case of the textbook scan, are there drawbacks to encouraging students not to read every word in a given textbook chapter? How might this strategy benefit struggling readers (both in terms of their content knowledge and reading skill)?
3. When activating prior knowledge, how do you handle students' volunteering misinformation? How do you extend learning around faulty information without shutting down the student who shared it?