As you know, I only get a semester to teach AP Government and that requires me to get a little creative when I want to make sure that students “get it”.
Enter the Interest Group Project. I introduced the project on a Thursday and made it due the next week on their block day {Wednesday/Thursday} with limited in class work time.
I like to sometimes give more creative licensing to my students. I don’t care about the format, I care about the content. This is why I didn’t put specifications on having to use PowerPoint, although most did just that or used Google Slides. Just follow the rubric. I also didn’t give them a list of interest groups because I want THEM to do some research! Per usual, they did incredibly well and I was so interested to learn about each group!
Here is a student example from the AARP. {posted with student permission}
What I will change for next time:
- I want to add a portion of how they use high tech media to get their (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc)
- I didn’t teach them anything about interest groups yet, because I wanted them to do this FIRST and then be able to tie it all in. I liked this, but I think I’ll try it the other way to see if it works just as good.
What I REALLY LIKED:
- Letting them be in charge of their own learning because inevitably they chose groups they had an “interest” in researching {pun intended}
- Giving space to research without giving too many guidelines
- Being flexible with the guidelines
- Requiring that most work be done outside of class since they had a choice of groups or to do the work individually.
- They turned NOTHING in. It was all a presentation grade. I LOATHE papers everywhere, so this suited me nicely
If you try this project, let me know how it goes!
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