Political Parties Project: Student Feedback

During the first semester, I had my AP government students complete a project in which they created their own political parties. They were sorted intro groups by their responses to a political orientation survey (using a Nolan chart so it was a little more fine-grained than the spectrum). They were responsible for creating everything about the party, from a name & logo to a platform, and then they campaigned for President. We did not get to have our debates due to school missed from Hurricane Sandy, but we did get to view their campaign ads before voting. I included a survey with the voting to get a little feedback about the project.

The first survey question was "What was the best part about the project?" The themes that I saw in students responses included working in a group, being creative, creating new ideas on politics, and learning through experience. Some particularly interesting student responses to the question were:

• "Giving students a voice to their beliefs, which are usually written off as naive or subject to change and allowing other students to rally behind what they in turn believe."
• "Realizing that there really is no easy way to please everybody, and that the government does the best that it can...most of the time"
• "The experience of being able to see how parties must come together with differing beliefs to make a compromise
• "The best part of this project was how we got to learn about political campaigns by doing a campaign of our own." 
• "It was something a little bit different then I have ever done before and made class interesting."
• "It was fun working with people that I usually don't talk to and finding out we have some of the same beliefs."

I then asked them "What was the worst part about the project?" There were 6 students who said nothing was! Always nice to hear. Others talked about how hard the platform was to make, unclear directions, issues with their group, and not having time for the debate due to the storm. Some also did not like making the ad as they weren't as comfortable making videos. Some quotes:

• "The actual serious work we had to do, but in reality I loved this project because the work was even manageable."
• "I can't think of anything bad about this project. It was interesting and fun." 
• "It was hard to communicate with my group about the subject and get all of the things done together because it required everybody's opinion all of the time when we could not be together all of the time." 
• "The worst part was agreeing on issues...we all had the same basic idea about our ideal government but butted heads on certain issues."
• "The worst part of this project was that we didn't get to do the debate. I was really looking forward to seeing how it all went with everyone's different points of views."

The last question I asked was how well their party worked together. The answers are a lot harder to code as they gave me specific assessments for their group. There were some issues with communication, some students who were absent for a lot of work days, and one group that had a major personality conflict. I still struggle with the answer to how do you deal with the students who just want to work on their own no matter what, and also cooperative work when you have students with real disabilities related to social skills.

Overall, it seemed that they found the project valuable and fun. I have some ideas for next year on how to make the directions clearer and make it run a little smoother. The biggest thing I am still thinking about is how to help students improve at cooperative work. I may be incorporating it into my skills rubrics for my sort-of SBAR I plan to try with AP next year so I need ideas on how to actually teach and reinforce those skills.

Interesting article about long terms effects of the recession

Take a read! There's a lot of apparently depressing research about the impacts of unemployment on things like future earnings and physical health. Basically, people just a year or two younger than me who graduated into the Great Recession will probably earn $100,000 less than me over an identical career and will be significantly more likely suffer from depression, alcoholism and so on. Blerg.

What stuck out at me, though, was this:

Ron Alsop, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace , says a combination of entitlement and highly structured childhood has resulted in a lack of independence and entrepreneurialism in many 20-somethings. They’re used to checklists, he says, and “don’t excel at leadership or independent problem solving.” Alsop interviewed dozens of employers for his book, and concluded that unlike previous generations, Millennials, as a group, “need almost constant direction” in the workplace. “Many flounder without precise guidelines but thrive in structured situations that provide clearly defined rules.”

This is very true of my students. The article blames it on parenting and teaching methods. They may be right, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. My giant, year-long research project for grad school is all about encouraging student self-sufficiency and independence. It's going...ok. There's a lot of things we can do as teachers to push students, but in all of them there comes a point where the student has to be willing to put in the work and to persevere when things get hard. I can't do it for them, that's the whole point!

So if this is already a problem by high school, when and how can it be fixed? How can children be encouraged not to have falsely high self-esteem but the kind of deep confidence that allows one to push through when things get hard?

Veropedia to the Rescue! Maybe?

I have a confession to make:

I love wikipedia.

I may be a history teacher, but my memory is just bad enough that I double check myself on dates all the time. Wikipedia helps. Sometimes I want to know more about a time or place I'm not an expert on (just because I teach history doesn't mean I know all of it, people) and wikipedia is a great starting place. Sometimes I just need a source of public domain/creative commons licensed maps and photos. Wikipedia comes to my rescue! Sometimes I'm really curious about the death tolls of different wars and disasters, and not only can wikipedia help, but the arguments on the talk pages make for great reading.

However, I'm smart enough to know better than to use it as my final word on any bit of info. I don't really recommend it to my students for research, although I have pointed out that if they use it as a starting point, that's fine.

A Solution?
Veropedia, looks like a really cool thing to me. From their FAQ:

Veropedia is a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time. These articles are stable and cannot be edited. The result is a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information.

This seems like the perfect solution for someone looking to have their students take advantage of wikipedia but leery of the ever-editable nature of the project. My one concern is the fact that the editors in charge of vetting seem to just be people involved with wikipedia with a good reputation within the site. However, I've spent enough time reading talk pages to know that this means that they'll have decent standards.

What do you think?

Calvinists more likely to Cheat

No, not really.

However, a recent study examined the connections between a person's fatalism and their likeliness to cheat. The results were pretty striking:

"those with weaker convictions about their power to control their own destiny were more apt to cheat when given the opportunity as compared to those whose beliefs about controlling their own lives were left untouched."

Read the article if you're curious about the methodology of the study. I don't know enough to really evaluate them for myself, but the findings match with my observations as a teacher. The students who cheat tend to be those who look at grades and test results as something I do to them, or something they just get, no matter what effort they might or might not put into it. The students who actually see their grades as something they earn are less likely to cheat. (There is an exception to that rule: students who are pressured into achieving good grades to the point that they feel they have no choice.)