In her class "France and the World: Human Rights, Race, and Revolution," Rachel Gillett had small groups work on different questions in order to stimulate discussion.
In this activity, David Weimer used different articles on "segregation academies" following Brown v. Board of Education in order to teach students how to evaluate information from a source and consider the origin of the information.
In Swedish Aa, Ursula Lindqvist and Suzanne Martin had students watch a recorded video of the poem "Accounting of Summer" to practice singular and plural nouns, learn new words, experience Swedish poetry, and hear the melodic sound of Swedish.
Jigsaw activities have students work in groups to think about different articles. The groups then come together and share their work to produce one detailed, comprehensive document on all the articles for the week.
This group discussion format can be used in a week that covers several big concepts, each of which can be discussed along a similar ("parallel") sequence of discussion questions. The concepts in this particular class are: Wisdom of crowds, Heuristic decision-making, Groupthink, and Cooperation.
