Adding to Evidence Logs, 1 of 4

How can learning about the choices individuals, groups, and nations made during the Weimar Republic help guide how we respond to injustice in our communities and in the world today?

This assessment includes:

• 3 activities
• 4 teaching strategies
• 1 book

• Ask students to reread their journal responses from Introducing Evidence Logs and then respond to the following question:
  How can learning about the choices individuals, groups, and nations made during the Weimar Republic help guide how we respond to injustice in our communities and in the world today?
• Have students share their ideas with a partner or small group, or you might use the Concentric Circles strategy by having students arrange their desks across from one another in two circles. Encourage students to add new ideas to their journal responses that expand or challenge their thinking about the prompt.

• Facilitate a class discussion in which students suggest documents or videos from Lessons 8 and 9 that are relevant to the essay topic. Write the list on the board.
• Depending on your students’ experience working with primary and secondary source evidence, choose a piece of evidence from the list and one or more activities from Strategy 9: Evaluating Evidence (pages 45–46) or Strategy 10: Relevant or Not? (pages 47–48) of the Common Core Writing Prompts and Strategies resource to help students develop their skills for working with evidence. Then have them practice the skills in small groups with other pieces of evidence from the list.
• Have students break into pairs or groups to collect and evaluate new pieces evidence on their evidence log handouts. They should first review the documents on the list, adding to their annotations, and then write relevant pieces of evidence that they have evaluated on their handouts.
• After groups have gathered and assessed their evidence, use the Give One, Get One or Two-Minute Interview strategy to have students share the evidence they have collected and identify questions they have about what they are learning. 

• Have students spend a few minutes reviewing their initial responses from Step 1: Introducing the Writing Prompt and evidence logs from Step 2: Introducing Evidence Logs.
• Then, in a final journal response or on exit cards, ask students to respond to the following questions:

  • Has any evidence that you recorded confirmed your initial thinking about the topic question?
  • Has any evidence that you recorded conflicted with or challenged your initial thinking about the topic question?
  • Which choices by individuals, groups, and nations in the history that you have learned about so far in this unit seemed most significant? What made those choices powerful or impactful?