The Armenian Genocide Assessment: Part 1

About This Assessment

In these optional activities, students dissect the prompt for this unit’s argumentative essay. Then, they consider how looking at both particular contexts and universal themes can help guide their thinking about making connections between past and present. Finally, they begin to analyze and organize what they have learned so far to help them write their response to the assessment prompt at the unit’s end.

Essential Questions

• What choices and conditions led to the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire during World War I?
• How can learning about these choices and conditions help us protect the most vulnerable groups in our society today?

Instructions

Activity 1: Introduce the Prompt

Distribute the Armenian Genocide Assessment Essay Prompt, and explain to students that at the end of this unit they will write an argumentative essay in response to the prompt on the handout:

What can we learn from the history of the Armenian Genocide about what it takes to protect the most vulnerable groups in our society today?

Ask students, in pairs, to dissect the prompt. As they read the prompt, direct them to make the following notations:

• Circle words you do not know or understand in the context of the prompt.
• Star words that seem to be the central ideas of the prompt.
• Underline all of the verbs that represent what you, the writer, are supposed to do.
• Cross out any extra information that does not seem specifically relevant to the writing task.

Activity 2: Make an Initial Response to the Prompt

Next, ask students to respond to and discuss the prompt using the Think-Pair-Share strategy. Remind students that they are not expected to answer the question at this point so early in the unit. Individually, they can jot down clarifying questions about the prompt, anticipate what they might learn about in the unit to help them respond, or offer a preliminary hypothesis based on their “gut reaction” or personal philosophy. After a few minutes, ask each pair to share their thinking with each other. Finally, ask students to share a few opinions or ideas with the larger group. Tell students that their initial responses will evolve as they encounter new ideas and evidence in class.

Activity 3: Introduce the Analysis Organizer

Explain to students that they will pause a few times throughout the unit, return to the assessment prompt, and record new ideas, information, and analysis. To do this they will use the handout Armenian Genocide Assessment Analysis Organizer, Parts 1–3.  

The Assessment Analysis Organizer asks students to identify and explain factors that enabled people at all levels of Ottoman society to plan or participate in genocide against the Armenians in the first two columns, and then to connect those factors to universal themes and patterns in the third column. They can use the universal factors they identify to complete the fourth column and make a connection to another historical or contemporary event they know about from prior learning or their personal experience. 

Some students may need help getting started with the process of completing the Analysis Organizer. We recommend completing the first row of the organizer together, using what students have learned from the first three lessons of the unit. For instance, in Lesson 1 the class learned about the millet system in the Ottoman Empire. The first row of the handout Armenian Genocide Assessment Analysis Organizer, Parts 1-3 is pre-filled with the information about the millet system as an example.

Review this example with the class, and then ask students, individually or in pairs, to come up with their own historical or contemporary connection to the theme of “inequality” based on their prior knowledge. 

As you introduce the Analysis Organizer, it may be helpful to have a discussion with students about how finding contemporary relevance in the study of history often requires us to identify what is particular and what is universal about a moment in the past. While historical events are all products of their unique times, places, and circumstances, they also often connect to universal themes and patterns in history and human behavior. For instance, an event like the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II connects to universal themes that have occurred throughout history such as xenophobia, racism, and people’s heightened sense of paranoia and suspicion of others during wartime. We can find those same universal themes present in other times in history, even as the particulars of time, place, and circumstance may be very different.

After completing the first row together, give students time to review what they have learned in this unit’s first three lessons and complete one or more additional rows. (Alternatively, you might assign this for homework.)