Engage Your Students with Expression Style Groups
to Celebrate Black History Month!
Grades 3+ and up
Computer access – at least one per group
Join our Twitter Challenge – See Below!
Use the Power of the Profiler to group your students according to Expression Styles, then let them embark on a student-driven-collaborative-project-based-learning assignment to present a “Famous First” by an African American back to the class!
To create groups:
- On the Teacher Site, My Students Tab, select Manage Groups.
- Click Create New Group.
- Select Group by Expression Styles.
- From the list of Expression Styles, decide on 3-5 styles you’d like to use for this project, such as: Artistic, Audio-Visual Display, Dramatic, Musical, and Oral.
- One at a time, select one of the Expression Styles and you can include students who have that Expression Style either as only their First Choice or more. Assign 3-4 students per group. As you look at the lists, you will notice that students will overlap if you use more than just First Choice. This will enable you to place students as needed for social and behavioral reasons.
- If you want to give the students a message board to communicate, for “Group Type” select “Collaborative” to create a Renzulli Collaborative Learning Group. Then decide if you want to review posts before they go up or if you want to allow the students to post freely. (Personally, I always let my students post freely until they gave me a reason not to. You are able to select this specifically for individual students once the group is created, on the “Permissions” page.)
Assign students the website, Famous Firsts by African Americans by FactMonster. You can send it to them as a Teacher Favorite or have them search the Enrichment Database themselves for it. They should select “Exact Phrase” and “Entire Database.”
Instruct students that as a group they will decide on at least one Famous First to present to the class. For older students, they might consider combining more than one if they can work them together fluently. The presentation can take any form they agree on that fits their Expression Style. Depending on students’ age, how in-depth you want the research, and how perfected you want the presentations, you can give them an hour or several class periods to prepare and practice!
You will want to have materials ready on-hand or give them time to collect art supplies, costumes, instruments, etc.
BONUS: How about a group challenge with the Quiz: African-American Firsts?
Build in whatever standards you are currently working on, such as:
- Persuasive Writing: Why is their person included on this list? Why is he or she an important African American in history? They will need to provide evidence!
- Extracting important and relevant information from a non-fiction text. How many specific points should they include?
- Provide them with a rubric for evaluating themselves or classmates on speaking & listening skills.
- Cite your source(s).
