Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

When I was hired at Minarets High School, I was asked to establish and teach the Minarets Cs class, a freshmen introduction course to help the 9th graders adjust to life at Minarets. Naturally, we always have a discussion  about the Minarets Cs, the learning objectives for students which include the 21st century skills as well as a vital addition: Community. During our discussion last year, we talked about which of the Cs were most common on campus and least common; creativity was the most common while community was the least common. This lack of community involvement was not only recognized by the students, but our staff as well. As a result, the staff members at Minarets High School decided to do something innovative and dedicate the last day of the fall semester to the community, appropriately named Community Day. Rather than submitting final projects or having a movie day, every student was engaged in a community project, whether it was making gift tags and cards for kids a...

Warfare is always a favorite topic for my students. Maybe its the excitement from the action or the emotional response that is brought on by the death involved, but student engagement always improves dramatically as soon as we start discussing a war, especially WWI. This year I had the opportunity to push student engagement even more by mixing the War to End All Wars and project-based learning. When I was in college,  I always wanted to take the History of Warfare, where we would have studied how warfare evolved. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to take the class I used it and the fact that WWI resulted in dramatic changes in how wars are fought as inspirations for my students' WWI projects. I introduced this unit by having students analyze primary resources to determine the causes of WWI, beyond the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Once the causes were determined and the trenches were experienced by the students , they began work on their Evolution of Warfare pre...