Students Learn How to Work in Groups

We started to practice group work while brainstorming our ideas for the Seventh grade social awareness focus for this school year. The Social Studies Department has a focus on inspiring students to make connections between class work and the world outside. We will be choosing a global social cause to address as a seventh grade class. Students will petition to adopt causes that they believe to be important and we will run informed elections to determine the social cause for the year. Once this has happened, students will raise funds and awareness about our cause in our school community.

AIM: I will demonstrate my understanding of how to work in a group by brainstorming a social cause and effectively implementing the group work participation chart.

Lesson Steps:
We started by completing another round of Do Now questions that related to our classroom jobs. We are still learning how our classroom works.

Next a group of students volunteered to model how to work in a group discussing the topic: "What are some reasons against wearing a uniform?" I modeled how to fill out the Group Work Participation Chart while our volunteers followed the discussion guidelines.

I then introduced the idea of the "Social Studies Social Cause" project that we will be working on throughout the year and explained how the seventh graders will focus on an international problem. I explained that we need to really focus on making sure that we always connect the outside world with our classroom.

Students then got into their groups and practiced group work while discussing the social causes assignment.

Homework
Bring in an example of your social cause (a picture, an article, a written summary of a radio program).
Once students have narrowed down their ideas, students must choose one social cause and bring in something that will help illustrate the cause. They can bring in an article, a picture or even write a summary of a conversation/radio program that they heard. We will use these examples in tomorrow's discussion.