Revisiting the DBQ-Week 11

  This week marks the last week before Spring Break.  The unit on World War I had been finished and the students were ready for the break.  There was just one more task they needed to complete, that I had to keep their attention for: the DBQ.  As I mentioned in one of my earlier blog posts, Document Based Questions are a form of essay used quite a bit in high schools which are used to teach essay writing.  The students had just completed their self-taught unit and were ready for the break, so getting them focused enough for the essay was the weekly challenge.
   As luck would have it, the DBQ was about the causes of World War I.  The content for this DBQ directly related to the unit which they had just completed and involved people and places they had learned about recently.  With this knowledge fresh in their minds, they challenge for the week was to keep them interested so that they could do well on the essay.
   I wasn't quite sure how I could do this.  In past classes, I used student involvement to get them interested.  The very nature of how the DBQ had to be taught, however, prevented me from doing this.  I did, however, get the opportunity to engage them in questioning about the documents--that proved to be the means for engaging them.  By asking students questions and using dialogue to engage them, I was able to keep their interest well enough for them to glean what was required from the documents.  By the end of the week, the students had successfully completed the DBQ and were ready to enjoy their Spring Break.
   This week didn't involve so much a new lesson for me as it did a reminder that teachers must always be ready to meet students where they are...using whatever means are available to keep their interest so that they can learn to the best of their abilities.