"Give them the reward of their labor"

It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me, but now I’ve experienced how much students love to see the fruit of their labors. And this interest can be used to develop further content comprehension.

Last week I got to teach my social studies students about Libya using live primary source documents and a live side show they designed. This week I got to show them the fruit of their technology intensive labor. During that first Libya lesson students worked in twelve mini groups to read first-hand accounts from two Libyans who wrote of their perspective of Mummar al Kaddafi and the revolution taking place in their country. Students indentified terms they didn’t understand, found online definitions and inserted those definitions as comments in the live primary source document I’d copied into a Google document. They also made a slide show about Libya by gathering meaningful images off the internet and then inserting them into a live Google presentation with their own captions.

Since this was the students’ first time using this collaborative, active learning strategy and because multiple mini groups were working on the same live Google document or presentation at the same time, technical issues quickly surfaced. I was able to guide students to work around the technology difficulties to the best of their ability during the twenty minute activity, but students still wrestled with frustration.

But afterwards, when I was able to put all the students’ group work into one final product, the results were impressive. This week I was able to spend nearly a whole class period leading the students into a more in-depth reflection about Libya using the products they’d created with technology the previous week. The students were very attentive and curious about this lesson because it centered on the products they’d created. It also showed them their group efforts had not been in vain. Students left encouraged to tackle collaborative, technology-rich lessons in the future.

The experience impacted me with the need all people have to know their toil is for a purpose. How rewarding it is to see the fruit of one’s work, to review material and reflect on the implications of the knowledge students gathered. Taking an extra day to pull the loose ends of the first lesson’s technology activity together made a huge impact on the students’ sense of accomplishment and understanding. Before this experience I would have not prioritized the follow-up lesson recap. But now I see how valuable it was to bring greater comprehension and confidence to the students through the recap. Instead of rushing on to the next standard/topic, I will prioritize pausing to show students the products of their labor. Through that I can foster a deeper understanding of the subject matter in which they now have a personal investment with tangible evidence.