"American Memory Fellows Travel Agency" Exercise

The goal of this short activity is to use a role play to tease out the elements of lesson planning, and for participants to discover that they have these planning skills and awarenesses in other parts of their lives already.

Imagine you and the others in the group have just opened a travel agency. I am your first customer. I enter and tell you that I would like you to plan my vacation. Then I tell you that I'm very hungry and I want to go across the street for a snack and I'll return in ten minutes. In that time, you should generate a list of relevant questions to ask me so that you can plan a vacation I will enjoy so much I will become a repeat client of yours.

What happens is that participants will ask how much time I have, who's going with me, what kinds of places I've gone to before, how much money I have to spend, etc. I will take notes on their questions and they will discover that each has a counterpart in the plan of a lesson (in the list below, target audience, duration, content, resources, methodology, assessment).

After the point is made, we go on to the primary sources activity, beginning with what kinds of evidence people leave behind that they lived.

Plan of a lesson:

1. Target Audience
   • The teacher knows that there will be a good fit between content and student.
   • The teacher takes into account the qualities of the content (e.g, is it graphic, text, factual, abstract, etc.) and the needs of the students.
   • The teacher plans to make the material accessible to children with different skills levels and learning styles.

2. Duration
   • The teacher decides how much time is available for the completion of the activity, taking into consideration the needs and work styles of the children and the relative importance of this content in the curriculum.

3. Content
   • The teacher looks at the material and plans to take into account what skills the children will need to encounter it and interpret it.
   • The teacher knows what body of information she/he will want children to learn.
   • The teacher recognizes the opportunities the material presents to discuss and learn social studies concepts.

4. Resources
   • The teacher chooses a variety of appropriate materials such that children can encounter and consider the same or related material in a variety of ways.
   • The teacher takes into account availability and accessibility of resources such as books, computers (and websites), field trip sites, videos, movies, people, and money.

5. Methodology
   • The teacher decides on which way(s) to present the material.
   • Will the material be studied independently, in small groups, as a whole class?
   • Which modes will be involved (speaking, listening, reading, writing, searching, etc.).
   • Will the material be presented in the context of a game, a debate, a role play, etc.?
   • What will the role of the teacher be?

6. Assessment
   • How will the teacher know what has been learned and how well?
   • How will progress be measured over the course of the activity?

How would these questions and elements relate to using primary source documents in a lesson?