Brand New Deck, Best Luck Yet

To prefect this new strategy, I created a brand new Pear Deck about Prohibition. Normally, I would teach this by providing students with primary sources and having them analyze them in small groups and holding a class discussion to answer the Essential Question for the day. Instead, because this is a challenging class for me to keep engaged, I used the same resources and skills to create a PearDeck. This allowed me to call on students who had on-task answers and limited the talking that students who always speak did. I was able to call on specific students to keep all students engaged and I felt really good about the engagement level of class today. I am planning on creating a second follow-up deck for tomorrow as students reported at the end of class that they really were able to engage with the lesson for the day. Although a few students were not paying attention, overall the level of engagement was much higher than usual. I was also able to better control the pacing of the class by deciding when to move on to the next activity.