Good question
Lisa Van Gemert, who teaches at Lamar High School in Arlington, Texas, asked, "Is there a place you know of where we can share actual lesson plans?"It's a question close to my teaching heart.
I've asked participants in the summer institutes I've taught to share the teaching plans they have done. But even arranging exchanges is complicated.
A couple years before starting this blog, I moderated a bulletin board with the idea of encouraging the sharing of teaching ideas for comparative. (Ask me, if you're curious, about why it didn't work very well.)
One of the reasons I proposed and wrote a book of teaching plans for The Center for Learning was to promote more sharing of teaching plans. I know that not all of the 40 lessons are superb or useful for everyone. I hope that everyone will find a few that are useful or inspirational.Patrick O'Neil at the Univ. of Puget Sound started a "Teaching Comparative Politics" Facebook group last summer with the potential to do most of the things I tried to do with the bulletin board.
It's a great idea, but it's only attracted 41 members and discussion has pretty much been absent. (I think high school teachers are too busy to "go there" very often, and maybe we're too old and "out of it" to understand how to use things like Facebook.) And, I haven't discovered a way to upload and store documents for the group that other members could download.
So, I had to answer Lisa by saying, "I don't know of anyplace where teachers can share lesson plans, but I think it's a good idea."
Everyone has a few really great teaching plans. And everyone has more really good, functional ones. And all of us could use more ideas to make our teaching more effective.
In one of the few exchanges on the "Teaching Comparative Politics" Facebook page, Miguel Centellas, who teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, offered his voting simulation exercise. It is intended to compare the results of voting in general plurality elections, district plurality elections, two ballot votes, instant run-off or ranked voting, proportional elections, and ley de lemas (double simultaneous voting). His web page offers ballots you can copy and instructions.
John Unruh-Friesen, who teaches at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minnesota, responded with a description of similar simulation. Except, he noted, "I take People magazine's sexiest people and we elect the parliament of Sexyopolis.
"We simulate the major election systems used in the AP Comparative Government nations.
"The class typically generates a different 'Sexiest Person' with each system.
"It's also a lot of fun to say 'Sexyopolis' in class a lot."
Centellas replied that the "first time I did the simulation, I asked students to decide their favorite television show. That worked well."
Does that give you some ideas about teaching a comparative lesson about electoral systems too? That's one of the ways communication and exchanging ideas can help all of us.
So, what is to be done?
- Does anyone know of a system that people could use to upload teaching plan files to a server on the web where those files could be downloaded by others?
- Does anyone know of free or really cheap server space that could be used to host such a library of teaching plans?
- I own a domain name (compgov.info), that I'd be willing to donate to the cause. (A former student is hosting it on some spare space he has, and it's simply a place holder -- as you'll see if you look at it. There's not enough space on the current server to to host a teaching plan library, so we'd have to move the domain to another server.)
- Is anyone interested in proposing a second volume of Comparative Government and Politics lesson plans to The Center for Learning (and either creating 40 lessons or collecting and formatting ideas from people actively teaching the course)? [The Center for Learning wisely (I think) publishes only teaching plans written by currently active classroom teachers, and as a retired teacher, I'm no longer eligible., but I can offer some hints from my experience.]
Labels: pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:43 AM
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