TEACHER COMMENTARY AND REFLECTION

Why did I ask the Essential Question: (How can humans resolve global and intra-national conflict short of resorting to violent war and conflict and its subparts, What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? How and where is it enforced? Does it work to prevent war? Why? Why not?)

I asked the Essential Question because it is a question I enjoy looking at through out the events I am required to teach as part of the State Framework for 10^th Grade history. I like to look at the ®what if" questions in each unit. For the 20^th Century in particular the ®what if" questions focus on what if we"d been more just or more attentive to human rights would we have prevented decades of intra-national violence? This question is the question the writers of UDHR asked themselves and the solutions they came up with are some of the solutions the students will investigate, critique and write about in their proposals.

Looking at the five questions used as a guideline for Essential Questions:

1. Does it generate other questions? Yes, the sub questions are some and as to each unit it generates questions in each. For example, what did the creators of the United Nations and UDHR know of prior attempts and failures to answer this question, what failure of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations allowed the outbreak of WWII, etc.
   
   
2. Are there a number of possible responses? Yes, there are many attempts to avoid conflict, the isolationist policies of the US in the 20^th Century, the appeasement policies of the European community, the movement to support the International Court, the work of Inter-governmental bodies and non-governmental bodies (i.e. Amnesty International, the Red Cross.) All of these and the work of local and national groups should be part of the information collected in the research packets for the two term papers.
   
   
3. Can research be done on the question? Yes, the above possible responses are well documented.
   
   
4. Is data available? Yes, the teacher creates packets and the Internet and the library will have plenty of data.

Does the question inspire the investigation the teacher wants the student to undertake? Yes, I want the student to research the cause and effects of the failures through history to eliminate war. I want them to investigate and explain tried solutions and explain why many of those solutions failed. I want the students to look at these issues through multiple perspectives (hence the briefs in the name of particular countries) and to investigate "those organizations that work to alleviate severe problems of poverty, disease, famine, and catastrophe. By discussing specific needs and the various means of sending aid, students can develop a positive response to many world problems and can feel their involvement will make a difference." (Oakland thinking standard.)

5. The brief and the presentations ask for this information.

My experience in trying to teach a human rights unit before I used this lesson was that the students had no vocabulary or context to learn or discuss modern issues of enforcing human rights in the world. Each piece about human rights that we learned in the units of the state prescribed curriculum: Rise of Democracy; French Revolution; Nationalism, etc. stayed completely and stubbornly in the context of its time and place in history.

I have read about the concept of spiraling curriculum, revisiting concepts over the course of the student"s education, and it makes a lot of sense to me. It creates a context. For the next lesson the student has prior knowledge which gives the student the framework to construct their own deeper understanding.

This unit seemed the perfect unit to try spiraling over the course of one year. I am very pleased with the huge improvement I saw this year. By Segment Two students spoke of Human Rights and the United Nations as concepts they knew well and the booklet of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which Amnesty International provided each student is now a well-worn booklet that many readily pull out in discussions.

I have added the term papers in this design. The earlier unit did not have enough explicit writing instruction. Although it has been my intent to get to the presentation and mock sessions, we have yet to get to it as part of this unit. This is partly because I had agreed to work with my Academy on a trial as the closing project and because of school changes, the trial unit was cut and the time to prep for the UN was lost. This year I hope to have the same course to teach and to be able to control my schedule to the extent needed to get to the UN session this year.

The number of essays returned was disappointing and the quality was not as good as it should be. I think the addition of the rubrics and the checklists before the assignment is started and the writing in a series of drafts will improve this number and quality. The folders were very useful because the materials put in them and stored actually remained available for the students" use. Last year we lost a lot of copies of the UDHR and that is because I didn"t require that all materials stay in class.

The group work on the Articles and asking the students to teach each other with a visual helped break down the formal/legal language of the UDHR. The visual quality of the video engaged a number of students who had been avoiding the work of actually reading the Articles. Finally, the unit benefits from being focused on the ®big" questions students love to discuss: war, justice, conflict.