Create Your Own Utopia (Day 2 of 2)

To honor my students' request for more time to complete their brainstorming and posters, I will allow the students to reconvene with their groups from Friday and complete their brainstorming using the categories and question sheet provided (modified from this pdf/activity).

I will also ask them to make sure they have a poster that represents the key selling points of their utopian society ready to present at the end of this 20 minute work time. I will remind them that these posters need to present compelling arguments and evidence to support their claims (W.9-10.1) about why their peers should want to join their "perfect" society. 

The next and final step in this activity is for students to spend time reviewing their peers' ideas/sales posters. I will ask students to travel with their groups to at least three of the posters presented and write feedback for each group on the whiteboards surrounding each poster.

In their feedback, I will ask them to evaluate the claims/ideas that are being presented and consider the unintended consequences that may result from fallacious logic/reasoning presented by the proposed utopian society (SL.9-10.3). 

I will give the students ten minutes to walk the room and write their feedback on the boards. I will then ask students to return to their own poster, read the feedback that was provided and return to their seats for our wrap up conversation. 

I am setting aside a little bit of extra time at the end of class today to review a few reminders for the rest of the week as we will be completing our state testing and will be on a funny schedule. 

Before I review these test tips, though, I will ask students to share their observations/ideas from the gallery walk in the form of an exit slip.

I will specifically ask them to reflect on the similarities/differences they saw in the various societies presented. I will also invite them to reflect on the criticism they saw from their peers and give them to chance to justify their ideas or offer revisions. Finally, I will ask them to respond to our big idea, that one man's utopia is another man's dystopia. I will ask them to think about this statement and to tell me if they think it is true or not. This will hopefully allow us to look at the novels in more depth next week and think about the "utopian" societies that the author is criticizing through his or her dystopian storyline/imager.