Background

The following lesson plan is the result of team-teaching collaborations among several middle-school teachers at Coleytown Middle School, CT. The teachers came from three disciplines: social studies, language arts, and computer science. The collaboration was based on a mutual sharing of content, skills, and assessments through a district's curriculum-mapping program.

At the core of this collaboration was a social-studies teacher, who created a series of activities in which his students researched the experience of immigrants to the United States, using primary and secondary materials. They also went on a field trip to Ellis Island, which was close enough to the school that the entire grade was able to participate in a history-based scavenger hunt. The language-arts teacher, who had a strong interest in narrative writing, encouraged short-story writing during this month-long unit. She also assigned her students historical fiction for outside reading. A computer-science teacher, in addition to offering word-processing and database skills, helped each student develop a final multimedia presentation.

Assessment

The three teachers decided that they wanted to collaborate and have each of their students produce a final multimedia presentation based on the lives of a fictional immigrant family. They decided that their project would have three main goals:

1. Each student would "adopt" an immigrant family and then try to recreate the physical and social problems the family faced.

2. The students would produce original artwork and writing (on the computer) to represent historically accurate "slices of life."

3. The teachers also wanted their students to understand the thinking of the immigrants and consider which aspects of the "American Dream" might have drawn the immigrants to America.

The social-studies teacher began the process by creating a series of computer databases. One contained biographical information about the passengers of a shipload of immigrants sailing from Europe to the United States. Facts such as the name, age, sex, occupation, and financial status of each of the immigrants was placed into this database and then made available to the students. Another database contained information about the housing available to immigrants in New York City during the nineteenth century. There was also a database of jobs that might be available to the immigrants. This collection of information provided the students with an archive of historically accurate information that they could consult and use in their projects.

In order to coordinate the curricula, the language-arts teacher assigned historical reading materials to coincide with the timing of the unit. She also offered lessons on historical fiction and story writing. In these sections, she demonstrated how accurate historical details can enrich these stories and how anachronisms detracted from them.

The computer-science teacher organized his laboratory time so that the students could weave information from the databases into their research. He helped the students develop computer-based prose journals for each member of their immigrant family.

As the teachers and students began to discuss the notion of the American Dream, the issue of financial success emerged as a prominent theme. Money had become a major factor in the immigrants' new lives, and the students had already begun to find jobs for their immigrants and for their children, which gave rise to a discussion of children's rights and fair labor practices. The teachers had also devised a spreadsheet to help the students project family costs (food, housing, transportation, clothing) and income over a ten-year period. This spreadsheet would help the students ascertain if their immigrant families would attain their goals of financial independence.

Examples of two spreadsheets follow. The first is a section of the food shopping list. Use of this list stimulated discussion on how Americans shopped in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (no supermarkets, no malls!). It also spilled over into discussions on nutrition and balanced diets in the health and family sciences classes (no fast food, no refrigeration, much local farming).

The following spreadsheet helped students figure out if their immigrant families would reach financial success.

Standards Met

The teachers measured their proposed performance assessment against local and state educational standards. They found the projects helped them meet U.S. history, language arts, and computer-technology requirements. These were found by searching a database containing state standards created by Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning.

Rubrics

The teachers developed several rubrics for different stages of the project. The social-studies teacher used a checklist to assess students' coverage of materials in order to guide his work. The language-arts teacher applied her writing rubric to the students' fictional journals. The rubric for the culminating multimedia presentation follows:

Rubric for Multimedia-Immigration Studies Project

Historical Details Story Presentation EXCEPTIONAL Evokes the time period through abundance of details in pictures, narrative, and dialogue. Stories consistent and accurate; very appropriate for fictional narrators; inventive relationships or voice. Flawless -- number of cards, graphics, animation, and navigation of exceptional quality. ACCOMPLISHED Items meet criteria of assignment; few or no inaccuracies. Stories consistent, accurate, and appropriate; items in sequence; interesting narrators and characters. Few errors -- stack structure, graphics, animation, and navigation not all at same high level. ACHIEVED Includes required number of items; some inaccuracies. Stories drawn but not fleshed out; narrators and characters one-dimensional. Some errors -- missing pieces in navigation, graphics, animation, or stack structure. ATTEMPTED Does not include required number of items; anachronisms. No clear story; sequence disregarded or inaccurate; time period not reflected. Many errors -- incongruities in graphics, malfunctioning navigation, lacking animation.

Results

The HyperStudio presentation is one of many excellent student responses to the performance assessment. A screen shot of each of the cards follows. The student arranged to have the text fields scroll so that the viewer could read the diary entries. She also provided a flickering candle and animated fireworks for the immigrant family's first Independence Day celebration.

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