Investigating the Key Components of Revolutions
World History students have recently wrapped up their unit on Revolutions. This unit contained a variety of revolutions including the French Revolution, Haitian Revolution. and Industrial Revolution. One of the important learning goals that we focused on was how an historian is able to take complex events and break them down into their basic components. Through breaking down complex events into basic components, these events become much more easily understood. More importantly, patterns can be recognized between these events when they are broken down into less complex formats. The hope is that as students are presented with other various revolutions / rebellions in future history classes, they will be able to utilize the skills they learn during this unit to make sense of the new material.
Our summative project challenged the students to pick any revolution from history that they would like to learn more about, research it, break it down into its component parts, connect these parts together in a logical fashion, and then present it to the class. In order to help the class get started, we brainstormed what components we thought all revolutions might share. Since the class had already learned about a few revolutions they came up with the following list:
Leader
New Idea
Existing Problem
Action
Symbolism
Dissenters
Results
Followers
Students had the option to choose to complete the project on either a poster board or Prezi. Below are a few examples of Prezi's that were created for this project.
