I’m currently in the midst of a revamped unit with my 11th graders involving concurrently analyzing The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Broken Spears. We’ll be reading additional texts and watching films related to Thoreau, Subcomandante Marcos, Gandhi, the South Central Farmers, and whatever else we can cram into the next few weeks before the school year ends. I thought I’d share a resource I used in setting up this unit as well as a strategy I attempted in conjunction with this resource.
I guess now is as good a time as any to make this confession: I like to rasterbate. Uploading images to the online rasterbator, a PDF of the image stretched to the size of your preference is created. It’s an instant poster maker and the effect it has is a useful (and cheap) resource for decorating a classroom. That said, I decided to experiment with simple game play using a rasterbated image. As students filed into my class at the beginning of the quarter, I handed each of them two random sheets of paper, announcing that they all held pieces of a puzzle and needed to (preferably quickly) assemble the puzzle on a wall.

Period 2 struggles to put the puzzle together.

Period 3 doesn't do much better...

The simple experiment yielded a couple of useful insights: my kids took way longer assembling the puzzle than I thought they would. The dynamics of collaboration that I was hoping for not only sprang to life but helped garner additional buy-in from some of the quieter students in the class. Further, the sense of ownership of the picture by the students was powerful. We were able to analyze numerous components of the iconic photograph of Malcolm X (once it was revealed) as the students were looking at the picture from a well-developed perspective. (On a side note it is interesting that both classes that assembled the picture immediately guessed that it would be a picture of Obama once finished…) Though the students didn’t read a lengthy introduction or fill out an initial KWL chart about Malcolm, they were able to articulate their prior knowledge as well as any questions or thoughts that arose during the activity. By the time I handed each student her or his own copy of the book to mark up and write their names in, the students were prepared to engage in dialogue with the leader they spent 30 minutes assembling; even if I thought it was 15 minutes too long, the time still felt well spent.