Guns, Germs, and Steel

I love showing this movie in class, or at least the segment I selected, because it affords students with a chance to make connections between their research topics, prior knowledge, and their own lives in Kuala Lumpur. In many ways, Jared Diamond answers the question, how did we get as we are today? Certainly he does so in simplistic terms, but the reasoning and thinking is complex.

I have found that some students soar after watching this video, extending their thinking beyond the norm. Other students use the information as a supplement to what they have already studied. Tomorrow, I will ask the students to complete another Visible Thinking routine, Connect-Extend-Challenge, to check on their understanding and the direction we should go next. They will also write their headlines from the movie onto the class headline that we can put onto our thinking map.

I was happy to watch the interaction on the classroom folder begin as a support folder for a student absent from class that morphed into a discussion and rapid-fire poetry on what desserts and fruits students, and teacher(!), liked. Good fun, really.

I would prefer to say that I'm off to spoon some tiramisu from the refrigerator, but alas I will have to wait until Thursday.

Happy day!