Colonial Town Halls

Comply, Oppose, or Rebel?

By Kacy Smith  

Subject: 8th Grade Humanities (History)

Learning Targets: Social Studies: Knowledge & Contextual Understanding, Social Studies: Interpret History

Guiding Question: When is it necessary for people to rebel against their government?

Time: Two class periods

Differentiation: Groups based on reading ability

Whole Class: After covering the causes and events leading up to the American Revolution, I used the following debate activity to process and analyze the material from the textbooks. This processing and debating activity is from the History Alive! textbook. I differentiated for reading ability. In a Colonial Town Hall simulation, each group reviewed events leading up to the American Revolution. Each group discussed the events from the viewpoint of colonists and the British government, and then voted on whether to comply, oppose, or rebel against the British government. As a group, they wrote a prepared statement on their choice and a spokesperson read it to the members of the other town halls.

Differentiated Groups: 
    Group 1 (lower ability readers) explored the earlier events of the period: the Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act, and the Quartering Act. They had graphic organizers for the discussion and sentence starters for the written statement.
     Group 2 (on target learners) discussed the effects of the Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act, and the Quartering Act, and then focused on the Townshend Acts and the Boston Massacre. Questions were provided to guide the discussion, but not graphic organizers or sentence starters.
     Group 3 (higher ability learners) briefly discussed all the acts listed above, as well as the effects on Boston, Massachusetts. This group then explored the Tea Act and the Intolerable Acts. There was less structure to the directions for this group. For groups that finished early an extension activity was provided about the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Successes and Challenges: This activity went well, but it was LOUD. I’ve been teaching middle school for a decade and a half, so I’m used to working in noisy work spaces. This exceeded even my tolerance for noise at times though. Despite this, the students were pretty focused and worked together well. No one asked how I set up the groups. I was only required to remove one student that was so unfocused and distracting in order to allow her to work independently on the assignment. The most noticeable success was that the students preformed better than last year’s students on the assessment. Not everyone performed well as there were some low scores and a few who refused to write anything for the short answers or essay question. Overall, I saw an improvement in scores though. One of the biggest challenges was managing the groups. I appointed a facilitator for each group, whose job it was to ask the questions and guide the activity. The facilitator communicated to me throughout the activity by using a green cup (everything is okay!), a yellow cup (I need some help, but it’s not urgent), or a red cup (HELLLLLLLLPPPPPP!). This helped a great deal by creating tight boundaries within which they could interact. The other challenge was that in Group 1, the writing slowed down the process for the students. I was hoping that by having the facts written down, the students could make an educated decision more quickly. Instead this often led to the other two groups finishing earlier. Next time I may spend more time in the beginning with Group 1 to give them a stronger start.