At Pius XI High School, I taught my social studies lesson in a

government class composed of 14 sophomores, on gerrymandering,

the political act of determining where county district lines are placed.
Rather than simply lecture to the students on gerrymandering for the
entire class, I decided to give the students the chance to try
gerrymandering out on their own. To accomplish this, I set the students
up into groups of four and told them that they were each political think
tanks hired by either the democratic or republican party to come up
with a redistricted map that would benefit their particular party in
upcoming elections. Each group was given a blank map that contained
the letters D (democrat), R (republican), and I (independent). There
were only two rules that the students needed to follow: each district
needed to have equal quantities of population, and each district
needed to be contiguous. Other than that, the students were free to
redistrict as they liked in order to benefit their particular party. Once
the students were done with the redistricting, I asked for volunteers to
come up to show their maps, and explain some of the strategies they
used in redistricting. All in all, the lesson appeared to be a success and
I was an activity I would certainly keep in my repertoire.
One of the Wisconsin Teacher Standards that I used for my lesson
was teachers are connected with other teachers and community. One
of the primary reasons I chose this lesson, other than the fact that it is
an interesting and ever-present part of our political elections, was

because gerrymandering is a controversial part of American politics,

especially in Wisconsin. In teaching the students this process, I also
helped them to realize that gerrymandering was not merely something
going on in some remote area of the nation, but rather in their own
backyards.
This WTS holds a strong connection with one of the Alverno
abilities that I used for this lesson, integrative interaction. Using this
activity provided a sense of competition for the different groups (how
will you redistrict to benefit your political party?) and tapped into their
spatial interests through mapping, as well. Also, while I walked around
the classroom and interacted with the different groups, I noticed that
each of the groups needed to deliberate on the best ways to redistrict
their maps, encouraging inter-student discussion in a natural setting.
By arranging my lesson in this manner, I exhibited another WTS
through teachers evaluate themselves. Following this lesson. Mary,
my cooperating teacher was able to give me much feedback to help
me improve this lesson to make it better. One of the best things she
did, however, was ask me how I felt it went. I explained that overall the
lesson went well and the students seemed to enjoy themselves as well
as learn about the subject. Yet, I did understand that there were
certainly areas where I could improve, such as in giving detailed
instructions, or in doing modeling instructions.

One of the primary frameworks that I used for the lesson came
from John Deweys use of constructivism and experiential education. I
took some of my inspiration from Deweys work on Problem-based
learning by providing the students with a concrete real world issue that
needed to be solved (redistrict a theoretical map to benefit your
political party). Adding to this, the issue could be solved in multiple
ways, since there were numerous combinations of redistricting in the
groups. This meant that, as long as the rules were followed, groups
were free to solve the issue at hand in their own way, giving them
freedom and, more importantly, choice.