DBQ Football

I am super excited about teaching a lesson on Monday that I'm calling "DBQ Football AHS."  It's a take on something I have seen at AP conferences before.  Basically you give students documents that correspond to a football game and they piece them together to explain it in essay form.  That's basically what a DBQ or Document Based Question is.  So this is great practice.

My students are beginning to get a little fatigued by DBQ through the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism.  I've been hitting them with that for over a week.  So this will be a great break.  Their first DBQ test is on Wednesday.  So doing DBQ Fooball on Monday will be perfect timing.  Have some fun with it on Monday, sharpen it up on Tuesday, Assess on Wednesday.  We then have Thursday and Friday off for Easter.  I'm calling it a "Pretty Good" Thursday and a "Good" Friday.  :)

I decided to do the DBQ Football around the greatest game our young high school has ever played.  It was a 43-37 overtime playoff win and their first win in school history.  Some of my students were there, no doubt.  But, I figure I'll be using this for years.  So it will be fun to keep this alive as a part of school history through my class.  :)

I'll write more about how it went on Monday.  But, my plan is to have them work on this individually for about 10-15 minutes.  They will need to read the documents, analyze it for APPARTS (Author, Place and Time, Prior Knowledge, Audience, Reason, The Main Idea, Significance)  and then write a thesis.  Then we'll get into groups to compare thesis statements.  At the end of the period, we'll try to pull together one great thesis as a class.

What do you think:
DBQ Football AHS