Reflection and Moving Forward
While I feel that the lesson was generally successful, there are a few major changes and adaptations that I would consider making if I were to teach it again. First of all, more than any of the other lessons that I taught for Term III, I felt excited about extending this one to become a whole-class activity, with the only major obstacle being a need for sufficient wall space to have many groups posting at once (part of the reason we did this lesson in the hallway is because my classroom doesn’t have enough wall space for even these two pairs!); however, this could perhaps be avoided by having students tack their responses on poster paper, or arrange them to horizontally cover their tables/desk clusters. Other adaptations would be needed as well; for example, it would probably be impractical to actually distribute objects (as in the marble activity) with a large group, but this could be changed to simply asking students to describe and model distributions. I also feel that this lesson could be adapted for a wide range of ages (although I would need to change the sticky note activity with children too young to read them; I’d welcome any ideas you might have for how to do this activity with beginning readers).
If I did it again, I would try to make a more concerted effort in the early whole-group activities to challenge students on their responses, continually returning to the question of “so what is fairness?” to ensure that students are thinking of the various scenarios we discuss as related rather than fully independent. Further, I would make sure to include some sort of concluding activity at the end.
As mentioned in the Analysis, I would consider using something other than marbles in the activity about fairness – perhaps stickers, or candies, or nickels, or something else that the students could keep – in order to give the students an extra incentive to care about fairness. However, this could easily backfire (students could accuse each other of being unfair, etc.), so it would have to be done carefully; perhaps it’s not worth the distraction, and would work better if I simply asked students to imagine that they were actually getting to keep the objects.
I believe that this lesson could serve as the introduction to a much larger social studies unit, where students take their understandings of fairness and begin applying them to real-world scenarios of history, community, and public policy. This could begin with some fairly structured, centralized activities – for instance, I could read them a book about a relevant issue, and ask them to discuss and consider the fairness/unfairness reflected in it. However, given enough time, I would love to connect this into a broader lesson on social justice, where students would ultimately select their own issues to prioritize (e.g., homelessness, unequal school resources, animal welfare); for their chosen issues, they would have to apply the various concepts of fairness we’d have discussed, and then describe and defend an argument for how the situation could be more fair. If the class is deep enough into the concepts, I could play devil’s advocate and provide an argument for how the status quo is actually fair, and challenge them to respond to my argument. Ideally these activities could ultimately build to a civic action component (though I suppose that’s getting a bit ahead of myself). Nevertheless, the point I’m trying to make with this example of an extension is that a thorough look at fairness could be an effective opening into current issues of equity and justice.
And of course, there’s the other benefit of doing a unit on fairness: anytime students say to me, “Mr. Gottschalk, that isn’t fair!” I can respond, “Oh, really…?”
If I did it again, I would try to make a more concerted effort in the early whole-group activities to challenge students on their responses, continually returning to the question of “so what is fairness?” to ensure that students are thinking of the various scenarios we discuss as related rather than fully independent. Further, I would make sure to include some sort of concluding activity at the end.
As mentioned in the Analysis, I would consider using something other than marbles in the activity about fairness – perhaps stickers, or candies, or nickels, or something else that the students could keep – in order to give the students an extra incentive to care about fairness. However, this could easily backfire (students could accuse each other of being unfair, etc.), so it would have to be done carefully; perhaps it’s not worth the distraction, and would work better if I simply asked students to imagine that they were actually getting to keep the objects.
I believe that this lesson could serve as the introduction to a much larger social studies unit, where students take their understandings of fairness and begin applying them to real-world scenarios of history, community, and public policy. This could begin with some fairly structured, centralized activities – for instance, I could read them a book about a relevant issue, and ask them to discuss and consider the fairness/unfairness reflected in it. However, given enough time, I would love to connect this into a broader lesson on social justice, where students would ultimately select their own issues to prioritize (e.g., homelessness, unequal school resources, animal welfare); for their chosen issues, they would have to apply the various concepts of fairness we’d have discussed, and then describe and defend an argument for how the situation could be more fair. If the class is deep enough into the concepts, I could play devil’s advocate and provide an argument for how the status quo is actually fair, and challenge them to respond to my argument. Ideally these activities could ultimately build to a civic action component (though I suppose that’s getting a bit ahead of myself). Nevertheless, the point I’m trying to make with this example of an extension is that a thorough look at fairness could be an effective opening into current issues of equity and justice.
And of course, there’s the other benefit of doing a unit on fairness: anytime students say to me, “Mr. Gottschalk, that isn’t fair!” I can respond, “Oh, really…?”