In this project, students were given a menu of project products to choose from (all focused on the Mexican Revolution).  Examples included creating a magazine or newspaper, writing a “corrido” (a Mexican song style that tells the story of a historical event), making a 3-D map, or designing a scrapbook.

You can see one of the corrido music videos to the left.

You can find links to two of the magazines that students produced here:

• The Mexican Revolution – a magazine about Identity
• Mujeres Empoderadas – a magazine about women of the Mexican Revolution

In “Resources” you can hear two other corridos, see an example of a “scrapbook” presentation, and see a photo of a 3-D map.

Students were given autonomy in designing the project outcome.  Giving students choice throughout the project allowed for more creativity how they presented their findings.  In addition to choosing how they wanted to present their project, students were given the option of focusing deeply on one topic or to cover more topics broadly.

The resource below show examples of how students were given choice in this project.

When students tackle an extended project, it’s helpful to break it into smaller chunks with “checkpoints’ to make sure everyone is on track.

In the “Terra y Libertad!” project, students completed a series of “checkpoint documents” in order to focus their research, as well as maintaining a contribution record that recorded every group member’s contribution. This also made it easy for the teacher to keep track of who was doing what within groups.

We used the Critical Friends protocol with students during this project.  By using this protocol, students were able to gain effective feedback on their drafts of their presentations.  The presentations improved greatly after implementing the feedback from the Critical Friends protocol.

Because the protocol had explicit instructions, it was easy for the students to use and gave them more buy-in to the project as well as new leadership experience.