Who Are We?

• Students will learn about the qualities that make their classmates unique as well as the qualities they have in common.
• Students will be able to describe the identity of their world history class.

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-min class period and includes:

• 3 activities
• 1 teaching strategy
• 1 handout
• 1 extension activity

During this lesson, students will tour an “exhibit” about the people in their classroom, called “Who am I? Who are we?” Use the first few minutes of class to have students help mount this exhibit. Ask students to post their bio-poems next to their masks in designated areas around the room. You may also want to give students a piece of paper and tape so they can add titles to their portions of the exhibit.

Students tour the room in order to view all of the masks and read all of the poems. Facing History teachers often refer to this activity as a gallery walk. To guide students as they view their classmates’ work and to hold them accountable for using the gallery walk time productively, we suggest providing students with a note-taking template such as the “Who am I? Who are we?”  handout.

Curriculum connection: Gallery walks can be an effective teaching strategy to use throughout your course to help students gather details from a variety of sources. You can create your own exhibit for students to tour in order to learn specific information. Or, as in this lesson, you can have students create pieces that become part of an exhibit about a particular culture or time period.

Now that students have learned about the identities of their classmates, ask them to consider the identity of their class as a group. Have students respond to the prompt, “What words and phrases describe your world history class?” Then, have groups of students work together to create an identity chart for their world history class. Remind students to consider the same factors they used to define their own identities (e.g., physical characteristics, experiences, and interests) when defining the identity of their class.

As the final activity of this lesson, ask students to respond to the following questions in their journals: Do you think this class is a group? Why or why not? Do you think this class is a community? Why or why not? What is the difference between a group and a community? Their answers to these questions will prepare them for Lesson 6.

Students can finish their journal entries for homework. As an extension of this lesson, you could ask students to begin to make an identity chart of their school. What do they know about it? What don’t they know? To learn more about their school, each student could interview someone for homework. Students could interview other students, teachers, the librarian, school secretaries, custodians, administrators, or other staff. Students might also learn about their school by looking at their school’s website. In the next lesson, students can share the results of their interviews and use all of the information they’ve gathered to create an identity chart for the school.