Authentic Performance Task
A summary overview:
What will students be doing?
During this unit, our students will be learning about the Industrial Revolution. In addition to learning how this major event in American history impacted our world today, they will be learning how women, children, and immigrants specifically impacted the Industrial Revolution. Women, children, and immigrants are groups that often get overlooked in our country’s history, but they contributed greatly to it. For their culminating, summative project at the end of the unit, students will be putting on a play made up of a bunch of mini skits. These skits will give an overview of the Industrial Revolution. It will tell who the main players during this time period were and it will also tell the story of the impact women, children, and immigrants made in the work force. Students will be required to research the person or people involved in their skit and then write a script. The information they use as a basis for their scripts must be cited and come from reliable sources.
Justification for this task:
How does it push students to transfer knowledge to real-life problems or situations?
This task pushes students to transfer knowledge to real-life situations by forcing them to think about what our current world would be without the Industrial Revolution and the people, specifically women, children, and immigrants, who were apart of it.
Prerequisite knowledge and skills needed to complete the task:
Knowledge
What is the Industrial Revolution? Why is it important? Who played important roles in the Industrial Revolution (individuals and groups as a whole)
Having this knowledge will set the stage for the individuals and groups students can research for their plays.
Skills
Students must know how to research and find reliable sources.
Students must be taught how to write a script, if they do not already know how to.
Materials that students and teachers will need to complete the task:
Student Directions
Women, children, and immigrants are groups that often get overlooked in our country’s history, but they contributed greatly to it. In groups of 2-4, choose one of the groups (women, children, immigrants) to research and create a mini skit about an overview of the Industrial Revolution through their (women, children, immigrants) eyes. It is required that each group member research the person or people involved in skit and then write a script. The information used in scripts must be cited and come from reliable sources. There should be at least four sources used in each script.
An exemplar or model -- this can be a sample that your group creates, OR it can be a model of student or professional work that closely approximates what students will be doing in this performance task (e.g., sharing StoryCorps as a model for conducting oral history interviews).
We will be having our students perform either a skit or a play of what they have learned about the Industrial Revolution. In this skit they will be put into groups and they will choose people they want to represent and create a play from a list of people that we have given them. They will then have to research these people and find out their significance of the time and how they can incorporate all of their roles into one skit. This will include women, children, and immigrants of different ethnic backgrounds. Therefore, this will challenge the students to understand the roles of all people and races in the Industrial Revolution.
We used a similar project another teacher had her class complete as a basis for our summative project. The information for this other project can be found at
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/performing-arts-in-history-classroom-laura-davis
Student Evaluation:
The skit or play will be evaluated by first, having all the students grade themselves on how well they worked as a team and grading their peers. This will help to hold each other accountable while they work as well as themselves. Then, with that same rubric we would evaluate the group as a whole on their performance, organization, research and proof of understanding, as well as showing the different roles people played in the Industrial Revolution.