A Year 9 World War I Assessment Task
For 5 years, I have run a museum assessment task with the Year 9 History students. And every year, the students never fail to surprise and impress me with their dedication, creativity and commitment to commemorating the people who fought in a war almost 100 years before they were even born.
This event is called “The Night at the Museum”, although due to COVID-19, we had to tweak the proceedings a little and it became the “Day at the Museum.”
It all started with a conversation with a colleague who had listened to a Triple J Hack podcast that mentioned an empathy museum; where you try on the shoes of people from all walks of life and listen to their life stories.
This got me thinking, we could do that as an assessment task at school. I thought about WWII and the Holocaust for the Year 10s- which I still think would be a wonderful idea- but then I decided on WWI for the Year 9 classes.
Originally, it was going to be in the morning and the students had to choose and research a particular person. When I was sent the program for the QHTA state conference, there was a presenter, Michelle Gault, with a session called “A Night at the Museum”. That sounded exactly like what I wanted to do- except when I attended the PD, I realised it was much better than my little idea!
The premise was that the students could choose ANY topic from WWI and present it in any way they liked. The clincher was, that the exhibition was held outside school hours and all of their parents were invited to view their work.
The students first had to choose a topic that was of interest to them, create a hypothesis, investigate sources and write a short essay on their topic. The final stage was creating their museum display.
I am not going to lie, this took a lot of organisation on my part; there are 140 students in the cohort. But as I was visiting classes, discussing ideas and had students turning up in office at break times to get help. I started to realise how engaged and excited they were about the task. Additionally, I did not just send email invitations to parents. Some parents like the idea of pinning an old fashioned flyer on the fridge.
One of the draw cards that got the Year 9 boys committed was the offer of free food. I worked with the Cert II in Hospitality trainer and he had senior students, dressed as waiters, offering finger food to both the adults and the students throughout the evening. It could be tempting to just offer the food to the parents, but the students worked so hard on their assessment and deserved to fill their faces with as much free food as they could.
The displays were incredibly diverse. The evening was divided into two categories: performance and displays. The performers wrote original songs, choreographed dances, made documentaries and did performance poetry. This allowed for those students with creative performance skills to work in a medium that appealed to them. The second group were the displays. This is where boys- who have previously show little interest in history- shone. They made model planes, guns, propellers, dioramas- OK so there were a lot of dioramas, but each one was unique. Some of the artwork that students created was breathtaking.
It was hard work, for both the students and the teachers and it cost the History department somewhere in the realm of $1400AU (including food, display board hire, table cloths and display accessories) .
However, the expectation that Year 9s are in a learning slump and only produce mediocre work, was completely blown out of the water and I would not hesitate to do it again.
Usually we have between 350-450 people in attendance, however although we were not in hard lock down, in Queensland, there were still restrictions on gatherings so I had to tweak the format a little and I think that some of the changes we made created a much better event.
Firstly, I moved the event from the evening to the day. This was strategic, as I know that a lot of parents work and I thought this would be a good way of limiting the numbers.
We ended up with about 80 parents attending and all of the chairs were socially distances and the visitors were required to sanitise, and sign in with either a QR code or manually.
The other thing I did differently, was that I arranged for all of the students and teachers to have Period One off class so they could help set up the museum. In the past I had done this by myself, and it is exhausting, however this alleviated a bit of the stress.
Another change was that I had tours of the Museum running for the younger students. We are a P-12 school, so I called for volunteers to be guides for the year 4, 5, and 6 students. They filled out an application of Forms. I chose my volunteers and invited the Junior students to the museum one class at a time throughout the day. They were then divided into groups of around 5 students and the Year 9 guides would take them around to the different parts of the museum explaining the meaning of the displays. This was a really great way to have the Middle Years and Junior Years students interact.
Finally, I did not feed the parents this year, but I did provide individualised snacks for afternoon tea for the students. Chips, muffins, juice boxes, water etc. This was a very popular part of the day.
All in all the day was a success. I was worried that due to not as many parents in attendance that the students would not put in as much effort, but I had nothing to worry about. The displays were amazing and every year I learn so much from the students when they choose an obscure topic that I have never explored before.
It is a very rich assessment task, and I would highly recommend giving it a try!