Now that you’re three weeks (halfway) into your senior project experience, are you answering your essential question? 

1. How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected? 
2. Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?
3. Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how? What do you want to know more about?

Current Essential Question: How can I use my knowledge of American civics/politics/law to inspire others to be more informed voters?

It’s hard for me to reflect on my initial expectations for my Senior Project experience because what I am doing now has diverged so much. I think I envisioned myself spending six or seven weeks on the computer all day writing up lesson plans and creating infographics that may or may not be seen by anyone who cares. I was willing to settle for making my project exclusively about creating asynchronous learning material (see the second paragraph of my Week 0 journal). In retrospect, I do not think I would have been able to answer my essential question like this. I would still have to keep in mind strategies for presenting my content (the “how” question that I reflected on in my first Critical Reflection). However, I would have no way of knowing what makes a particular strategy effective without engaging with students face-to-face (or face-to-screen)—any effort to do otherwise would be mere speculation.

I am very lucky to have connected with the Minnesota Young Democrats because their feedback on my lesson has pushed me closer to answering my essential question. I am especially proud to witness students’ enthusiastic engagement with my gerrymandering lesson. It showed me that students didn’t just observe the information, but absorbed it and put it into action, which is the best result I could have possibly asked for. Each student used the activity as an opportunity not just to draw the most perfect-looking map, but to reflect on the broader implications of gerrymandering, and that is what will make them more informed citizens and voters in the future. 

The gerrymandering activity demonstrated the benefits of utilizing a variety of different presentation techniques within one lesson. I spent about 10 minutes showing videos, another 10 talking over slides with maps, and 15-20 administering the gerrymandering Jamboard. Switching up the activities often allowed me to prevent students from getting bored, and it also helped them view the same information from several different angles (ie. seeing it in a video, hearing about it from me, doing it themselves). Their responses to my Google Form’s questions about pacing and balance reflect this: 

My session on Friday went really well, but there are still some challenges that I would like to address. Here are some things that I would improve upon in future sessions:

• Time management: I went about 10-15 minutes over my rough 45-minute time slot. I think this was mostly okay because people liked the gerrymandering activity so much, but I want to stick closer to my allotted time in the future.
• I could have cut the TEDed video and the slide after it. One of the students commented in the Google Form that the Vox video covered the same concepts as the TEDed one, and I agree. This would have saved some more time for the activity.
• Maybe I could have come up with some more guided questions for the videos than “what do you think about this.” Students still gave some good responses (especially to the Vox video), but it can be a lot to ask to reflect on ~ six minutes of information in a single question.