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This American Life Group Project


One of my favorite things is the NPR podcast "This American Life". If you have never listened to it, DO IT!

As Ira Glass says, "Each week on our show we choose a theme, and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme."

I was reading the Love,Teach blog last year and I saw that she also loves the podcast. She loved it so much that she created an entire week based around the show.

I decided to take her idea and have my advanced class create and produce their own version of "This American Life".

First, I split the students into groups. I then told them to come up with an abstract concept that they would like to explore and teach the class. For their topic each group needed to find:

  • Art work
  • Quote
  • Discussion Question
  • Poem
  • Informational Text
  • Fictional Text
  • Video Clip
  • Song
  • Reflection Question 
The groups were supposed to take an abstract concept like trust or hope and really explore it in depth and with a variety of mediums.

Each group took over class for a day and taught the class from start to finish. 

The students really enjoyed the project. I even had one student say that he wanted to be a teacher after taking part in the project!

This ended up working out EXCEPTIONALLY well. I thought that I would share my roadmap template and my students' roadmaps. If you are so inclined you can even use some of my students' projects as lessons within your classroom! (They would get a kick out of that!)


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