Tishna Mohiuddin Jim Crow Legislation OVERVIEW/ RATIONALE After having a very teacher-centered lesson, I decided to switch gears

and make the lesson more about student collaboration. Students will simultaneously expand their knowledge of Jim Crow laws and practice working together to analyze each law.

ENDURING UNDERSTANDINGS/ ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS Essential Understandings Segregation impacts the racial group and individual identities of all those living in the U.S. at the time. Essential Questions What are the effects of segregation on a person or groups identity? Of integration? Of assimilation? What is the value of integration or of diversity?

GOALS/OBJECTIVES Students will start practicing principles of the believing game by first paraphrasing another students opinion/conversational point before responding to it. Students will collaborate and explore the various Jim Crow laws and analyze the implications of their ten choices. STANDARDS CC.8.6.9-10.C. CC.8.6.9-10.E CC.8.6.9-10.F

MATERIALS Jim Crow laws packet: http://people.sju.edu/~brokes/jimcrow.htm borrowed lesson from: http://www.eastconn.org/tah/1011PR1_JimCrowLaws.pdf PROCEDURES

OPENER Warm-Up: Students will respond to the following question on Canvas - What is the stupidest rule youve ever been expected to follow? What about it was stupid Students will volunteer to share their answers with the class. BODY OF THE LESSON Leading into Jim Crow: Below is a link featuring list of laws that were in place during the Jim Crow era: http://people.sju.edu/~brokes/jimcrow.htm Browse through the list and pick a law that, if in place in present day, would have a drastic impact on your life. Identify the law. Describe how the law would impact your life in one to two sentences. on Canvas graded Think-Pair-Share: Share your answer with a partner. Listen carefully to one another, because you will be volunteering to share your partners response to the question, not your own. Jim Crow Laws [Group]: Students in groups of three to four have to pick ten laws that most interest them and analyze each law. (40 min) Work will be done on a shared Google doc. Group can decide amongst themselves how they will select the ten laws. On their Google doc, they must identify the process by which they selected their ten laws. After the ten laws are selected, each person must write a comment under each of the law. The comment must be more than Ive heard of this law before. Comments must be color-coded so that it is clear which person in the group posted each comment. Possible topics that can be addressed when examining each law: What is the rationale behind the law? Would the law be hard to enforce? How so? What impact would this law have on daily life?

How might this law impact families and individuals within the African-American community? Within the white community? Within America? After each person has commented on each law, each person must respond to a comment made by another person in the group. Responses need to be more in-depth than simply stating, I agree or I disagree.

CLOSURE Jim Crow Laws Reflection: We may not have laws today that impose segregation in

various public spaces; however, from our daily travels, we see that there are places that are frequented by one racial/ethnic majority or another. In which of the arenas (i.e. transportation, schools, hospitals, etc.) mentioned in the Jim Crow laws do we still see segregation today? Focus on one example. How does this self-imposed segregation

influence the community at large? How does it affect each of us individually? Share-Out: Students will share out their answers and respond to one another as they do so. [if theres time]

PART ONE Name: Tishna Mohiuddin Course: 9th Grade African American History Title of Lesson: Jim Crow Legislation

Application of Strategies and/or concepts we discussed in class: Differentiation: In the larger scheme of this unit, this lesson was differentiated from other lessons, because it was built allowed students to work in groups. The other lessons in my unit predominantly involve classwide or independent analysis of various primary sources. This lesson allowed students with interpersonal intelligence to flourish. Writing in Secondary Social Studies: Although I did not utilize a specific strategy from those presented to us in the readings and in class, students used writing as a means to apply a critical lens to Jim Crow legislation. As I specified in the assignment directions, students had to do more than express moral indignation about the unjust nature of each laws. They had to ask questions with the objective of facilitating discussion within their groups. They had to consider whether each law would be difficult to enforce and why. They also had to infer the possible rationale behind each law. Connections to Unit Plan: This lesson is meant to give students a distinct idea of which areas of life legally mandated segregation was generally imposed. The primary purpose is for students to develop their knowledge of Jim Crow legislation. Skills and Conceptual Objectives: Students will take an evaluative approach when reading the Jim Crow legislation. They can make inferences about what the rationale behind the law and assess what might have made the law challenging to enforce. Students will practice active listening so to speak by reading one anothers responses to each Jim Crow Law and building upon their peers reasoning or asking clarifying questions. Students will collaborate to formulate a cohesive paragraph from their collective analysis of each piece of legislation. Common Core: CC.8.6.9-10.C. CC.8.6.9-10.E CC.8.6.9-10.F

Assessment: Each group presented me with a shared Google Doc in which they present the ten laws they
chose as well as the record of their discussion regarding that piece of legislation. This will include a brief description of how they chose their ten laws. This assignment was worth sixteen points. The following are the instructions that I gave students: Pick ten laws as a group from the list of Jim Crow legislation that seem most significant or most interesting/bizarre to you. Work will be done on a shared Google doc. You must decide amongst yourselves how they will select the ten laws. On your Google doc, you must identify the process by which you selected your ten laws as a group (in one to two sentences).

After the ten laws are selected, each person must write a comment under each of the law. The comment must be more than Ive heard of this law before. Comments must be color-coded so that it is clear which person in the group posted each comment. Possible topics that can be addressed when examining each law: What is the rationale behind the law? Would the law be hard to enforce? How so? What impact would this law have on daily life? How might this law impact families and individuals within the African-American community? Within the white community? Within America?

After each person has commented on each law, each person must respond to a comment made by another person in the group. Responses need to be more in-depth than simply stating, I agree or I disagree. Your final product should include: a brief 1-2 sentence description of how you decided as a group selected your ten laws (2 points) the ten laws that you picked (10 points) two comments made by each group member after each law - one comment will be your response to the law and the other comment will be your comment on another group member's comment (4 points)

PART TWO To provide a bit of background, I assigned groups taking into consideration a Group Work Preference questionnaire that students had filled out a few days prior to this lesson in which they identified who they liked working with and who they had difficulty working with. I did my best to include in each persons group a person from their preferred list. My two classes reacted differently two the groups that they were assigned. With the class that I have been teaching since October, there were generally no complaints about the group assignments. With the class I took over more recently; however, there was a great deal of discontent over the group assignments. In retrospect, this is unsurprising, as I am much more familiar with students from the former class than the latter. I think this difference also made for a sharp difference in the level of engagement and learning in each class. In my first class, which I will refer to as Class A, students spent the entirety of the class working diligently with their group. Technically, because this assignment was being completed via a shared Google doc, the groups did not have to sit together; however, all students opted to do so the first day. There were a few students who were a bit more distracted during this process; however, they were the students that are normally pretty distracted during class. There was one group that worked surprisingly

well together. In the second class, students, most of whom were really discontent with their group assignment, took much longer to move to sit together with their group and longer still to have a person create the Google doc and share it with the other group members. In this class, students were constantly wandering off to chat with their friends on the other side of the room. Additionally, this is a class where I have an ESL student, a student on the spectrum, and one student who is identified with having severe ADHD and emotional regulation issues. Part of the difficulty in assigning groups was knowing how students would react to having to work with these students. I placed the ESL student, a Bengali male, with two students who have a history of completing their work in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, from whatever I was able to observe about the group dynamic, these two students didnt take the necessary initiative to include this student into the group. I placed the student on the spectrum with a student who had had said that he was generally okay with working with anyone in the class as well as with a female student who I had seen him speaking to before. Unfortunately the female student was absent that day and subsequently there was not a great deal of communication between the two students of that group who were present that day. The student with ADHD seemed to fit in pretty well with his group. He was less difficult to assign to group, because he was, as I had seen, a very social person.

PART THREE I described the assessment itself in a previous section [see Part One - Assessments.] I did not suspect that students would have difficulty picking ten laws from the long list they were given. Where I was expecting students to put most of their efforts was in their comments to the laws and their discussion with their peers. I was hoping that students would be able to build off of each others analysis of the law to build a more in-depth understanding of Jim Crow legislation. PART FOUR In this lesson, I primarily learned that my students need more scaffolding on how to respond to one another. Reviewing their final products, I did not see a great deal of depth in the analysis provided. I fault myself here. As I said before, I did not scaffold the ways in which students could interact with the material sufficiently. Perhaps the quality of analysis would have been improved if I had students focus on five laws instead of ten. Or, each group have been assigned one law which they were to analyze closely and conduct research on. Ultimately, I cannot really fault students for the quality of the analysis they provided. The following are examples of the type of comments students made on their chosen laws:
still an unfair way of segregation [in response to segregation in libraries] Soldiers are soldiers, minions of the government, why separate them? [in response to segregation in the military]

I think that when playing sports race should not vary because if these people have enough heart, they should play no matter what [in response to segregation in baseball] A lot of students used the words unfair and unjust, but did not expand on what specifically they found unfair and unjust. Perhaps I could have encouraged deeper thinking if I had asked more specific questions regarding the laws that students could answer when commenting on each piece of legislation. One particular student who does not usually turn in any work and is currently failing my class did a particularly good job both on commenting on each law and on responding to her group members comments:

This is unfair because it is making the county pay more money to make the workers work harder to make more room for the African Americans and White people. [in response to segregation in prisons] I agree with ______ because they probably don't want whites and blacks to get married and have half have black kids. To them that means more blacks and thats definitely not what they want. [in response to her group members comment on the law on intermarriage] One particular response made by an African American female student who usually does well in my class was of particular interest to me. In responding to a law that forbids white female nurses from working in a ward in which black males were staying, she said, I kind of think this law isnt too bad because I can understand where the female nurses are coming from because they probably feel threaten by the black males but then at the same time they dont want to harm you they just want to get taken care of to get better. I was really impressed with the initiative she took in considering the perspective of the white females at the time. I dont think she was implying that black males would inevitably harass white nurses, but instead was trying to consider how the law might be received by various parties. One of her group members said that she disagreed, but did not elaborate on what specifically she disagreed with. This, to me, was a shame, because I saw it as a missed opportunity for a rich dialogue to occur between students on the intersection of race and gender. PART FIVE I would teach this lesson again with certain modifications. I would model for students how they might respond to the each piece of legislation and I would model for students how they might respond to each other. Also, I would consider narrowing down the scope of what each group needed to focus on. I think asking each group member to comment on each of the ten laws and then respond to each others comments was too much. I would consider, as I said before, having each group focus on one particular job and then provide a set of links each group could peruse to do further research on the law, where it was implemented, and how it was enforced.