Lesson aim

To continue with the thinking tasks and to hopefully introduce through discussion some of the important elements of propaganda posters.

Thinking aim

To use the ENV model to start identifying the elements of the posters and the values required for them to be propaganda.

Lesson outline

We began by the students having 20 minutes to sort the images in any way that they wanted so that they created two groups each time. I introduced the fact that we would have a competition to see which group could come up with the most ways to sort. Afterwards the students were to cut these out and group them together in sets with all the ones that had the same or similar values, they then had to come up with a name (parameter) for each group.

Reflection

The students loved the competitive aspect and began highly engage in the task, begging for more time at the end to continue. Many of the ways that they sorted really could be discarded from my point of view as not relevant, but it certainly encouraged them to look carefully. The students found it much harder to come up with parameters for the different sets of values, and eventually I had to suggest that message be included as one as none of the groups had selected this. Also this second aspect, which was more important in terms of applying the model and actually develop their thinking skills, was found to be much more difficult by the students and they gave it much less focus than they had the initial sorting. Several of the groups did not get finished as they were unable to select from their lists the values that were relevant and those that were not. It would have been easier if I had selected for them but I felt that this would be more me pushing their thinking than creating the steps for the to develop their own thinking.