Raising awareness of the importance of women in history

 

Do you have students who are interested in finding out more about famous women in history? and are you passionate about raising awareness of this issue? A teacher I know in Italy sent me a fun quiz that she had taken to find out ‘Which woman in Scottish history are you?’ She thought I might like it for my students.

I saw a lot of potential in this quiz as a really great way not only to raise awareness of the place and importance of women in history but also to highlight and celebrate the contribution that Scottish women, in particular, have made to the fields of medicine, engineering, science and more, despite being often overlooked.

The lesson idea that this quiz gave me would be very useful for anyone who wants to raise awareness of the contribution of women to society, whilst working on aspects of vocabulary and pronunciation, as well as fostering collaboration. As is always the case with my lessons there is a strong focus on promoting learner autonomy, and the lesson is learner-centred.

It is designed with B1 level students and the online context in mind, as it makes use of collaborative technology within the lesson itself – using an interactive online quiz and Flipgrid as a collaboration tool.

The basic idea is that the students pre-learn some of the more challenging vocabulary to enable them to complete the online quiz. They then work in pairs to discuss their results, before completing a collaborative task in breakout rooms. The results of the task are reported to the class via Flipgrid presentation and this leads to a focus on aspects of connected speech, based on their videos.

As a lead-in to this topic, students will briefly tell the class the name of a famous person from their country who made a contribution to the field of medicine, engineering, science, etc., and say why they were important. They will then be shown the names of the women from the quiz and asked if any of them are familiar and what they might have in common (They are Scottish).

Whilst completing the quiz myself, I noted down many adjectives that would be challenging for this level, and these are used as the first activity. The students are divided into two groups A and B and each group is given a list of adjectives to find out the meaning. Examples of words from the quiz are, industrious, noble, eccentric, fiery, etc. Students can either work on their own for this or be split into small groups to work together and support each other.

After this, they are put into A /B pairs to peer teach the vocabulary.

Now that they are prepared for the quiz the link is shared and they take the quiz individually  Which Woman in Scottish History Are You? | Take the Quiz (historicenvironment.scot) After they have finished the short quiz, they are put in pairs in breakout rooms to discuss their results and say to what extent they agree with them.

The next part of the lesson involves the students working in small groups or pairs based on the character they were most like in the quiz, to complete a collaborative task. They have to use internet resources to find out the answer to a set of questions on their character: character’s name, occupation, when they lived, what they were famous for. They also have to provide a description of the woman’s character based on the adjectives in the quiz. If you think it would be more appropriate and personalised, the students could research a notable woman from their own country using the same questions to guide them.

When the students have collected their information they then have to make this into a presentation by using Flipgrid. I have previously written a blog on how to use this online tool, which is a wonderful, versatile and motivating way of getting students to collaborate with each other. I highly recommend this if you haven’t tried it yet. See the post here Flipgrid for book reviews  

Once the students are back in the main session, the videos are shared for comment.

Whilst the learners have been working independently and also by watching the presentations, the teacher will be in a position to select an aspect of either grammar or pronunciation for further attention. I suggest a focus on connected speech, as the video presentations can be used as the basis for this. The learners can use their own performance on the video to compare with their upgraded performance at the end of the focus by re-recording a short segment of their presentation for comparison. Depending on the length of the lesson, this would perhaps have to be delayed until the next day.

For a follow on task to be completed in the student’s own time they should be directed to watch their classmates’ videos and choose one to leave a video comment on. This task is a good way of ensuring that the learners continue to think about the vocabulary which was focused on, as well as giving them another opportunity to practice the connected speech in a similar, but not identical, task. The good thing about Flipgrid is that the learners can re-record the task a number of times until they are satisfied with the result, so they can produce their best work. The teacher can also listen to and watch these contributions and leave a comment, whilst assessing if the learners have met their learning outcomes for the lesson.

I really recommend this short, lighthearted quiz as a way of leading into a lesson on the importance of women. This is only one example of how it could be used, and I hope that it inspires you to think of possible uses for your own context to highlight this very important issue.