This lesson serves as the final lesson of a unit in which students had previously learned about key players and events of the Civil Rights Movement. During this final lesson, the obj. is for students to understand that although we now view the movement as a successful and historically important, during the 50s and 60s it was an extremely slow and frustrating process for all those involved, and thus disagreement arose and often divisions grew over the philosophies and strategies of the movement.
During the web quest, students will work together in small groups to identify other individuals who played a key role in the movement, even if their names aren't always or ever mentioned in history books. The idea is for students to understand that the movement was successful because of the hundreds of ordinary citizens (like you and me) who worked together for a common goal. The connection was made to their lives by including the memorial to Dr.King and having them evaluate who they believed also deserved to be recognized for their dedication.
The classroom activity (comparing quotations of MLK/Malcolm X) begins to introduce the idea to students that there were drastic philosophical differences that existed during the movement and the men and women involved attempted to find ways to work with each other despite the differences to achieve a common goal. As part of the debrief for that activity, the whole group discussion asks students to make connections to any events occurring today in which we see large groups of people with different philosophies and strategy coming together to demand change (i.e. recent debates over police brutality).
The web-inquiry activity facilitates learning because 1) it requires students to work together and collaborate their ideas and knowledge and 2) it requires students take what they already know about the civil rights movement and use that knowledge to conduct research to find hidden information. Students will need to navigate the internet to find the necessary information and then synthesize all of their findings to answer the key questions in order to present to the class.
Because the question what other leaders should be incorporated alongside Dr. King is a very open ended question that has potentially hundreds of answers, the sub questions are provided as scaffolding to get students stated down a specific path. Rather than google "leaders of the movement" or similar searches, students will use the sub questions to stimulate their prior knowledge and by answering the questions, it will begin to narrow down their research to more specific topics and/or people.
The web inquiry serves as the summative assessment to the unit, because students will have to use their knowledge from the unit to answer sub-questions which will assist them in the final presentation.
Below is my web-inquiry lesson and rubric for the assignment