Education Commons^™

Speed Dating In History: Fostering Critical Thinking, Patricia L. Rieman

Patricia L Rieman

When students role-play, their learning is personalized (Joyce & Calhoun, 2014). Add the challenge of finding compatible partners, and students are fully engaged as they infer the connections between themselves and their “dates”. Mix in the final element of limiting the opportunity to interact with potentially compatible partners, and students must quickly determine importance, synthesize, and then verbalize the details of their personas. Additionally, students must analyze their partner’s message to identify connections to their own, infer hidden identities, and describe their cognitive processes. In this session on using speed-dating to teach history, all of these actions come together to …