Jared's+LEDP

Total Time allotted: 5 days (Approximately 300 minutes)
===1. Goal: HS.9. Identify historical and current events, issues and problems when national interests and global interest have been in conflict, and analyze the values and arguments on both sides of the conflict.=== ===2. Objective: Students will use principles learned from the game Diplomacy in order to assess and understand the motives that lead to World War I by journaling about their own experiences and principles learned that lead to the conflict with at least 80% accuracy. ===

3. Procedure:
===__Anticipatory Set: __ (30 minutes) In order to help students understand issues that lead to World War I, the teacher will have students play the game Diplomacy. Depending on class size, the teacher will split up the class into two groups for two separate games. The teacher will pair up students so that each pair represents one of the seven nations represented in the game (if there are more than 28 students, but less than 42, some teams will be groups of 3). The teacher will then have students choose their nation by randomly drawing them. The teacher will then as quickly as possible explain the basic rules of the game as well as the objective. After explaining the basic rules, the teacher will explain the importance of the negotiation portion of the game and how nations are encouraged to make secret deals as well as lie. Finally, the teacher will explain that the game may or may not be fully concluded, but that students will complete the game at the end of their third class day. The team in the lead at that time will be the winner. (150 minutes) The teacher will also give time limits for each round so that the game can move along as quickly as possible. The teacher will give 7 minutes for each diplomacy stage, 3 minutes for each order writing phase and 5 minutes for each resolution and gaining and losing units phase, so that each round can be played in fifteen minutes. This will allow students to play for approximately 10 phases. The teacher will explain that students may make or break any agreements throughout the game, including splitting up their group members to make more use of the diplomatic stage time. === ===__Teaching: __(15 minutes) Once students are eliminated or the game comes to a complete end, students will be asked to do a pre-journal regarding what they learned through playing the game, highlighting what went well, what went wrong and what they would do differently next time. === ===(15 minutes) The teacher will then debrief the class about what they learned and guide a discussion on what problems they had and what role negotiating played. === ===(75 minutes) Once finished with this discussion, the teacher will highlight issues regarding World War I in the following day and a half of class. The teacher will particularly highlight the long-term causes of World War I, such as Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism. The teacher will use the Diplomacy game as a reference for student understanding of how conflicts arose and the issues of making secret agreements. === ===__Closure: __ The teacher will have students look for and point out when real countries did something that was similar to what happened in their board game activities. Students will then be asked to do a post-journal highlighting similarities with what happened in the board game to what lead to the actual beginning of World War I. === ===4. Assessment: The teacher will use students’ journals to assess students understanding and ability to connect the game with the actual World War I history. === ===5. Principles of Learning: This series of lessons, would allow students to use several of Gee’s principles of learning. The first principle of learning that this game would teach the students === ===is the Metalevel thinking of semiotic domains. In order for students to truly learn from this unit, they must be able to critically think about how theirs or other students’ actions compared to or contrasted real historic events leading up to World War I. Students need to be able to connect these two semiotic domains together understanding that some of the same issues that students dealt with through the game also happened to the actual nations involved in World War I. === ===The Psychosocial moratorium principle is another principle that I hope to teach students through further lessons in the unit. As we discuss the approximate 16 million death total of World War I as well as the link to the approximate 80 million deaths in World War II, students must understand how mistakes such as secret deals and treachery have grave consequences in real life, particularly for those who had nothing to do with the negotiations. While students know that their choices have no real world consequences, they can understand that these real world actions had dire consequences. === ===Another principle of learning that this mini-unit uses is the probing principle, although this can be a tricky principle to use and learn within the confines of the game, students must, at some point probe and try to find the correct time to break alliances or backstab their friends. They must also assess how much to trust the other teams and hypothesize when and how to prepare for betrayal. === ===<span style="font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;">There are many other principles that students can and should learn from playing Diplomacy and relating it to World War I, such as Identity Principle: can students, who are generally honest, good people learn to lie to other students in order to win? The practice principle, having a successful or unsuccessful turn will teach students something, especially if they betray or are betrayed and this will teach them immediate consequences within the confines of the game. The “Regime of Competence” Principle among several others is also taught, the game is challenging for each team, there are sometimes rewards and students will learn how to better play the game as they go and be able to learn and think about new and different strategies if they ever played the game again. ===