Our 10th Grade Class is More Democratic Than 19th Century America

While Mrs.Gallagher was away on a conference for the week, our Honors History 10 class stayed in touch and used each other as resources to learn about the Rise of Democracy in 19th century America. In the spirit of a true democracy, we held a class meeting the day before Mrs.Gallagher left. Here, we all added our input to decide how we would learn the curriculum while our teacher was away. The verdict came to analyzing primary sources and constructing a poster that would answer the essential question: How should we define democracy? How democratic was the US in the early 1800s? Mrs. Gallagher set up an entire-class Google doc where we put our lesson outline and goals for each class. At the end of every day, 5 or 6 students wrote in detail about our progress and Mrs. Gallagher responded with questions and suggestions to help us along. With clear communication between teacher and students, and the help of technology that allowed us to overcome our distance barrier, our class analyzed 5 primary sources and formulated our ideas to create posters about the Rise of Democracy.

Here is my group's digital poster using Glogster!