Bringing Model UN into the History Classroom

Truly understanding why the globe launched itself into a second world war in just two decades is challenging. Textbooks try to highlight a few terms/events to sum up a very complicated international political economy. In the textbook our school uses, Alan Brinkley’s Unfinished Nation, he highlights: Dawes Plan, Kellogg-Briand Pact, Lebensraum, the Neutrality Acts, Rome-Berlin Axis, Anschluss and the Munich Conference. Obviously, reading the chapter is not enough, which is why students took their seats in my classroom the next day. Only--this time, it wasn’t a classroom, it was an international diplomatic table of countries involved in the lead-up to WWII

Procedure:

First, I divided the students up into the different countries including a League of Nations. Then, I had them take on the issues. Naturally, I didn’t like Brinkley’s terms, so I made my own list. At the beginning of class, students quietly worked with their fellow ambassador (if they had one) to write a press release about each event and thus play model UN without being in model UN!

After they wrote their press releases, I let them debate the issues. This was a lot more challenging. When I do this lesson again next time, I’m going to give them their countries before hand so they can do some background research to better defend their positions with proof.

Results:

Students certainly better understood the lead up to WWII. But, this lesson also taught students what it’s like being a politician/diplomat/ambassador. They also played around with writing a formal press release. When some countries/students had more formal, articulate press-releases, the other groups tried to keep up. In the end, they were all really good!

After the classed hummed along for a while,I figure I would detail the opening movements of the war in Europe. But, I didn’t get far. When we started talking about the Munich Agreement and Germany taking over the Sudetenland, one of my students drew a parallel to the current situation going on in the Ukraine--the exact parallel former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton made two days later--I might add. Clearly they were thinking like diplomats!

Then I embarked on a sweet tangent about how history relates to current events. And on that note, I’m going to read the news.

Great Depression Storytelling

As a history teacher, I find one of the best ways to get engagement and retention is to give students a role to play in class. One way to do this is to set up a hypothetical situation where students are actors in a story from history. During the Great Depression (or any depression/panic for that matter), I make each student a part of society and force them to contemplate the decisions that led the country into depression.

While the best part of the lesson is student engagement, it’s also a great teaching tool for empathy. Students have to grapple with how people lose their jobs, but also about how businesses--usually banks--make bad decisions that lead to financial catastrophe.

Finally, it provides a nice framework to refer to when you discuss subsequent recessions. Or, when you’re trying to review the material and you can refer to the exact student who was the banker who had to send his/her hired thugs to call-in a loan; it helps to jog students’ memories.

Here’s the set up for my Great Depression unit. Feel free to ask questions in the comments section if you don’t understand how it works.

Characters:

Banker 1

• invests in the market responsibly
• pays back debts

Banker 2

• bad investments
• bad loans
• bankrupt when panic sets in

Business person

• needed a loan to expand his business
• they take on an employee (character below)
• when times get tough the employee gets fired
• people (including former employee) now can’t afford goods and price falls
• tariff rates also lead to
• price drops and deflation occurs

Employee

• has a job until the employers loan gets called in
• then fired and unemployed--with no way to get a loan

Citizen 1

• can buy on margin
• can invest in one bank
• can run on the panics when panic sets in

Citizen 2

• Just took out a loan to buy a house (or expand a small business)
• bank comes knocking

Farmer 1

• takes out a loan
• prices fall

Farmer 2

• drought/dust bowl and displacement

The Government (usually teacher)

• invests heavily to win WWI
• pulls back on investment
• increases interest rates (Fed)
• increases tariff (Congress)
• Hoover’s government vs. FDR

World War I Wall Machine

For an extra credit assignment at the end of the semester, I did something that makes a teacher cringe, I chose to give my students tremendous latitude in how they created and portrayed any event from the history we studied. The description was simple enough; I had students summarize one of the units we studied over the course of the semester, and I let them present it however they’d like in front of their classmates. Though I gave a multitude of options--prezi, blabberize, twitter, video, to name a few--students leaned heavily on the Facebook option. It just helped prove to me how much that site dominated their (or should I say, our) lives.

They had a lot of fun with it. And, for some, it really helped them recall information about the units covered in the previous months.

Follow this link for one of many “wall machines” that were created.