Spectrum Activity

Students can clarify their comprehension through discussion with their peers when conducting a spectrum activity. Teachers have the opportunity during the activity to assess for student understanding and address student misconceptions.

Directions

  • Choose a topic where students will have to make value judgments.
  • Students can be assigned a different perspective or role and complete the activity from that person’s viewpoint.
  • Create a spectrum with diametrically opposed ideas at each end.
  • Divide students into groups of 2-3.
  • Provide students with information (text, pictures, events, people, etc) to place on the spectrum as a group.
  • Students must reach a consensus with each placement.
  • Debrief by having students clarify their placement choice on the spectrum.

Spectrum Activity

The philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., speech, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.

Cesar Chavez

Poster for a 1968 Carnegie Hall (N.Y.) concert to benefit California Grape Workers

Vietnam War Protests

The Beatles

Woodstock

Malcolm X

"It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep."
-- "Message to the Grass Roots," speech, Nov. 1963, Detroit (published in Malcolm X Speaks, ch. 1, 1965).

Betty Freidan, Feminine Mystique

Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women, led a march in Manhattan in 1970 for the Women's Strike for Equality. /

The Pill

Gloria Steinam

Gloria Steinem has said, "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" This thread runs through her life as an activist and change agent, dedicated to fashioning a world that does fit the needs of its people.

KentState Shootings

The effects of the Roe v Wade decision

The military draft

Photo, above: Rep. Alexander Pirnie, R-NY, draws the first capsule in the lottery drawing held on Dec. 1, 1969. The capsule contained the date, Sept. 14.