Grade 8 diamond-nine ranking of long-term causes of the First World War on Padlet

Grade 8 (Year 9, age 13 to 14) · 50 min · 1 device per pair

Year 9 write their causation essay on the First World War next week, and the essays falter when the factual anchors are vague. The teacher makes one Padlet Sandbox board per pair, set to school login, holding nine cards, each a cause with one fact attached: the Anglo-German naval race after HMS Dreadnought in 1906, the Triple Alliance of 1882, the Triple Entente of 1907, the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the Schlieffen Plan drawn up in 1905, Weltpolitik from 1897, the Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 and imperial rivalry in Africa. Pairs drag the cards into a diamond with the most important cause at the top, adding a note beside each card that explains its position. The teacher circulates, pressing pairs on which cause made the others dangerous, and the lesson ends with each pair writing the opening sentence of their essay from their top card.

Why this is Interactive Replace

Pairs move, rank and justify the cards, which is working with the content rather than receiving it. The diamond-nine is a card task history departments have long run with printed sets, and the Padlet board keeps the same nine causes, the same ranking argument and the same feedback from the teacher at the desk.

Compared with

A printed diamond-nine card set, cut out and arranged on the desk by each pair.

Watch out

If all pairs worked on one shared board and the teacher re-taught from the pattern of placements across the class during the lesson, that live data would be an addition and the lesson would become Interactive Amplify.

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Grade 8 diamond-nine ranking of long-term causes of the First World War on Padlet.

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