English teacher Caitlin Dee’s attempt to expand Holocaust awareness through a gallery walk project has been recognized in an educational software company’s blog.
To start their unit on the Holocaust, Dee’s class read Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, outlining his personal experience in a concentration camp. Afterwards, each student was assigned a topic to research and present.
To frame the lesson, Dee and her co-teacher, Alex Kurnava, thought it would be a good idea for the students to create their own gallery walk.
“We thought it would be really cool to do as our final project, since we started the unit looking at Holocaust museums from around the world,” Dee said.
A gallery walk is a collaborative learning strategy where students get to move around the classroom to provide feedback and analyze various stations, usually images, texts, or peer work. Dee’s take on it had groups of students scattered throughout the library, each having a presentation prepared on their Chromebooks about specific aspects of the Holocaust.
Students and teachers were invited to visit the gallery. Christopher Reilsono’s history class was among those who attended, and at the end of the day, Reilsono spotlighted the gallery walk on his X social media account. A blog writer from HMH, an educational software company, ended up seeing the post, reaching out to Dee, and posting about it.
Dee was excited to have her ideas appreciated on a popular education blog.
“I never thought that I’d be featured in a national blog this early in my career,” Dee said. “I’m still figuring things out sometimes, so it was amazing that somebody wanted to validate my ideas.”
