Benton Community’s World History class serves as a graduation requirement, and is generally the social studies class taken by students during their sophomore year of high school. In this course, we cover world events from the agricultural revolution around 12,000 BCE to present day. Due to the sheer amount of topics discussed in class, selected topics are chosen to have a deeper dive and be a more major focus.
As a part of this focus, our writing on summative assessments often takes the form of clusters. For clusters, students are given 2-4 terms or people throughout the unit. For each term, students must give an identification and explain the significance of that term. The last and most challenging part of these clusters is making connections between these terms, including terms that may be relevant for events that happened across the globe.
This challenge can be helpful to students in multiple ways. One is to help students develop critical thinking skills that can help them throughout their lives. In addition, it can prepare students to become thoughtful citizens who understand cause and effect relationships in world events.