As much as I love a good lecture, it isn’t always the best tool. In AP Euro, I set out to cover the rise of the English state under the Tudors, hoping to end with the 2011 DBQ on Elizabeth I and gender. I never got there. My students asked some insightful questions that pulled me into tangents; They knew what they were doing. Still, I gladly indulged in the side quests. It made for a lively class, but not quite the lesson I had envisioned.
I spent a fair bit of time reworking my plan for the next block, which focused on the English Civil War. Students had already read the textbook section on the events leading up to the conflict, so I wanted an activity that pushed them further. My goal was to help them explore the clash between “Country and Court” and to see how individuals were often pulled in different directions by political and religious motivations.
I landed on a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style PowerPoint where students picked one of five roles and navigated a series of crises, making decisions based on their character’s perspective. The finished product was no small task (148 slides with hyperlinks) but it was worth it. In just 20 minutes, students got to experience the turning points of the struggle between Charles I and Parliament in a way that felt fresh and engaging.
“Choose Your Own Adventure” isn’t exactly a new idea, but I saw it as a fun way for students to wrestle with some of the minutiae of the English Civil War. The activity took about 20–30 minutes, leaving the rest of class for primary source analysis and connecting back to the key concepts.
English Civil Wat PPT: Choose Your Own Adventure (Google Drive). I tested it to make sure the hyperlinks work after converting it to Google slides. If for some reason it doesn’t work, let me know and I can link its as a PPT using One Drive.
If you use this activity, I would love some feedback about how it went, how it can improved, or how it could be expanded. This has gotten me interested in doing a few more of these, so I will be on the lookout for content that lends itself to this style of activity in the future.
Most of my time recently has spent with resource creation for my AP European History course. Some of these resources have crossover application to AP World, depending on what a teacher wants to emphasize as an illustrative example. I’ll be testing this one our with my AP World student in Unit 4 after I make some improvements.