Anne Koschmider and Julianne Horowitz 's posts (Hexagonal Thinking for World War I and Hooked on “Hexagonics" respectively) inspired me to try out hexagonal thinking before the "Recipe for a Revolution" activity.
Last year, during hybrid instruction, my students (9th graders) encountered 2 major challenges with "Recipe for a Revolution":
1) Not all students were familiar with how recipes are organized and structured
2) Not all students grasped the causational relationships among the "ingredients" for a revolution
These challenges together led to cognitive overload and unfairly prevented some students from successfully illustrating causation.
So this year, I decided to add 2 additional steps to the process--hexagonal thinking and a more direct conversation about the organization, structure, and purpose of recipes. The hexagonal thinking activity allowed small groups of students to "think aloud" through the connections among terms and start building an understanding of causation, while also solidifying their conceptual understanding of key vocabulary words like "sovereignty" and "nationalism." Students who had shown little understanding of the connection between the Enlightenment and the revolutions the previous day were now connecting the dots. Several students reported that the hexagons helped them see that all of these concepts were connected.
As we begin the process of understanding how recipes work and then creating their own recipes today, I am glad that students will be able to go back to their hexagons and use the connections they identified to help them determine how the "ingredients" combined to create revolutions in the 19th century.
