The last few years I have attempted the Autopsy of an Empire assignment in Era 4 and have gotten mixed results. The "empire as a body" analogy fell flat for some students and it just seemed to have a lot of moving parts that we couldn't manage all at once. This year, I decided to lean into the body analogy sooner and I think it'll help when we get to the Autopsy of an Empire activity in a few weeks.
Each student received one of the 5 empire articles and completed the Three Reads process. Then, on the second day, they worked on this slide template with the other students who received the same article and shared their work with me so I could assemble a master slide deck like this. The following day, we discussed Frankenstein's monster and I prompted students to recall that he was assembled with many different parts. First, students made connections between the categories and the body parts I listed on the Empire Building Handout (with Franken Empire template). Students used the master slide decks to assemble their "Franken-Empires" using many different parts of other empires (I advised them to include parts from at least 3 empires). When they checked in their charts, I asked them to explain one of the rows--so why they connected the body part they did and why they chose the empire and so on. Then they received the one-pager template. I was purposely vague about the requirements because I wanted to see what they would come up with--I just asked that they illustrate their charts on the monster template.
Here are some examples:
