Distance Learning: What Would You Do for Teens and Young Adults PowerPoint
- PPTX
Description
Get students thinking and talking with this collection of creative and original hypothetical What Would You Do? situations from veteran English teacher Taylor Sapp. The 27 critical thinking prompts here are designed with young learners or elementary school students in mind.
This is the PowerPoint edition. You can also get it in a Google Slides edition.
What would you do if:
- you had a friend who was a little too touchy-feely?
- you could teleport anywhere you wanted in the world?
- you saw a person holding a Free Hugs sign?
- you were in a restaurant with a disruptive child at the next table?
- you were dating someone who was nonbinary?
and 22 more hypothetical situation prompts that for students to respond to. See the preview for the full table of contents.
The situations represent a range of ethical situations, everyday problems students really face, fantastical questions, and social issues. All are designed to be appealing and appropriate to teenagers and young adults.
That does mean that some touch on issues like drugs, dating, and gender roles. Note that you may want to set limits for those topics depending on your school situation, comfort level, and your student population. For example, a question on whether you'd change your gender for a week could be treated as a pure hypothetical or lead to a discussion of gender identity in society.
We encourage you to neither force your opinion on any one, nor allow someone's right to exist to become a subject of debate. The goal is to engage students in speaking with topics that are of interest, including topics that are currently under discussion in our society.
This activity works equally well for speaking or writing practice as students talk through the situation and different contexts, or write their opinion. You can even have them start out discussing the prompt as a kind of brainstorming, and then move to writing an expository or opinion essay. And the slide format makes it easy to email these to students, add them to your own class slides, or show them on the project in face-to-face classes!
Unlike similar collections of hypothetical situations, this is more than just a list of ideas. Each prompt is divided into two slides.
On the first slide you'll find a hero image that can be used to activate schema, a short situation to give context and engage students, then a brief expression of the dilemma, highlighting the issue, and finally some suggested solutions, although students are welcome to create their own innovative solutions (and trust me, they will!)
On the second slide, there are some ideas for variables that might change your students' answers. This helps students think about their actions in context. Many of these situations also touch on important Social-Emotional Learning points such as how to deal with a chronically late friend or resolve a conflict with a neighbor. And context is key in evaluating situations and coming up with solutions. Students may also be surprised to realize how their answers can change if only one variable is different.
In addition, the first slides suggest ways to use the slides, including a range of extension activities!
Use them as thoughtful and engaging warmers, fillers, or as the start of a class discussion, or even as pre-writing. Engaging, flexible, fun. What Would You Do? is your students' new favorite activity.
What would you do if your students wanted to do MORE work because they love these so much?
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Want more?
Check out the whole book in paperback or ebook on our website or wherever you buy books: What Would You Do? by Taylor Sapp.
You can also buy it as a growing bundle of printable PDF activities.
Browse the What Would You Do Activities individually.
or check What Would You Do for Middle School:
And don't miss all our Critical Thinking Resources.
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Alphabet Publishing is a small independent publishing company that specializes in materials to help students practice language through creativity. All our products are author-led and all our authors are teachers practicing in the classroom now.
