Learning From My Mistakes - To Meme or Not to Meme?

In November I had a creative idea to engage my students. I am a strong believer that both formative assessments and reflective questions are essential components of any learning process. I am always looking to try something different to help my students understand what they know or don't know, so I came up with the idea of having students create memes to reflect on our Agriculture and Food Unit. 

I was pretty excited by my first attempt and the creative reflection that would happen. 

What We Eat - Meme Activity

I hoped to see some incredible creative examples of my students making connections to the unit objectives. I was excited to see what they took away from the unit and how they would express their learning takeaways. Sadly, this was not what I got. 

• Despite my frequent use of the word create, most of my students found and shared a meme that someone else had already created.
• Some of the blame is on me because I did the same thing when I created the activity. I didn't want to use up good takeaways by creating my own, so I "reshared" existing memes that I found. I did a poor job of modeling the products I was hoping for. 
• I think I put too much emphasis on "going viral", so most of the memes did not actually reflect on learning. Students were too focused on finding something funny even if it did not connect to our learning process. 
• My student's mindset about what it means to create is a bit different than mine. I talked to many of them about this and they look at "resharing" someone else's work in almost the same way I was thinking of creating and sharing an original work.

I am not someone who gives up easily  and I considered my first attempt at this activity as a good learning experience for both my students and me. We had a good conversation about what went right and what went wrong and I thought were ready at attempt round two a few weeks later.

Water Resources - Meme Activity

Better results in round two, but still more disappointment. I used the same format and wording but spent more time on verbal explanation. This apparently was not enough. There were a few more original works, but otherwise, copy my bullet points from round one here.

Third times the charm, right? 

Sustainable Energy - Meme Activity

We talked again and I changed the format of the activity a bit. Much better results. Still not perfect, but close to where I hoped we would be the first time around. I'm looking forward to adjusting a bit and trying again. 

Whats next?

I will probably do this at least one more time this year, using the format of the third example. Maybe tweak the wording a bit and add some spin that connects the meme to their daily lives. If you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them?

I do think that I will use my first failure next year the first time I do this with my new students because I think it ended up being a valuable part of the learning experience. I'd like to see if a new group of students takes me down a similar path.