Lesson 2: How can we balance majority and minority interests?

Drafting a statute for a micro-community

Lesson description

The students continue their work in groups.

The teacher watches them at work, observing which methods and skills they perform well and where they need training and further help. The teacher can ask for, and give feedback on how the students co-operated in the debriefing session (lesson 4). The groups should work alone as much as possible, and the teacher should certainly not intervene if the students are “making mistakes”. They will learn more if given the liberty and responsibility to discover their mistakes themselves, and if necessary, the class will correct most of the mistakes in the plenary round.

The teacher should also refrain from intervening if a group finds “politically incorrect” solutions, such as handing over all powers of decision to one person (“dictatorial solution”). Here again, this gives interesting inputs for discussion. Quite often the students will challenge a piece of unsound or inacceptable reasoning. The teacher assesses the students’ achievements in competence development and draws conclusions on their learning needs.