Congress of Vienna / Concert of Europe Reenactment

This is a lesson that takes a full double period to complete. The purpose of the lesson is to provide students with an oppertunity to reenact the Congress of Vienna. I find this to be a more interesting way of learning of the objectives of each country rather than explaining it.

The objective of the lesson is to understand the goals of the main countries represented at the Congress of Vienna, it requires students to debate scenarios based on the goals of their assigned countries.

The lesson starts with a short VOKI avatar, the link is provided on the lesson plan sheet, VOKI is a free website, I am not the owner, but I am providing the link to a Metternich Avatar that I have made for this lesson. I play the Avatar to introduce the lesson.

In five groups, the class are assigned a country and given an information sheet from that country. They prepare an opening speech highlighting the objectives of their countries.

Secondly using the powerpoint, a series of scenarios are played out and the class will offer solutions from the perspective of their countries. The outcome becomes that the class get to develop an understanding of the objectives of the Congress based on the responses of their peers. Some of the scenarios however come from the Concert of Europe period and not exclusively from the Congress of Vienna.

As an extension I usually ask the class for homework to write a paragraph about each country present at the congress to discuss what their objectives are. The plenary of this lesson is a link to a website summarising the outcomes of the real congress of Vienna. Students usually find it interesting to see how their reenactment matches up with the real congress.