The Tikkun Project
Lesson
1
Looking for Similarities and Differences
Concept
Groups can be defined by shared traits or by differing ones, and most real communities contain meaningful amounts of both at once.
Focus Question
How important are similarities and differences in groups?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Strand C (Comprehension), Grade 8: Interpret a text's central idea and evaluate its validity when applied to lived experience.
Thinking & Learning Skills
ATL — Thinking Skills: Using a structured game mechanic (Set) as a metaphor for group logic; testing a text's claim against personal experience.
Learner Profile: Open-Minded, Thinkers.
Context
The launch lesson for the capstone unit introduces both the Set game (a recurring structural metaphor for the whole unit, reused explicitly in Lesson 5) and the core text, and revisits the previous class's initial definition of diversity and their thinking on whether diversity is a strength in their community.
Lesson Outline
LEARNING TO PLAY SET
Divide students into groups of 3-4 to learn the card game Set. Cards have four attributes: colour, shading, shape, and number. Three cards make a "set" if, for each attribute, all three cards match OR all three are different — no mixed case counts. Play a few rounds until the mechanic is clear.
Draw out the key insight: groups can be organized around what members share, or around what distinguishes them — and in any real group, both kinds of pattern are usually present and important at once, not just one or the other.
MEETING THE CORE TEXT
Show the SET Anchor Chart alongside the core text: "When a person mints coins with one stamp, each one is made the same. When the creator of the universe makes people from the mould of the first person, not one of them is alike." (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4). Ask, connecting back to last class's definition of diversity and the game just played: In what ways do you think this text is true? In what ways is it false? What is the text trying to tell us about similarity and difference among people?
WATCHING AND REFLECTING
Show the video "All That We Are." Both the video and the text add real complexity to the idea of sameness and diversity among people — the goal is for students to sit with that complexity, not resolve it into a single tidy answer.
REVISITING OUR THINKING
Display the class's co-constructed definition of diversity and their earlier responses on whether diversity is a strength in their community. Exit ticket: How has your thinking about diversity changed or been confirmed? Thinking ahead to the Critical Challenge, how do you think we can work well with people from a different community so that diversity actually strengthens the shared project, rather than just being present in it?
PLAYING HUMAN SET
In the same small groups, students identify two attributes they all share and two that differ across every member. Groups share their attributes with the class; record them visibly. Students then re-form into new groups by birth month and repeat the exercise — two shared, two different. Finally, ask students to suggest a new way to group the class themselves, and repeat once more.
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Set as a structural metaphor: choosing a game whose entire mechanic is "match OR all-different, never in between" gives students a concrete, low-stakes way to internalize that a group can be meaningfully organized by similarity or by difference — before the unit asks them to reason about that same tension in much higher-stakes human contexts.
Human Set, repeated three times with three different groupings (self-selected, birth month, class-suggested), matters specifically because it demonstrates the same people can be meaningfully grouped multiple different ways — no single grouping is the "real" one, which undercuts a tempting but oversimplified view of identity as having one true categorization.