Unit Structure: Reflection on Last Year’s Shortcomings

Which were numerous. And led to this year’s changes - more on that later. The best part of those failures? I loop with my students - the ninth graders I had last year are the same kids I have this year as tenth graders. On day one of this year, I got to own those failures and explain how I was going to fail forward and make this year better; I got to explain my plan for fixing last year’s mistakes but not to worry - that new mistakes would be made this year.

So what didn’t I like about last year? Thanks for asking. Running a self-paced, mastery-based world history class was a blast - I got to walk around and talk to students all period. But. But. There were things that needed changing. My class was too prescriptive. Do this, then this, then this (here’s a unit plan to check out). This is your test - short answer questions, same for everyone. Revealed at the beginning of the unit. Completed when the unit work was finished. Transparent? Yes. Self-paced? Yes. Waaaaaay too prescriptive? Yes. Too much ‘everyone does the same thing’? Yes. Absolutely yes. There was nowhere near enough room for student choice within the structure of my class last year.

And what about when students work at their own pace? It was freeing for them. But when students are wrestling with primary source documents, there is some power in the shared experience of that discovery together. I still kept a couple weeks at the end of each unit for synchronous, whole class historical thinking activities like structured academic controversies and Socratic seminars. However, that aspect of richness that was present in those synchronous historical thinking activities was lost in the self-paced sections of my class because everyone wasn’t always wrestling with the same documents.

Were there more failures last year? Most certainly. But these were the two biggest ones that needed fixing over the summer. My solutions will be up here soon.

Inquiry-Based History Curriculum

I’ve discussed the awesomeness of Professor Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) before. Their literacy and critical thinking infused history curriculum is an approach that I absolutely believe in. (Full disclosure: I was lucky enough to get my masters studying under Professor Wineburg and some of the SHEG folks.) Given the onset of Common Core (regardless of your opinions about the CCSS), this style of teaching a history class is finding more and more interested folks.

I got into a conversation last night with Joe (no last name given on his Twitter handle) about checking out some SHEG type lessons. I passed along a few things I have uploaded on my Google Drive. I figured linking them here wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.

A structured academic controversy about whether or not the partition of India was necessary is linked here.

The prep materials for a Socratic Seminar about whether World War I was a just war can be found here. The materials for a Socratic about the British outlawing sati in India are here.

The documents for an inquiry as to why the US entered World War I can be found here.

#SharingIsCaring

#BetterTogether

Inquiry-Based History Class

If you listen to too many of the jargony phrases in education, your head might explode. Or you’ll design a tic tac toe board with educational jargon in preparation for a big conference. Either way… But despite, or maybe because, talk about education can become buzzword-y, it is always a good idea to know what people in your field are buzzing about.

I have seen (thanks Twitter) a lot of discussion about inquiry-based learning. In some ways, it was fascinating reading about these classes, particularly science classes. To have students do experiments to learn scientific phenomena (as opposed to learning about these phenomena out of a book and then experimenting to prove that they are true) is a darn cool way to teach, and intuitively it seems very ‘sticky’: kids seem more likely to remember what they have deduced from their experiments.

In other ways, reading about inquiry has been incredibly frustrating. As a history teacher, I don’t have tangible objects to manipulate to determine the laws of nature. This makes the type of inquiry that goes on in science classrooms difficult in history classes. Still, there has to be a way to teach an inquiry-based history class, right? I think there is. In the conversation around what history teachers should be doing in their classroom, flipped or not, it seems like there is a way - a necessity, I’d argue - to base history classes around inquiry.

In short, I believe historical inquiry means having our students do the work of historians in class. Students receive (or find, depending on the teacher’s preference and/or students’ abilities) multiple primary and secondary sources about an era or event and figure out why and how things happened in the past. By doing this, students analyze the past by creating meaning, not being handed facts. With historical inquiry, students synthesize disparate interpretations of events to create their own unique understanding of the past. They are also given opportunities to connect events that happened in the past and in a particular place to what is happening now around the world.

Focusing on historical inquiry pulls to the fore the content skills students learn through history class, skills that are absolutely essential for any functional member of a democracy. (For example, how to find bias, analyze meaning behind and within a source, or make meaning from conflicting accounts of the same event to name a few.) By doing this, historical inquiry also pushes the knowledge of historical content a bit to the backburner. Students still need context (the basic facts around a historical event) to do the work of historians but how they use these facts becomes far more important than if they remember when World War I started.

So what is historical inquiry? What does it look like in a classroom? A great place to start, and a source on which I base much of my thought on historical inquiry, is this book by Sam Wineburg.

Why Blog?

And some context

So why am I writing this? Why start a blog? Several reasons, actually. This is an entirely selfish venture – I am writing this for myself. I believe that one of the best ways to become a better teacher is through reflection, purposeful thinking about what you did in the classroom, how it went, who was learning, and maybe more importantly, who wasn’t learning. This is a place for me to do that: to reflect on what I have been doing in my classroom, and to try to get better. Always better. Always.

What is my classroom? I teach world history in San Mateo, CA.  I am lucky to get to loop with my students: I get them as ninth graders and keep the same students as tenth graders. This group of common students is shared with three other core teachers – English, math, and science – for the two-year loop. Then we get a new batch. This smaller learning community (SLC) structure emphasizes personalization, which meshes well with my personality. I just finished my second loop with students and will receive a new group of freshmen in August.

My class is unique in a couple of ways: first, I collaborate extensively with my English colleague in an attempt to discuss similar topics in both my students’ English and history classes. For example, they will read All Quiet on the Western Front in English while we study World War I, or Cry, the Beloved Country while we study South Africa. Large Humanities papers and projects are markers of progress throughout the two-year loop.

The second way my classroom is unique is the literacy and evaluation of history focus. I was heavily influenced in these areas by being able to study under Sam Wineburg, who believes that students should be reading and interpreting history, not being fed a narrative without the ability to question it. In short, students should be doing the work that historians do. This is a big difference from what my students are used to in history, and is able to engage them in a way they are not used to in history class. I absolutely love the emphasis that this pedagogical style has placed on critical thinking and interpretation of history. Additionally, I was further influenced in my literacy emphasis by a training I was able to do with WestEd that emphasized the explicit teaching and modeling of the reading processes expert readers use to students.

Finally, I was lucky enough to participate in the Making Education Relevant and Interactive through Technology (MERIT) program through Foothill College this past year. This yearlong experience focused on getting teachers knowledgeable of and comfortable with educational technology resources, as well as creating a supportive network in which to learn and experiment in our classrooms.

This push to integrate more technology into my classroom – not at the expense of the critical thinking focus but to allow for more of it – combined with completing my second loop of students has given me a lot to think about this summer as I reconfigure what my classroom looks like. And here we are again, back at the beginning: this is why I am starting this blog.