Announcing a Great Opportunity for Students: Along the Color Line Video Contest
Please share this with any teachers you know. Dr. Marable was very important to me, and I can think of no greater tribute to him then to share his work so that it inspires new social critics. I have written a curriculum to to support the project, which you can find here.
“Along the Color Line” Video Contest: Teens Speak Out About Current Events
“Along The Color Line”, written by the late historian Dr. Manning Marable, was a public educational and information service dedicated to fostering political dialogue and discussion, inspired by the great tradition for political event columns written by W. E. B. Du Bois nearly a century ago. This video contest provides high school students with the opportunity and incentive to use scholarly research to analyze and pose solutions to some of the social issues that Manning Marable addressed in his writings such as sexism, racism, imperialism, and poverty. It continues the spirit of “Along the Color Line” by fostering critical analysis on political issues and public events that had special significance to African Americans and to other people of color internationally; allows students the creative license to translate the rigorous research that Dr. Marable used in his “Along the Color Line“ columns into a creative and accessible video medium; and empowers students to speak out about the material conditions of their lives to an audience of teachers, activists and community members at “A New Vision of Black Freedom: The Manning Marable Tribute Conference” sponsored by Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies from April 26 – April 28, 2012.
Curriculum Connection: An adaptable weeklong curriculum developed by a NYS certified HS teacher is available free for educators. It provides educational units and background reading for teachers of Civics, Government and US History to connect this contest to their classroom while meeting several Common Core writing (1,4,5,6,9) and reading (1,2,4,6,8,9,10) standards.
Contest Requirements: After becoming familiar with Manning Marable’s column “Along the Color Line” style of blending scholarly data with political analysis to address social issues, students will create a 2-3 minute long video presentation that features their research and analysis of a social issue that is important to them and their community.
Criteria: This contest is limited to students currently enrolled in high school anywhere in the US. Submissions will be judged on depth of knowledge of social problem being discussed, originality, and creative expression. Students can submit individually or through their teacher as part of a class project.
Submissions: The due date is February 17, 2012 before midnight. Submissions should be sent to marablevideocontest@gmail.com. Only one submission per email and per student. Students must include their name, age, grade, and full contact information as well as the name, address and phone number of their high school. Videos longer than 3 minutes will not be accepted.
Finalists: The top finalists will be special guests of the conference, where their videos will be screened. The first place winner will be announced at conference.
Prize: $250 Prize, one of Dr. Marable’s books and the video featured on the conference website.
For more information or questions contact: askmarableconference@gmail.com
On Rigor
I started this blog post after abandoning Monday night’s #sschat (for those not on Twitter, the hashtag chats are set times when people join on twitter to discuss various topics, turning twitter into an open chat room, of sorts. #sschat is a highly useful weekly chat at 7 pm EST for social studies teachers). The topic for Monday’s chat was bringing rigor into the social studies classroom, but after 30 minutes of back and forth over the definition, both literal and applied, of the term “rigor,” I decided to bow out and write this post instead.
This post very much represents a work-in-progress when it comes to thinking deeply about this topic. I would ask that all conclusions, no matter how strongly they are expressed below, be taken as tentative. I’m sure in my attempts to think rigorously about rigor, I’ve fallen short in some logical areas.
Rigor: The Definition
A Change in Practice: How I Use Primary Documents
Cross posted from the NYC Social Studies Critical Friends Group Blog, based on this prompt.
Last year, I began really changing how I used primary source documents in class. For most of my career, I used primary documents to give students factual information and eyewitness accounts to what was going on in various times and places. I had somewhat blindly accepted that it was better to use primary document to “bring history alive,” rather than relying on the deadened accounts found in textbooks. I also imagined I was “empowering” my students to become historical interpreters, rather than relying on politically correct interpretations put forth in the textbook. In reality though, I don’t believe my students experienced primary documents that differently from how they would have experienced the textbook. I wasn’t teaching them to interpret, but rather to find factual information in relatively unproblematic texts I had chosen with a clear takeaway in mind.
Last year, I began doing much more work putting primary documents in opposition to each other. This forced students to do the critical work of historians in order to construct history for their selves. I began selecting primary document sets that, if not outright contradicting each other, forced students to take multiple documents into account in order to draw complex conclusions about causation and historical significance. Very much connected, I shifted from having my students do analytical writing to doing persuasive writing using primary documents, thereby forcing them to use the documents as evidence to support their claims.
I initially made the change because I realized that in my previous years teaching US, I wasn’t really having my students doing much thinking about history outside of their project work. When I began constructing a new global curriculum last year, I wanted to ensure students were playing authentic roles not only on projects, but also regularly in class. While my major assessments had always asked students to include more than “just the facts,” the way students had been learning hadn’t done the same. I was asking myself, “How can this work be more engaging, challenging, and worthwhile?”
My initial change was just on some gut hunches; I’m not sure I could have articulated any of this at the time. The “data” that led me to the change was the mostly boring writing I was getting from students. Once upon a time I had looked forward to reading student essays, but I realized that since I was no longer asking students to think in service of the Regents gods, I was also not getting the best work from students that allowed them some level of individual expression.
I knew the change was successful when students started being excited by what they found in primary documents, and when I saw them actually using that information in their work on a regular basis.
My thinking on this got pushed exponentially farther than it ever would have otherwise when I started working on the NYC local assessment pilot for the new teacher evaluation system. The three other people on my team were all brilliant at doing this kind of work. Most importantly, they named some of the things I had been doing, but not doing so intentionally, so that I could recreate some of my successes. They also named the specific skills students needed, and gave me tools to teach these skills.
Now, I’m wondering about how to fully integrate this kind of learning into my government & economics course in a way that moves students beyond the dominant “token-liberal vs. token-conservative talking head” political discourse so prevalent right now in the country. How do I get students to move beyond the simplistic “I agree with this perspective over that perspective,” and towards one where they can critically articulate and analyze the rhetorical structures and tools being used to manipulate viewpoints, and the discourse itself.
Latest Project: The NYC Social Studies CFG
Over the summer, I had a wonderful reenergizing experience doing professional development around teacher leadership at Swarthmore. Coming out of the week, we were all asked to initiate a leadership project of some sort for the coming school year. As I was moving to a new school, I was in the unique situation of needing to find something to do outside of my school.
As I was brainstorming ideas, I remembered a conversation I had a few weeks prior with Kate Weiss, a teacher who I met while doing a Facing History seminar. Like myself, Kate was a Social Studies Department Chair and the senior history teacher before being done with her first decade of teaching. We found we had much in common in terms of feelings of stagnated professional growth, isolation, and frustrations with our schools as they reached maturity. I found myself wishing I had met her much earlier; perhaps the past two years would not have been a little bit easier.
When I got back from Swarthmore, I met with Kate, and we decided to try to do something to help teachers in similar situations, by forming a group of NYC Social Studies teachers based on the Critical Friends Group model. I am very excited by the group we were able to assemble to meet monthly. We have 11 rock star teachers from 7 different NYC public schools, as well as a full time social studies coach. The group includes numerous department chairs and teacher mentors; everyone in the group shares some leadership role at some level. We met for drinks a few weeks ago, and had our first formal meeting this past Monday.
Our plan is to meet monthly. At each meeting, all teachers will spend the first thirty minutes doing some reflective writing, which will be shared on our blog. Then, 2-3 teachers will present their work, student work, or an issue they face as a leader using National School Reform Faculty protocols. We hope that we will challenge each other to grow as teachers and leaders as we share resources and ideas. We have also committed to sharing as much as possible publicly, so the work of the group can benefit others beyond the walls of our schools.
Our blog is now live. Please subscribe and comment as posts arrive. Below, is our official mission:
The mission of the Social Studies Critical Friends Group (S2CFG) is to provide accomplished social studies teachers, who have foundational experience in the classroom of at least three years, with a peer network to support their continued development beyond that which the small school can always provide. Taking inspiration from both the National Writing Project and the National School Reform Faculty, S2CFG members will hold monthly in-person meetings in addition to participating in an online network to share and develop best practices, curricular units, and performance tasks. The group will also provide a forum for teachers to discuss the issues they face in formal or informal leadership roles in their schools. Members will be expected to produce at least one piece of reflective writing each month about some aspect of their professional practice, as well as present at least two NSRF protocols during the year looking at either their classroom or larger school issues. Members can expect to gain a wealth of ideas and support from other strong and accomplished social studies teachers. However, it is our goal that the S2CFG will not only give teachers an increased sense of community and purpose for their own professional lives, but that it will also serve as a springboard to develop teacher-leaders who will serve as professional and curricular developers for the larger education community. S2CFG will share our work (units, performance tasks, tools and documentation of our project) across networks of schools, and members will have opportunities facilitate and present at various conferences and institutes.
Implementing Standards-Based Grading in my Social Studies Class, Finally
This year, I am going 100% SBG in my senior Social Studies course, which combines government and economics.
Background
I wrote a whole series (scroll down to the bottom) on my plan to do a form of Standards Based Grading in my history class last year. It sort of happened, sort of didn’t. I was thinking about SBG, but the experience for my students did not change: they still saw grades for individual assignments, though there were performance standards attached to writing assignments. There were three major problems, two of which I knew going in, one which I realized very quickly:
- In a survey history course that ends in a high-stakes, content-based exam, it is necessary to track how students do with all content, and one is never going to be able to write standards for, let alone reassess, 200 different pieces of content.
- As I wrote last year, the history skill standards that I was aware of at the time are not written with performance in mind, and were very difficult to assess.
- The problem that emerged immediately was that I hadn’t planned my course with SBG in mind, so the standards I planned on using were not really useful for assessment. They were also the wrong standards/enduring understandings for what I ended up teaching, because I never went back and made sure the Stage 1 stuff from UbD aligned with the Stage 3 stuff (see this recent post on that issue)
Changes for This Year
This year, there are four factors which are game changers and make me know I can actually do this right this year:
- I started working on a project with the brilliant Daisy Martin, who does the Reading Like a Historian work out of Stanford, who gave me a ton of clarity on what historical skill standards should look like so they can be used to assess student performance.
- Most importantly, my new school started a SBG pilot, that the 11th and 12th grade math and science teachers, as well as the art teacher, are participating in. They already had a structure in place which solves some problems for me, and keeps me from having to figure things out myself. The clarity provided by the design of the pilot makes my life easier.
- Because I knew of the pilot and had the structure in mind, I was planning as an SBG assessor from the moment I started conceiving my course, thereby correcting the second issue above.
- My unit plans, at least the first one so far, fully align Understandings, Assessment, and Instruction, the three stages of UbD.
What it Will Look Like
Everyone in the pilot was told to write learning goals that start as “I can” statements for students, along with teacher friendly indicators of performance. Examples follow below.
Supercharging the DBQ Essay
The Document Based Question Essay is one of the more ubiquitous secondary social studies assignments in New York, and I imagine, in the US. It is a requirement on both New York State Regents Exams in History, each a graduation requirement, as well as on AP History exams. It’s one of the few things on standardized tests I do not have a problem with, and would use even if there was no test associated with it. While not a truly authentic assessment, DBQs accomplish exactly what most timed assessments should: it simulates the real work of professionals in the field through inquiry. Given that authentic inquiry in social studies takes a lot of time, the DBQ essay provides an appropriate bounded inquiry experience which can be used both as a formative assessment to help students learn more information, but also as means to assess students’ abilities to critically read, construct written arguments, back those up with evidence, access and integrate other knowledge, and write in a clear, organized manner. For the couple hours it takes, DBQs give teachers a lot of bang for their buck.
Since becoming a part of the pilot for new assessments to be used as part of NYC teacher evaluation last January, I’ve been thinking even more deeply about the uses of DBQs. Starting from the brilliant Historical Thinking Matters, the DBQs from the pilot forced students not only to construct arguments based on evidence, but they also asked students to learn to think and read like historians, by presenting them with contradictory evidence about the causation of events. This is something the NY DBQs never do; all documents can be read and used merely as a statement of fact. It also pushes students beyond the thinking of most AP DBQs, which focus on obviously subjective evaluations of the effects of historical actions, as opposed to forcing students to take an objective stand on the causes of events in the face of unclarity and uncertainty. Still, with all sources being primary documents, a key component of the work of modern research was missing.
Last year, it dawned on me that I could use the DBQ structure to teach and assess students’ abilities to evaluate all sources. On a DBQ I constructed about the French Revolution, I threw in a “document” from Wikipedia. I did not want students to simply discard the information — there was really good stuff in there — but I hoped students would question the trustworthiness of the source in writing rather than just citing it as fact (some did). The most astute readers even picked up that there was evidence in another primary document included that contradicted part of the Wikipedia source.
This year, as I put together a senior course that deals with major questions and understandings from government and economics, I’m envisioning using DBQ essays in order to simulate two additional authentic tasks from my students’ lives. One of these uses is a little more obvious: students will have to take a stand on policy matters based on contradictory data, newspaper reporting, and opinion pieces. I’m currently accumulating documents for an essay about the effectiveness of the stimulus for later in the year, and additional ideas would be great.
However, in dealing with seniors, I’m also looking for a way to simulate the experience of a college course, and attempted to construct a DBQ experience to give me an idea of where students are in terms of being ready for that. My first unit looks at identity formation, media literacy, and the connection between the two. So I’m asking students to write a DBQ essay agreeing or disagreeing with the statement, “Individuals‘ identities are created by advertising” using these documents (sorry, it’s a big file). I think this task will simulate the experience of having to take an exam based on course reading. I don’t just want to simulate this experience, though. In order to simulate the lecture hall, I will deliver a formal lecture on models of identity formation, and students will be allowed to use their notes on their essay. The next day, I will attempt to simulate the social aspect of studying in college by splitting up the documents between students, having them read them over, and then share their reading with their classmates. Only then, will students get all the documents, and have a couple of classes to write their essays.
One of the shared practices of my new school is the use of three interim assessments throughout the year using the same rubric in order to track students’ growth and to be able to target instruction to the areas where it’s most needed. This identity essay will be the first of my interim assessments, so I’ll post the data and my reflection on it once I have it in early October, as well as continued reflection throughout the year about addressing these specific skills.
