How We Can Teach Social Studies More Effectively
I was humbled and honored when Larry Ferlazzo sent me an email a couple of months ago to answer one of the questions for the wonderful teacher advice column he does at Education Week. I’m even more humbled to be featured in a column with Bill Bigelow, curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-director of the Zinn Education Project, whose work I have long admired. The question for this week is, “What’s the best advice you can give to Social Studies teachers who want to be more effective?” An excerpt from my response:
The best advice I can give Social Studies teachers who want to be more effective is to remember that we teach students, not content.
While standards may dictate that students be able to explain the Green Revolution, the human beings in our classes demand that the information we help them learn also help them develop as people. Students may enter our rooms asking, “when am I ever going to need use this information?” We need to help them leave wondering, “what lessons can I learn from the past to help myself and our society make better decisions in the future?” A study of the Green Revolution, then, becomes a lesson in how a seemingly wonderful solution to problem (hunger) can have unintended consequences that are potentially far more catastrophic (overpopulation, increased reliance on polluting fossil fuels). By focusing on transferable goals, students will not only be more engaged, but will better remember and understand the content.
The rest is here. Part two and three to come, and they’re still looking for answers, so please contribute your suggestions!
Help Wanted: Existential Teaching Dilema
This evening, everyone in my critical friends group is sharing an “existential” dilema we’re struggling with about our practice. Here’s mine:
This is the question I’ve struggled with since I began planning my Government/Economics course last summer: How do I choose/balance between the following modes of praxis in a course where I’m not concerned with a massive amount of content for a state exam?
- Teaching through inquiry, which best develops students’ ability to think critically and to learn how to learn. In true open inquiry, learning a specific body of knowledge is limited or sacrificed.
- Teaching through extensive reading, watching, and research to gain the necessary cultural literacy to enter adult society and assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Given the tremendous amount of information students need, this limits the emphasis on skill development.
- Teaching students to do authentic intellectual work (which often, but not always, is through Project Based Assessments), which emphasizes the practical skills of communication and production, as well as have students engage with specific content.
Some notes towards an answer:
I recently re-read Horace’s Compromise, where Ted Sizer writes that schools should only really focus on four things:
- Helping students develop understanding, which is done by questioning.
- Helping students to gain knowledge, which is done by telling.
- Helping students develop skills, which is done through coaching.
- Helping students obtain decency
There seems to be a strong correlation between Sizer’s first three duties of an “essential” school and the three modes of praxis I struggle to balance. At the school level, I think there is a clear need to balance all three, along with ensuring all students are decent people (and given that most of my thinking right now is about macro-curriculum planning for the school I’m helping to open next fall, having that clarity is a huge help). My feeling is that a thoughtfully and intentionally structured school would be filled with classes that allow students and teachers to primarily focus on one of the three areas, to make sure that the course’s transfer goals are clear, and to decrease the cognitive load on students, allowing for maximum development.
In the overwhelming majority of schools though, there is little attention to how the entire curriculum works together. At best, there is some alignment vertically within subject areas, or horizontally across grades. It then falls to the thoughtful teacher to make an independent decision on how to address these three goals…
I’m very curious to hear how teachers, parents, and students would respond to this question.
Make History Matter at 8am Tomorrow at NCSS
Frank McCaughey and I will be presenting tomorrow morning at 8am sharp at NCSS. Hope you can join us physically or virtually. For those who can’t, our presentation and a link to our materials are below.
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
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.
Goals for the 2011-12 School Year
Following on the heels of my last post, here are my goals for the upcoming school year:
Teaching (The first two are also my “official” school goals that are being used to guide observations)
I will improve the way I give feedback to students. Formally, I hope to develop a system to give students feedback about writing that meaningfully a) tells students where they are, b) what they need to do to improve and c) is efficient enough that I can provide frequent and timely feedback to all students. I also need to make sure I am giving informal feedback more frequently to all students. (I hope that moving to a Standards Based Grading system will enable these things to happen organically).
Students will have multiple opportunities to rethink and revise their answers to large essential questions throughout each unit, and will also reflect on and revise all major work.
I will solicit bi-weekly feedback from my students to ensure they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and to give them a voice in what happens in the class.
Leadership
The Social Studies Critical Friends Group will meet once a month, and will be valuable for its participants.
Advisory
100% of my new advisees will either graduate or earn at least ten credits by June.
100% of my advisees will be accepted to college, and will have a plan to pay for it or whatever else they choose to do next year.
Personal / Professional Development
At least once per week, I will write and publish a piece of writing about teaching social studies, be it about my practice or teaching in general.
Every two months, I will write and publish a self-evaluation of how I am doing on these goals.
