By Stephen Lazar, on December 2nd, 2011%
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. Continue reading Make History Matter at 8am Tomorrow at NCSS
By Stephen Lazar, on October 27th, 2011%
Cross posted from my Critical Friends Group blog, where our monthly writing prompt was, “What is something you are currently struggling with in your practice?”
As the call for progress reports went out, I found it hard to believe that a quarter of the year was done. I’ve pretty much felt like I’ve been in warm up mode thus far, which among other things, has meant I have yet to begin a project with my students, or any other form of assessment beyond essays and written check-ins. Whereas there has been some inquiry, it has all been bounded, with me doing the research work. I’ve yet to set my students free to come to their own conclusions from their own information. I’m grappling with how to make my Government & Economics course more student-centered and driven.
This has never been a problem for me before. In all previous history courses, I’ve maintained a good balance of a few weeks of content, followed by a few weeks with students doing inquiry-based project work related to the previous weeks’ content (at least until the end of the year, when my class became a test prep factory). I’m having a hard time trying to figure out why this is an issue this year.
Part of me just feels overwhelmed my the sheer amount of information students should know to be active and reasonable democratic citizens in our quasi-capitalist economy. My nature as a history teacher was to reduce what I was supposed to teach (do they really need to understand the Proclamation Line of 1763? I think not), whereas I now find myself thinking expansively about what students should understand (I mean, how could I not help students understand Judith Butler’s theory of gender peformativity when talking about identity). I also find myself embracing the ability to drop everything and discuss current events. Thus far we’ve spent a couple days on Troy Davis, a day on Steve Jobs, and a week on Occupy Wall Street and direct democracy. I feared that this would be something I would not be able to bring myself to do. Perhaps I’ve gone too far, though.
By Stephen Lazar, on October 16th, 2011%
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
By Stephen Lazar, on April 21st, 2011%
“For a teacher trying to design an assignment, the ideal thing is to put your students in a situation where they are challenged. The more someone struggles with something, the more they are going to learn. You want them to eventually feel something is easy to process, but only because they’ve worked through it and made it their own, not because you made it easy for them.”
~Nate Kornell, Assistant Psychology Professor at Williams College in “Studies Find ‘Easy’ Material May Not Be Easy to Learn” (Education Week)
Make sure you read this whole article. This is something all the great teachers I know seem to know, and it flies in face of the “drill and kill” model of education being propagated by too many schools across the country right now. As I tell everyone I coach, the best form of “test prep” is a good, challenging, project. It’s nice to see research confirm that. The whole study can be found here (PDF file).
By Stephen Lazar, on February 25th, 2011%
Previous Post on History Day (with photos)
This is the only unit I have taught all five years in the Bronx, and it is continually the one that produces the best student work. After stagnating a bit with the unit in the third and fourth years I taught it, I think our team made some good improvements to the scaffolds we used in the Research Packet, which better emphasized higher level thinking. Bronx Lab History Day was a success for the fifth straight year, and I think we have a few projects that will be competitive at the city contest, which we haven’t had in a couple of years.
Things We Got Right
- For the fifth year in a row, my students were motivated to do the best work they’ve done. For some lower preforming students, this was the first project they successfully completed. For many of my top students, this was the best work I got from them. I was very satisfied with the end products.
- By redoing the Research Packet to focus the scaffolding worksheets on analysis and synthesis, the level of thought in students’ writing was much improved from previous years.
Things We Got Wrong That Are Easy to Fix
- For a slew of reasons, we did not do much work with primary documents in the first half of the course, as I had in US History in earlier years. I think this hurt the quality of the primary document research in this unit. The previous units need some inquiry-based primary document lessons to help scaffold the reading and thinking skills necessary for History Day research.
- This year, we moved the bibliography to later in the process. I would move it back to the midpoint as it was in years past. Students were too focused on the end goal to put effort into their bibliographies, and a lot were not completed.
- We need a global history library. Having only textbooks and the internet in class limited the quality of the research.
Things We Got Wrong That Need to Be Redone
- I’m still not sure how to make students take deadlines seriously before the final presentation. If everyone could be done even one day earlier to have some time for peer edits and revisions, the projects would be tremendously improved.
- Likewise, I’m still not sure how to make time for teaching students how to do layout well and neatly. This requires having the materials and writing done earlier, just like the previous issue.
Unit Materials
Previous Unit Reflections
By Stephen Lazar, on February 24th, 2011%
Before all the Education Writers Association fun last week, I oversaw the 5th Annual Bronx Lab History Day Fair. Our nearly 200 10th and 11th grade students presented projects related to this year’s National History Day theme, “Debate & Diplomacy in History: Success, Consequences, Failures.” As in years past, students worked their hearts out, a group of students and myself got kicked out of the building by security the night before, and students made me quite proud. Below are some pictures from the event, followed by an updated post I originally published this summer. Continue reading Bronx Lab History Day: Still the Best Thing I Do
By Stephen Lazar, on December 4th, 2010%
Will fill this out later with a full post, but wanted to post my prezi for EdcampNYC since I couldn’t get it up on the wiki.
By Stephen Lazar, on November 29th, 2010%
In terms of intellectual sophistication, our second unit in Global History was the most ambitious I have tried. I believe we had a modest success. Most students were able to articulate how past events have led to current conflicts, and could use this information to speculate on alternative courses of action moving forward. Throughout the unit, students were engaged, both formally in the classroom and informally outside of it, in high level conversations that were well beyond my past experiences with history students both in terms of depth of thought and engagement. With that said, students did not reach the level of understanding I expect for them around the standard of “marshaling evidence of antecedent circumstances and contemporary factors contributing to problems.” This unit was the first of three that will engage directly with this understanding, and I hope that it laid the foundation for more advanced work later in the year.
Things We Got Right
- Student were engaged in really deep and authentic inquiry-based work, requiring the use the skills of historians to solve real-world problems.
- The individual lesson on the Crusades, where students unknowingly got different documents from multiple points of view led to fantastic conversations about bias and how perspective matters in history. This format should applied to other content in the future.
- The structure of the project was excellent, and the final products were largely well done.
- Students had deep conversations about what makes up personal identity and how this can lead to group conflicts.
Things We Got Wrong That Are Easy to Fix
- Remove the Nigeria and West vs. Religious Fundamentalism groups from the project; the former is too obscure; the latter is too abstract.
- Add a Tibet group.
- Model the process of the project for students, not just the product.
- While a gallery walk was effective for students to learn about other groups’ work, this needed to be followed by a more teacher-centered review of the different conflicts to ensure all students understood all topics.
- Add an additional layer of checking for understanding in the group project to ensure individuals understand the events they looked at and are ready to draw connections between their individual event and the group’s conflict.
Things We Got Wrong That Need to Be Redone
- There is one major change that needs to be made to the unit for next year: rather than using the Facing History approach of starting with individual identity, then moving to group identity, then interactions between groups, we should have organized this unit as an inquiry-based one where students started with the current conflicts, then wrote questions to lead them on an investigation of the root causes of the conflict, which of course would have naturally then led to individual and group religious identities.
Unit Materials
By Stephen Lazar, on August 27th, 2010%
Over the past four years, I have created, developed, and spread an annual History Day in my school, as part of the National History Day competition. All sophomores and juniors at my school spend five weeks conducting in-depth historical research, which they then present to both our school and general community each February.
My school’s History Day is the accomplishment of which I take the most pride in my teaching career. It is the only event in the year which is attended by the entire school and the only event at my school where parents and community members are invited to view the products of students’ learning. My former principal always told me that History Day was his favorite day of the school year.
Most significantly, it yields the greatest buy-in, interest, and growth in my students of anything I do. Students look forward to having the opportunity to learn about a topic in which they have interest and show off to the community. It has become a rite of passage. Over the past four years, I have had students complete research on a range of topics from the Missouri Compromise to the Spanish Civil War to Septima Clark, often yielding insights and understandings of which I was not even aware. It is the only time in our curriculum where students have the opportunity to complete in-depth, college-level research.
For the students who go on to the city and even state levels of the competition,they have the opportunity to compete with and learn from the best students my city has to offer. It has been a transformative experience for my public school students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, to see that their work is just as good as the almost entirely white and private school students who enter our city’s competition. And I am very proud that two of the past four years my students have won awards at the city level. But I am even more proud that four of my students have used their History Day papers as the writing samples that helped earn them full-tuition Posse Scholarships to elite private colleges. It meant the world to me, and their future to them, that they all felt that the best piece of writing they did in four years of high school was their work on the History Day project.
The rewards for doing History Day are so great, that I think any teachers who are on the fence should take the plunge and do it this year. When I first heard about the competition, I was in my first year teaching in the Bronx. This was not my first year teaching, but it sure felt like it. All the previous success I had as a student-teacher in Rhode Island and a real teacher in Northern Virginia seemed to have gone out the window. I went to my then principal and asked him if perhaps the following year I could do a school-wide History Day. He told me to make it happen that year. I told him that to do that well I’d have to drop everything I had planned for my course and start immediately. He told me that he thought it was what my classes needed. He was right.
Over the following weeks, my students (and myself) worked harder than they had before. The Saturday before our school fair, nearly half my students came in to work on their projects. The night before, I had to kick a dozen students out of my classroom at 8pm. Over 90% of my students presented successful History Day projects at our first fair. Before that, I never had more than 50% of my students complete a project on time. The momentum from History Day carried through the rest of the year. I’m not sure I did anything different from that point on, but the success students felt from successfully taking on the huge project of History Day fundamentally changed their view of their selves as students and our relationship.
By Stephen Lazar, on July 29th, 2010%
(See Part 5a here. Everything earlier in this Standards Based Grading series is here. As always, I’d love feedback)
Project #6: French Revolution Newspaper Project
(Assignment adapted from The Student Centered Classroom Handbook by Bil Johnson; f
amily descriptions adopted from The Choices Program: The French Revolution, both of which are highly recommended)
Unit: The French Revolution
Essential Question: Do the ends justify the means? Is the pen truly mightier than the sword?
Standards/Understandings:
- Writing Standards
- Obtain historical data from a variety of sources, including: library and museum collections, historic sites, historical photos, journals, diaries, eyewitness accounts, newspapers, and the like; documentary films; and so on.
- Interrogate historical data by uncovering the social, political, and economic context in which it was created; testing the data source for its credibility, authority, authenticity, internal consistency and completeness; and detecting and evaluating bias, distortion, and propaganda by omission, suppression, or invention of facts.
- Identify the gaps in the available records and marshal contextual knowledge and perspectives of the time and place in order to elaborate imaginatively upon the evidence, fill in the gaps deductively, and construct a sound historical interpretation.
- Freedom ain’t free
- Winning the revolution doesn’t mean that the revolution has been won
You will be given “family” identities, with the characteristics of that family explained to you: that is, where the family is from, what its economic status is (how they made/make their money), what the family members’ political philosophy and religious background is, etc. The “family” group you will be affiliated with is that branch of the family that runs the prominent newspaper for your class in France. Each member of your “family” will have a role as an editor or reporter for the newspaper. Continue reading SBG in My History Classroom Part 5b: Assessing the Standards
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About Me I am a NBPTS Certified Social Studies and English Teacher in Brooklyn. I work with teachers to support Project and Inquiry-Based Learning. My writing on policy and practice has been published on the New York Times, Education Week, and Gotham Schools websites.
You can also follow me on Twitter @SLazarOTC. |
