Bronx Lab History Day: Still the Best Thing I Do
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.
Making History Matter – Projects in the History Classroom
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.
Reflection on Global History Unit 2: Belief Systems and Religious Conflict
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
National History Day: The Best Thing I Do
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.
SBG in My History Classroom Part 5b: Assessing the Standards
(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.
SBG in My History Classroom Part 5a: Assessing the Standards
With our curriculum map done (at least in draft form), my team’s next step in the backwards design process is to design the assessments we will use to asses our standards. I’m posting plans here to get feedback, ideas, and to share. These will show up in no particular order. Here are two projects which interconnect at different points in the year.
Project #2: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Time Travel Tour Co.
Unit: Belief Systems
Essential Question: How do people make sense of their world?
Standards/Understandings:
- Marshal evidence of antecedent circumstances and contemporary factors contributing to problems and alternative courses of action.
- Identify relevant historical antecedents and differentiate from those that are inappropriate and irrelevant to contemporary issues.
(Before they get this, scenes from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure will be used as a hook)
Part 1:
After their travels through time, Bill and Ted have decided to start a business: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Time Travel Tour Co. Their first customers are a group from the United Nations who want to try and find solutions to current problems caused by religious tensions. Bill & Ted have hired you, because you are totally awesome, to plan the tour for the UN members. You will have to take them to three key moments in history to help them understand the current conflict. Before they go on the tour, you will have to provide them with a preview of what they can expect to see, which will include:
- The time and place to which they will travel
- A description of the relevant groups or individuals they will see
- An explanation of why this event is important to help understand the current conflict
You will be assigned a group to create a tour for one of the following conflicts:
- Israel/Palestine
- Catholics/Protestants in Norther Ireland
- India/Pakistan
- Sunni/Shiite
- West/Islamic Fundamentalism
- Christians/Muslims in Sudan
- Serbs/Muslims in Bosnia
Part 2:
The UN Members were so impressed with your tour, that they want your advice on how to stop the current conflict. Write them a letter where you summarize what steps should be taken to solve the conflict. Be sure to explain how your first hand experience of history helped you come up with this plan, as well as what the religions have in common to help them understand the other side.
Project #7: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Time Travel Tour Co. – The Sequel
Unit: End of Year Review
Essential Question: How did we get here?
Standards/Understandings:
- Challenge arguments of historical inevitability by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences.
- Marshal evidence of antecedent circumstances and contemporary factors contributing to problems and alternative courses of action.
- Identify relevant historical antecedents and differentiate from those that are inappropriate and irrelevant to contemporary issues.
Part 1:
Bill & Ted were so awesomely impressed with your work, that they want to hire you to design tours that they can market to schools with students who don’t think history matters. Last time, they came to you with a specific problem people needed to know more about. Now, they want you to identify a problem that you think students will care about. Once you’ve identified this problem, you will have to come up with 5 different moments in history to take the students to help them understand the current problem. We don’t want to bore any students, so there needs to be variety in your selections: you need to take students to at least 3 different continents, in 3 different time periods. In choosing your 5 moments, you can either choose moments that directly led to the current problem (like the Berlin Conference to help people understand the underdevelopment of Africa during Colonialism) or moments that give similar examples from history (like to a port city during the Black Plague to help people understand the AIDS crisis).
Before they go on the tour, you will have to provide them with a preview of what they can expect to see, which will include:
- The time and place to which they will travel
- A description of the relevant groups or individuals they will see
- An explanation of why this event is important to help understand the current conflict
Finally, because this is a new tour, you’ll have to help Bill & Ted get people to sign up for it by creating a poster (perhaps using Glogster?). Your poster needs to include all the information you’ve assembled, but most importantly, it needs to convince people that the problem you have identified is important and interesting.
Part 2:You saw the presentation one of your classmates came up with, and realized something: if you went on their tour, you could prevent one of the current problems we now have in the world. Unfortunately, you are not allowed out of the phone booth during the time travel tour, but you are pretty sure you could sneak a letter through the crease. Your job then, is to choose two of your classmates’ posters. For each one, choose one important person from one of the events, and write them a letter explaining what they should do or say in the situation that they are in. Explain what will happen to history depending on their actions at that moment.
Next Steps:
These need rubrics and examples.
