Flexibility is KEY

This is a follow-up to "So what if it's a project?"

I never did come up with a better project idea. I had the edges of something but I couldn't make it resolve. So I picked two of the more school-y but somewhat authentic projects (newspaper, conversation photostory) and let them pick. Before starting, though, we spent half an hour on a review warm-up (bellringer) that I planned as a quick thing. I saw with my first block class how much time they were taking to do it, but not in a "those kids are slacking" way - they were thinking hard about it and trying to do it without looking at their notes, and I decided that my planned 10 minutes of review at the beginning of class could be half an hour of letting them struggle with this. They struggled and then we discussed it. I asked them who was the easiest and then it just went from there.

 
What's the point? The point is flexibility. The point is the lesson plan is only the introduction to the story. I'm not always good at remembering that, but when I do, I am in that moment seeing what is happening for the students and willing to change around based on what I see on their faces and hear in their voices, those are some of my best moments as a teacher. This simple warm up was not something I expected to be a powerful learning experience - but something about it challenged them and they rose to that challenge and were willing to push through and work on it. I had kids who are not my 'hand-always-up' types coming up to me as I circulated and just let them work, and struggle, and say "Martin Luther was from Germany, right?" and the excitement in their voice at knowing this, at remembering without looking at their notes, got me excited.

After that it was time to introduce the projects. I went over the two options, they got in their groups and picked one, I handed out directions and spent the rest of class just circulating and helping out. I both love and hate those classes. I love it because I feel the most engaged with the students but I hate it because there's 26 kids in the room who all want a conversation with me to resolve their concerns so I'm worn out by the end of the period.

What happened with the projects? Out of 3 classes, only 4 groups are doing a photostory because a newspaper is easier. One group, however, took the two ideas and ran, asking if they could basically do a newscast. Some groups got into their newspapers, making it sound authentic. Some are basically rewriting the notes into their own words and calling it an article while others asked for textbooks and resources to look up additional information. Two kids called me out on details I remembered wrong. Although very few students did not get engaged and work hard, there were those few I didn't reach.

I don't know how to judge this in terms of success. Success at helping them grapple with the content? Some already got it and are just flying, others did have to go back and review and ask questions and seem to have learned from it, others seem not to be learning much from it, just completing the requirements. Success as a (somewhat) authentic project? Assuming the role of a newscaster or newspaper writer seems to have had an appeal to some students, but I'm not going to make big assertions about authenticity.

Overall I'm glad I went forward with the projects even if I couldn't make a grander idea resolve. Last week there was a lot of lecture in my regular World History classes, and to be honest, I got bored. If I'm bored, you KNOW the students are. Even if this wasn't the perfect implementation of project-based learning, it was a step in the right direction with a unit that I have previously struggled very hard with teaching. There's other topics where this is easy for me - the Industrial Revolution, for example, is incredibly easy to create simulations and stimulating activities for - but the Reformation has always been a struggle to teach well. For the first time in years I feel like I made progress on that.

So what if it's a project?

So today's dilemma is about World History II. I'm home planning with a little leisure time for once because we all got sent home after work and after school meetings were cancelled due to severe weather warnings. The plan was to slightly modify a skit project that one of my colleagues has his kids do on the Protestant Reformation. So I sat here and read through it again, thought about other project ideas, and then started to think some more.

The problem with this is that now I'm doubting my whole plan. If I weren't doubting it I could just make a few tweaks and be done and get up early to make the copies I would've made this afternoon. Given time to reflect, I start to doubt the entire premise.

See, history teachers like to do projects that are "somewhat authentic" - we're taught in college that this a better way to assess history knowledge and get kids interested in a subject than just lecture/notes and tests. The idea has been popularized by the History Alive! folks. Don't get me wrong - I like a lot of what they do. I'm just so skeptical anymore about standard history teacher projects.

As a new teacher I jumped into these ideas, following what I was taught.  I've had some success but over the years I've come to be skeptical of projects like have the students write a newspaper on the Reformation or make skits or interview historical figures. Do the kids really learn more from doing this or do they focus on the product and not retain the information? Plus, how engaging are they, really? The kids who already come to my class with some motivation will find a hook, but those are the same kids that gave me gorgeously detailed artwork for an assignment on finding pictures related to each religion we studied in Unit 1. What about everybody else? Why should they care more about writing a fake newspaper about the Reformation than notes?

I know a lot of people's answer to this is audience. Despite some initial ideas I never really jumped into the idea of having kids blog or otherwise post schoolwork online. Honestly it doesn't seem that much better - it's just another form of the same old phony project. Like how webquests were going to be so awesome (I had to make one in college for my class on social studies specific pedagogies) but turned out to be just another form of making kids do research projects, except now there's a computer. I do not believe that adding a computer/the internet suddenly makes it better. Sorry.

Unfortunately all of this has left me with lots of questions and no answers. I have time in my schedule (for once) to do more than go over the basics of the Reformation and I already told the kids we're doing a group project starting tomorrow and I want to throw my existing plan out the window and it's 7pm.

So yeah, that's my dilemma right nw.

Speaking of enough time...

We've had students for two days now, but since we're on an A/B block schedule we really have two "first days" of school. The very first thing I have students do is fill out a short survey while I take the initial roll. The questions get at their attitudes to school, how they learn, what they think about history, and things like that. It finishes up by asking for three things that I can do as a teacher to help them learn and then three things they can do as a student. This year I'm using that to help lead into the discussion of classroom commitments.

I notice that many of my students (especially my sophomores) talk about time and pacing. Asking for me to not go too fast, give them enough time to understand or to complete work, things like that. This makes me sad. Sad because if I am overwhelmed by all the material in the 10th grade world history curriculum and how to "cover" it before May, I know it has to be worse for them. Sad because it makes me feel like I'm doomed from the start. I know it's a reasonable thing for them to say, just like I know that a reasonable pace with my material would involving cutting 1/3 of it out.

There has got to be a better way.  I'm pretty seriously thinking about using some examples, like the World History for us all curriculum and the Reading Like a Historian stuff, and completely reorganizing my first quarter. I didn't want to attempt that kind of structural change while prepping a new course this year, but I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's necessary. Once I get to the Industrial Revolution I feel more ok, since our pacing guide gives us more time on that material and students come to it with more prior knowledge. It's the beginning of the year where I feel so rushed and that needs to change.

What do you mean, I actually have time for that?

I have a million and one things I want to write about that I'm doing or thinking about this upcoming school year, but planning a new course (and my first AP one at that) has consumed my entire life. However, I wanted to say one thing: planning a course where I feel like I have plenty of time (maybe even too much?) is a very strange feeling. I took the AP units for US Gov't and laid them out on my calendar, adding the two VA required units (State&Local Gov, Financial Literacy) in the 4th quarter and I ended up with 11 extra blocks in the 3rd quarter based on my original ideas of how long I would have for each subject.

11 extra blocks! At 80 minutes per block, that's almost 15 hours of wiggle room in my planning. Last night as I was doing some reading in one of the AP study guides and starting to lay out my first unit, I looked at what I wanted to do in terms of introducing not only the content but some of the skills and strategies we'll be using throughout the year and felt like I needed more time to do all of that well, so I made the first unit an extra week long to allow time to properly set up the year. I was able to do this and not have to worry about running out of time. It was a strange and wonderful feeling.

Now, I understand that this course is often taught as a semester course (that's how I took it back in the day - 1st semester was US, 2nd comparative) and that's part of why I feel strangely free to stretch my wings here, but I don't care why. I'm loving the thought of actually having enough time to devote to building classroom community, teaching learning strategies and skills and reviewing without constantly hearing the tick-tock in my head from the curriculum.

I've long thought that most of our curricula try to squeeze too much into the school year, and now I'm convinced. This is what planning should be like.

Don't Let Me Forget This

"No technique will ever work equally well for all students, for all classes, and on all days, regardless of how brilliantly it is executed."
- Weimer, Learner-Centered Teaching, p.191

What would a time-traveler use to keep a journal?

I'm one of those crazy history teachers who likes to use creative writing assignments. They're a good assessment on a variety of levels and they give me a chance to help students develop historical perspective.

Throughout the year my students have written postcards from the New World, made "phone calls" from war-torn nations, written letters to the editor on whether the US should participate in World War 2 (in June 1941) and created "monuments" to imperialism. I like these assignments, but as I'm thinking about next year, there's some changes I want to make.

The first change is the obvious update--can we find ways to incorporate 21st century tech in these? (Yes) More importantly, I'm rethinking my class "notebook" and I want to create a more organized, unified system of assignments. I want to be able to tell my students, after appropriate introductions to "how we do things" to add an entry to their "time-traveler's journal" about this and then let them loose to create.

So, I'm asking, how do I set this up? What tools & tricks can you recommend to make this work? What online tools would work well for submitting assignments? (Class blog, forum, wiki, something completely different?) I especially want it to be flexible enough to include more than just text, centralized enough that they'll see and respond to each other, and easy to use. (I know, I don't want much at all.)

How do you teach the incomprehensible?

Imagine:

You have a total of 3 hours (in two 90-minute chunks, minus the usual housekeeping time) to teach your students about the Holocaust and other modern genocides. You have some state standards to guide you, but they focus on terminology (what is genocide?) and a laundry list of genocides to mention. Your students will come to the first lesson fresh from spring break.

How do you teach this weighty topic without trivializing it?

I don't have an answer. I struggle with this every time.

The hardest thing about teaching history, for me, is to do justice to the tragedies of the past without turning it into sensationalism. It seems there's a fine line to walk between glossing over what happened (11 million people died) and turning it into a horror-show (look at these pictures of concentration camp survivors) that, rather than building empathy and compassion, appeals to the enjoyment of the grotesque that so many of us have learned from tv and movies. How do you use the tools of modern media to tell a real story, with real people? (Now I'm starting to sound like Claude Lanzmann.)

My students, by the way, are fascinated with the topic. I don't know how to respond to that.

Part of my problem is that I spent an entire semester studying Nazism in college. It was a senior seminar, so we read a lot, had the sort of discussions that continue for an hour after class is over, and thought long and hard. Everything I do will seem too shallow after that, I suppose. I can't take the reading and discussion of a variety of "biographies" of Hitler and easily turn it into something my students can do in a block, and yet I want to. I can't show Shoah. (I'm not sure I want to, really.)

I'll probably do what I did last year, and piece together fragments of the things I'd love to spend more time on. I just know it's not good enough. It never is.

Games, dream electives, and why I want a 20th century history course to be taught in 11th grade.

It's been a busy week. I've been starting a new semester, new units, generally trying to do a better job of staying caught up and taking a Spanish class. I wanted to make sure that I posted a couple of thoughts before they escaped my brain though.

1) I love it when I can make a game out of something to introduce it. This week was the "Scramble for Africa" game. (The day after I finished playing it with my classes, I found a nicer "Scramble for Africa" game someone had made. I now have a whole plan on how to make a totally cool, SMARTboarded up, version. Next year, though. Now I need to concentrate on teaching World War 1.)

2) World/European History and American history classes should all stop around 1890. Then you should do a 20th century/modern history class that combines the two. Seriously, February-May is annoying. I teach about World War 1 in US and then the next week I'm teaching it in World. I feel like I'm getting planning whiplash. It's not exactly the same curriculum, since the emphasis is different. (Example: with the Great War, in US I emphasize why we got involved and the 14 points, whereas World emphasizes the actual course of the war, Russian Revolution and overall Treaty of Versailles effects.)

Considering how much I had to reteach my US class that was supposed to be in the World curriculum, and how truncated those emphases are without each other, it makes much more sense to devote an entire course to the 20th century and include both perspectives in it. (This might also give us a chance to do a better job at including Latin American, African and Asian perspectives on a lot of these events.)

3) I'm working on a dream electives list.

• There's already the "Media and American History" one that Tom and I wanted to teach together.
  
• I also want to teach "History vs Hollywood" as a semester course. The students would vote on 5 "historical" movies for us to examine, and it'd be very project-centered, encouraging them to use the research on the accuracy of the movie to jump off into research/projects about the time period.
  
• "Italian City-States: A Historical Soap Opera" would be fun, although I'd need to dust up on my Florentine intrigue.
  
• I also have always wanted to teach a social history-oriented elective that went at about the same pace as the regular World History courses. This would be my chance to incorporate all the pieces I think are missing from a standard history curriculum: art, music, clothing, food, daily lives of real people, social structures, literature, gender, advertising, propaganda outside of wartime, race outside of slavery, etc.

What history-related electives would you want to see taught? What changes would you make to the structure of the social studies curriculum?

Finally, how many of you agree that all high school history and english should be taught as humanities courses? (History provides the context in which we practice those language skills. English provides the great literature that we read about in historical context. It's a match made in heaven.)

Wishing...

I've been thinking. (Yes, yes, you could smell it/hear the gears turning, me too.)

I really just want a chance to talk to other secondary social studies teachers about ideas, lessons, et cetera. To post my "stuff that works" and see theirs and generally actually collaborate with our people doing what I'm doing in my subject.

Is there interest out there for this sort of thing? Or am I totally blind and missing it?

The Ledge

TMAO of Teaching in the 408 has a fabulous post about the Ledge. Go read the whole thing, even though I'm quoting it a lot here.

You get up on the ledge as a young teacher when you realize that there is no formal system of accountability anywhere. The evaluation process is an outright joke, your intern advisor calls you exemplary, and your BTSA lady pops in so you can fill out some forms.

I miss my student teacher evaluations. My supervisor was an incredible, former high school principal who knew more about teaching than anyone I've met (in-person) since. He could tell me what I was doing wrong and suggest ways to fix it. He made me cry on a regular basis. He knew that wasn't a problem though--crying was part of me dealing with how hard doing this thing right was, and how much I still had to learn. When he praised me, I deserved it.

You’re up on the ledge when you want to know how to get better, but there’s nothing there. The vast store of practical strategies you took from your alternative or traditional route credentialing program seems to be running a little dry and district PD is either non-existent or an exercise in futility. There is no formal plan for post-competency-acquisition development, unless it is in the areas of technology, and you already know how to use PowerPoint.

This year, my district finally got it about PD. They cut down on the floofy offerings, offered actual sessions on 21st century strategies, sessions on other relevant topics, and listened to the survey they sent out last year. The result? I'm going to more PD sessions than I have to, because they might actually be of use to me.

This is not the norm.

It gets worse when you do get better. Your level of quality as an educator changes, but title, position, responsibilities, and compensation remain stagnant. ...

You realize the profession incentivizes mediocrity. It does not drive people to show movies all day, or let kids text and screw around in class – ineptitude takes folks there – but it does incentivize using the same lame worksheets you used the last time around, the same crap readings, head-butting against the same, predictable failures to comprehend and achieve. Because the only lever school leaders have to lean on is the level of caring inherent in the individual teachers, the only thing driving you to do more is to care more. But there’s a limit to your caring, and a limit to the effectiveness of your caring.

I can't reuse stuff I hate. I pull out old lessons and just look at them and go "how could I teach this crap?" So I spend hours and hours recreating lessons, coming up with new ideas (or hoping for inspiration because I'm flat out and don't WANT to give in and lecture) and then the lessons never go as well as planned.

I look around at teachers who copy everything they need at the beginning of the unit because they know exactly what they're doing ahead of time. They spend very little time planning, go home right after school, stay caught up on their grading, and get a lot more sleep than me. I want to be them, I want to relax and not ruin the rest of my life for this job, and I can't. I care too much.

But how long is that going to work? How long before I burn out?

This is my third year doing this. No wonder so many of us don't make it to 5.

How Teaching is like Writing which is like Everything Else

One of my favorite authors is Elizabeth Bear, who maintains a slice of the writer's life blog that I find fascinating. She likes to say that "writing is like everything else" because of the number of analogies she and other authors come up with to explain the writing process.

Teaching, I suspect, is not quite like everything else, but planning is like writing and other acts of creation. You know: sometimes you get a great idea in a flash of intuition and you go into flow and it just keeps coming, sometimes it's like pulling teeth to get those words on the page but you have to do it, and sometimes you just plod along but the words get there somehow. When all's said and done, you wonder if the readers can even tell the difference between intuition like fire in your brain and the long slow pull.

The reason this connection between planning and writing is interesting to me is that it explains why I get so much more done on my last period planning days than my 2nd period planning days: flow. When I know that if I get into a groove I can just keep working until its exhausted, I'm much more likely to make the effort to put myself into the focused state of mind I need to plan. When I know I'll have to go back to class (not teaching--running a study hall, ugh) at 9:55 no matter what I'm in the middle of, I'd rather do something mindless like enter grades and copy things.

All that considered, no wonder people complain about students not thinking and not engaging with the lesson: why should they put the effort in when no matter where they are, the bell will ring and they'll have to go to their next class?