Re:Weaving History

  A story about my failures and my learning in teaching students in CHC2P for the blog series: Hindsight 2020. Originally published as part of Write-On, the 2016 Ontario summer literacy symposium, also published on the OHASSTA website It was hard to believe that they were the same students. Phones were put away (mostly), eye contact occurred between students whose heads were together in intense and sometimes spirited discussions about rural life in 1950s Quebec society. “Why did he just go to church and pray?” “I would’ve been so angry, I would just burn the sweater!” “Why didn’t he just send it back and get a new one?” “Who was the minority? Was it the francophones or the anglophones?” Part of the student-developed word wall *** The week before, Kim had been trying to get these same students working together. The desks were in groups and had been all semester. She had grouped according to the learning needs of particular activities, accounting for reading ability, first language, ...

I just listened to the Textbooks episode of The Staff Room , a podcast by two Ontario middle school teachers. Seriously, check it out, it is worth a half-hour of your time! I love that Pav and Chey get into some real talk about textbooks! They hit the nail on the head when they say that "textbook" has become a bit of a bad word; that you're not a good teacher if you're still using a textbook. There are whole educational movements encouraging teachers to stop using textbooks, and you can get some glares if you try to defend them. I think they really got the reality of it right, though. A textbook is only one tool in the teacher's toolkit. We are well-educated, smart people who can use a number of tools at our disposal to launch inquiries, to lay the foundations and to inspire learning. A textbook can be one of those tools, and need not be discarded like the proverbial baby with the bathwater. They explained how textbooks can have really well-constructed lesson...

Sometimes, inspiration comes unexpectedly and results in some "happy accidents" in the classroom. Except that I know it's no accident. By deliberately using historical thinking (in this case significance) and inquiry scaffolds, by trusting students to engage with the process, and by being adaptable and open to the learning, March Madness lead my students to some pretty great connections between history, democracy and the nature of leadership in our world today. I had been dissatisfied with my Egypt unit in my grade 11 World History (The World to 1500) course. I had tried to having the students come up with projects using open inquiry, and I was profoundly dissatisfied with their model pyramids and posters that looked like they had recycled them from grade 4. I wanted to do something more age-appropriate, more in-depth and that would use historical thinking concepts to teach them something they didn't already know about Egypt. We needed to go beyond mummies, pyram...

This is the fourth post in a series on the Interview as Exam. The first outlines why we did it: the causes and consequences for me and my students of doing this kind of assessment. The second explains the first kind of interview we started with in our history department. The third explains how and why we simplified the interview and supported the learning all the way through the course. This post is about assessing the interview. Warning: Learning in Progress! Whenever people ask to see my rubrics or assessment tools for the interview, I have an internal cringe. It's not that I don't like to share ( see my teaching wiki  or Twitter ! ) it's that the formal assessment process was really still in process when I left the classroom to work as an instructional coach in 2015. A lot of the initial assessment was kind of "loose." Things did get tightened up over the years, but I've learned a lot in the past few years that I would now apply a little differently...

This is the third post in a series on the Interview as Exam. The first outlines why we did it: the causes and consequences for me and my students of doing this kind of assessment. The second explains the first kind of interview we started with in our history department. This post explains how and why we simplified the interview, and supported the learning all the way through the course. Part 4 is about assessing the interview. I started to work with students earlier on in the course to build the skills that they weren't yet demonstrating in the interview. Even though my room was full of colourful  historical thinking posters , and we referred to them often, and students were DOING inquiry regularly, they couldn't, at the end of the course, identify WHEN they had used these processes and what they had learned in the process. I put together a scaffold ( My Skills Inventory ), and made sure that we spent time in class  in between  the units reflecting, and putting dow...