Re:Weaving History

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...

This is the second 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. This post explains the first iteration of the interview we used in our history department. The third 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. We as a teacher team created  a set of 20 documents , mostly primary sources, that we gave to students near the end of the course (CHC2D - Canadian History 1914-present). We made sure that they were documents that students had either seen before, or they had enough contextual knowledge to decode and explain them. We agreed that we could swap out some of the documents, depending on our own teaching that semester. We asked students to prepare to discuss all six historical thinking concepts for two documents of their choice, using the  historical ...

This is the first post in a series on the Interview as Exam. This post outlines 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. Part 4 is about assessing the interview. "The primary purpose of assessment and evaluation is to improve student learning."   Growing Success , Ontario Ministry of Education, 2010. In the past few months, I've had a few requests to share some of my experience (and resources) for doing interviews as final evaluations. After having written several lengthy emails, I thought it would be more efficient to write a blog post about the topic. I did write about my experience in the May 2012 issue of Rapport ( OHASSTA's newsletter), but I have had so much more experience and thinking about this that I...