Interview as Exam: Part 3 - Complex Simplicity
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 down examples of the learning so that they could answer the question - What are the skills of history and how did I learn them? It's not a perfect system, but it did give students the metacognitive vocabulary to start recognizing and talking about their own learning.
We also, with that critical principal support, started exploring Essential Questions (Wiggins and McTighe, 2013) and the lightbulb went on! We were having difficulty explaining succinctly to students WHAT they were doing on the final interview because our interview lacked a cohesive purpose that was not only engaging but easily explicable.
Enter the course essential questions! The questions have to be important to the subject, big enough that you can spend at least a semester (if not your whole life!) figuring them out, engaging for students and answerable in a myriad of different ways that involve bringing evidence to bear upon the question.
In 2014 I was fortunate to be part of the writing teams for the Ontario e-learning courses - CHC2D and CHC2P (link only accessible to Ontario teachers). As a team we brainstormed and pilot-tested these essential questions for our courses:
We created the History Day Conference (CHC2P version here) as a two-part final evaluation, the first part being a more tangible, exhibit-like "product" with lots of format choices. We wanted the final product to be more aligned with the kind of things that historians and history professionals actually produce. We moved the primary source document essays into the regular units, to give students more primary source exposure through the year.
For the first part, I had my students present to each other in small groups - no-one wants to listen to a whole class worth of presentations! This way they could share what they had learned, gain some speaking and questioning practice for the interview, and really have the first opportunity to get some feedback.
I walked around and listened to the conversations (concentrating on the students who were still struggling). I listened for: Do they know the material well, or are they stiffly reading? Can they answer questions? Are the listeners engaged in the process? This was not a secret - they knew what I expected and worked to demonstrate it. I knew I would have a "product" to look at afterward, so the "presentation" portion was mostly still about their learning. I could also catch any big problems before the end of the course.
I made sure to assess their products before their interviews, so they could have some feedback and a real opportunity to improve, go deeper or make adjustments.
For the interview, they could choose any document we had studied, or even ones we had not studied, so then I had the responsibility to make sure that they had LOTS of exposure to using and analyzing primary sources throughout the course. My lessons became much better throughout the year, and I found I had more time for this deeper inquiry work because I wasn't so worried that every kid needed to know every thing. (see my previous post on primary source resources for a starting list)
By giving students lots of choices, it allowed me to have conversations with students who still didn't see themselves in history and help them to connect, and find their own place in the past.
One girl who was particularly struggling all semester, told me near the end of the course that she was really starting to think about gender equality. I sent her to investigate the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She found this political cartoon, and got really engaged for the first time. She had to interpret and analyze the historical perspectives presented and figure out if things have changed or stayed the same!
Another student really got into the question "Was Hockey Canada's Game in the 1990s?" He was already a hockey fan, and some stats in the textbook started him going, but he then, unprompted, sourced a lot more data, and did a myriad of calculations based on historical statistics at various world and Olympic competitions to present a reasoned and complex argument. This would not have happened had I picked the topic (I confess, I'm not a hockey fan!). He engaged in good historical inquiry, in a question he was really interested in, and definitely had some fun doing it.
Because the emphasis in the assessment is on the analysis of evidence, and not on the memorization of content. I am usually pretty confidently able to assess students during the interview itself. If they've brought up something that I need to fact-check, I can always do that later in the day by reviewing my notes, their notes, or the audio recording.
Part 4 of this series will be about assessment tools, challenges tips and tricks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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 down examples of the learning so that they could answer the question - What are the skills of history and how did I learn them? It's not a perfect system, but it did give students the metacognitive vocabulary to start recognizing and talking about their own learning.
 |
Enter the course essential questions! The questions have to be important to the subject, big enough that you can spend at least a semester (if not your whole life!) figuring them out, engaging for students and answerable in a myriad of different ways that involve bringing evidence to bear upon the question.
In 2014 I was fortunate to be part of the writing teams for the Ontario e-learning courses - CHC2D and CHC2P (link only accessible to Ontario teachers). As a team we brainstormed and pilot-tested these essential questions for our courses:
- Is Canada a country you can be proud of?
- How is Canada's story, my story?
- Is Canada a better place now than before?
Students knew the "exam" question(s) on the first day of the course, and we kept revisiting them all year. At the end of each unit, students worked in small groups to defend the placement of significant events on our class timeline. They found the events, linked them to the questions and used the criteria for historical significance to defend their choices. Ultimately, only so many events could fit on the wall, so we voted on the "winners." This not only reviewed the material, but developed students' thinking, created a classroom anchor chart of our learning, and laid the groundwork for the final interview.
Once all of this was in place, we were freed to create a clear, easily explicable, yet still rigorous final evaluation. We were still conscious of stress levels (for students and teachers) and really wanted to make sure that the final evaluations were more a celebration of learning (for real!) and not a process of drudgery for all involved. |
| The colour-coding relates to each of the essential course questions pink = better/pride, blue = worse/shame, orange = my story, tan = neutral or both better and worse |
We created the History Day Conference (CHC2P version here) as a two-part final evaluation, the first part being a more tangible, exhibit-like "product" with lots of format choices. We wanted the final product to be more aligned with the kind of things that historians and history professionals actually produce. We moved the primary source document essays into the regular units, to give students more primary source exposure through the year.
For the first part, I had my students present to each other in small groups - no-one wants to listen to a whole class worth of presentations! This way they could share what they had learned, gain some speaking and questioning practice for the interview, and really have the first opportunity to get some feedback.
I walked around and listened to the conversations (concentrating on the students who were still struggling). I listened for: Do they know the material well, or are they stiffly reading? Can they answer questions? Are the listeners engaged in the process? This was not a secret - they knew what I expected and worked to demonstrate it. I knew I would have a "product" to look at afterward, so the "presentation" portion was mostly still about their learning. I could also catch any big problems before the end of the course.
I made sure to assess their products before their interviews, so they could have some feedback and a real opportunity to improve, go deeper or make adjustments.
For the interview, they could choose any document we had studied, or even ones we had not studied, so then I had the responsibility to make sure that they had LOTS of exposure to using and analyzing primary sources throughout the course. My lessons became much better throughout the year, and I found I had more time for this deeper inquiry work because I wasn't so worried that every kid needed to know every thing. (see my previous post on primary source resources for a starting list)
 |
| Royal Commission Cartoon found in Canadian Sources Investigated, Nelson, 2008, p. 182 |
One girl who was particularly struggling all semester, told me near the end of the course that she was really starting to think about gender equality. I sent her to investigate the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women. She found this political cartoon, and got really engaged for the first time. She had to interpret and analyze the historical perspectives presented and figure out if things have changed or stayed the same!
 |
| Olympic hockey standings table from History Uncovered, Nelson, 2014, p. 211 |
Because the emphasis in the assessment is on the analysis of evidence, and not on the memorization of content. I am usually pretty confidently able to assess students during the interview itself. If they've brought up something that I need to fact-check, I can always do that later in the day by reviewing my notes, their notes, or the audio recording.
Part 4 of this series will be about assessment tools, challenges tips and tricks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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