Re:Weaving History

Do you or your colleagues ever get "stuck in the trenches?" I have heard this expression in many Ontario schools where we teach the grade 10 course: Canada from 1914 to the Present. It refers to when you have gone into too much detail on the First World War, and find yourself with a wildly disproportionate lack of time to cover the other 96 years of history in the course! My brilliant colleague, Sue Pannell-Barrett introduced me a decade ago to a much more fun way of getting stuck in the trenches, while actually getting out of them time-wise in your course. I haven't looked back since!           Second Battle of Ypres, 1915 Could be any WWI battle! The genius of this activity, is that it is totally inquiry-based, students are practicing historical thinking (primary source evidence and significance), collaboration and organization skills, while having A LOT of fun playing in the sand. Attendance is never better than on sandbox day, and students consistently ...

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 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...

You might have seen this special collector's edition of Canada's History - the Big Questions of Canada.  I know I've given them to lots of teachers, and I found the essays enlightening and engaging for myself. The question I'm addressing in this blog post is, how could you use this in your classroom? I think we need to back up a little and ask ourselves, as history teachers a fundamental question: How many history essays have your students actually read? I know I had never really asked my students to read a well-written history essay, I just asked them to write  a well-written history essay! I would venture to say that probably most teenagers are not seeking out history essays to read in their free time, so it's likely that the only place they would have encountered one is in history class. How could I expect my students to write a good history essay if they had never even read one?!! The light bulb went off for me a few years ago, when I learned abo...

So this post was prompted by the awesome #sschat on Monday, May 8th, 2017 on Ending the Year with a Bang! And it brought up this activity that I did with my world history class ( CHW3M - World to 1500 CE ) a few years ago. Lots of teachers asked me for pictures of the activity, but, for some crazy reason, I didn't take any! So, as promised, here's a description of the activity and some of the insights that my students had because of the activity. What I love about this activity is that it can be adapted to any topic in history, students use their numeracy skills and must apply the historical significance criteria and really think big-picture about continuity and change . (see my Numeracy and Historical Thinking pos t for more details about this) Materials Needed I started with a roll of newsprint end - one of the tech teachers was going to the Ottawa Citizen office to pick some up, and asked if I wanted any. I didn't yet know what I would use it for, but timelines see...