Re:Weaving History

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 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...

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...