Re:Weaving History

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 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...

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...