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...

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...

One of my favourite introduction activities for historical thinking is the Bio-Poem. A simple "fill-in-the-blanks" poetry exercise from The Big Six   that gets students thinking deeply about evidence and historical perspectives. I know that many history teachers start in historical thinking with Historical Significance , but I would argue, based on my experience with this lesson, that most teenagers will connect and engage more readily with Historical Perspective-Taking. I think this might be because adolescents live in the emotions and imagination, and this is often what we need to do in taking historical perspectives. The trick is to then get them to connect those emotions and imagination to the evidence. This lesson was designed to happen at the beginning of the course as part of a Portfolio Assessment and takes about 2 class periods, but certainly can be adapted for other times and uses. I really love the fabulous 20 minute NFB film - Minoru: A Memory of Exile . It s...