Re:Weaving History

I just listened to the Textbooks episode of The Staff Room , a podcast by two Ontario middle school teachers. Seriously, check it out, it is worth a half-hour of your time! I love that Pav and Chey get into some real talk about textbooks! They hit the nail on the head when they say that "textbook" has become a bit of a bad word; that you're not a good teacher if you're still using a textbook. There are whole educational movements encouraging teachers to stop using textbooks, and you can get some glares if you try to defend them. I think they really got the reality of it right, though. A textbook is only one tool in the teacher's toolkit. We are well-educated, smart people who can use a number of tools at our disposal to launch inquiries, to lay the foundations and to inspire learning. A textbook can be one of those tools, and need not be discarded like the proverbial baby with the bathwater. They explained how textbooks can have really well-constructed lesson...

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 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 ...

As we get closer to the holidays, I've been thinking about what gifts I can give to my colleagues. It has become apparent to me in 2016 that the world needs more thoughtful dialogue around important issues, and the social science classroom has a special place in this dialogue. In writing resources and attending conferences, I have gathered over the years, a rich collection of teacher-friendly resources that I can recommend. I'm often surprised when I hear that my colleagues have not heard of one of my go-to resources, so in the interest of sharing and enriching our classrooms, here are my recommendations and thoughts on some of the latest, greatest teaching resources for history and citizenship education.  This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope it can get you started on your journey, or give you a new idea or place to explore. Please share in the comments if you have more to share History and Primary Source Resources The Historical Thinking Project - The home o...