Re:Weaving History

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...

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...

With much of the professional development focus on numeracy in Ontario this year, I've been contemplating the connections between numeracy and historical thinking. There are the obvious statistics and graphs that we all use to unpack historical content, such as this graph from    Canadian Sources Investigated: The enlistments (green) and the casualties (purple) for the months of 1917 is a great example of how we often think of "numeracy." Students need to interpret and understand the "content" and implications of it. This is great! While these types of activities are a necessary and excellent part of understanding the events of the past, alone, they are not yet really historical thinking.  What I've really been wondering is how do numeracy skills and concepts overlap or converge with the historical thinking concepts ? Earlier this year, one of my more numerate colleagues shared some of her realizations from a lesson study observation, whe...

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...

"Your resume is something you write as you go, not at the end. Live out loud! W e need to celebrate our learning publicly!" "Perfect is the enemy of done. Start. Help each other! If you wanna learn, you have to learn right beside them!" - Kevin Honeycutt On May 17, 2016, I was fortunate to attend the OCDSB Digital Learning Symposium. The keynote speaker was Kevin Honeycutt . If you don't follow him on Twitter, start now! In a quick review of the twitter feed from the day (#DLAchat), I pulled the best bits of advice, thoughts and inspiration that got most of us really excited - they are sprinkled throughout in purple. All really great words to inspire and live by, but the ones that got me going were Live out Loud! If we really care about education, and the future for our students, we need to be public about the amazing things we are doing and share them with the world. I had been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a few years, but put it o...