Contextualizing – Page 6

September 21, 2014

Class 5: Historical Thinking Part II / Twitter #sschat

This class leads off with a live demo of the #sschat on Twitter (Mondays 4-5 PM Pacific). Chats are archived here.

Will use the event to begin a discussion of using Twitter to build a personal learning network (PLN). Students that have not already done so , will be asked to create Twitter accounts. More on Twitter hashtags here.

Next, we will turn our attention back to our exploration of teaching strategies for developing historical thinking skills. We will deconstruct The Battle of the Little Bighorn Lesson Plan from the Stanford History Education Group’s Reading Like A Historian and how it’s designed to teaching skills in Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. Keeping with our “western theme” we will take some time to develop lesson ideas for using “Across the Continent” an 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer. [Above]

Finally we will turn do some peer editing of our shared Google presentation of collecting student-designed mini-lesson based on the Beyond the Bubble assessment model. Assignment | Product

Assignment for Class 6 – Shared Google presentation should be done by bed time 9/24. Blog post due by next class.

Take the peer feedback and do a final version of your mini-lesson.
Write a brief reflection on the process – it could include your take on historic thinking, the specific lesson model borrowed from SHEG, working with a shared Google presentation, peer review process, etc.
Take all the content of your lesson plus the reflection and post it to our blog as your second authored post.

Reading assignment: Snapshot of a modern learner in SmartBlog on Education

Image credit: “Across the Continent” 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer Newberry Library

September 15, 2014May 14, 2015

Class 4: Historical Thinking

Our class begins with a review of the Sam Wineburg reading and TEDEd flipped lesson Who is the historian in your classroom? That will also provide a chance to discuss the efficacy of flipping content. We will also consider the social media case study inspired by this lesson.

Today we begin our study of historical thinking skills based on the work of Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). We will focus on three key skills – Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. See historical thinking chart (pdf at SHEG).

You will work with a team to reverse engineer a few of the assessments found in SHEG’s Beyond the Bubble.

Spend a few minutes doing a scan of the lessons – and find a few that look interesting to you. (Be sure scan the “Same assessment types” for other ideas)
Find 3 questions that focus on any of these skills: Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating
With your team diagram how the assessments are designed:
How many historic sources, what types.
What additional information are students given?
How many prompts?
What are students asked to do?
How is the assessment designed to support the skills
Be prepared to share your finding with the whole class.

We will also look at How to Read Documentary Films a lesson that I recently developed for the Uprooted Museum Exhibit.

Assignment for Class 5

You will each design a historical thinking mini-lesson based on the Beyond the Bubble assessment model.

We will use this assignment as a chance to create a shared Google presentation. I’ve prepared some brief Google Presentation video tutorials. You can find them at this YouTube playlist / Working with Google Slides.

Note: each of you will be contributing to the same Google Slides presentation. I’ve listed your names in alphabetical order in the presentation. You will turn that name placeholder slide into your mini-lesson title slide. You will insert additional slides in your section of the presentation as needed.

All mini lessons should include

Title slide for your mini-lesson. Make it catchy!
Your name as author of the mini-lesson on your lesson title (your lesson will take multiple slides in the presentation – have your name in small font at bottom of each slide)
Target students – by grade level
Indication of one (or more) of the historic skills to be studied – Sourcing, Contextualization, Corroborating
One or more historic documents. Text, image and videos can be inserted into the slide. Longer documents can be linked to via URL or saved in Google drive with link to it.
Source URLs for all documents used
Guiding questions for students to use with document(s)
Brief description of how the document(s) and question(s) should reinforce the targeted historic skill(s)

My recommended sources for this assignment are the Primary Source Sets found at the US Library of Congress. These sets are organized by theme and include a wide variety of source types. Here’s a few examples of the sets:

Baseball: Across a Divided Society
Song sheets, video clips, images, trading cards, and photographs tell the story of how baseball emerged as the American national pastime. Featured primary source items show Americans from different backgrounds and social experiences embracing the sport.

Maps From The World Digital Library
Explore maps from different cultures and eras to discover diverse perspectives on the world’s geography. All the items in this set are from the World Digital Library, a project that makes available significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Women’s Suffrage
Sound files, sheet music, photographs, letters and maps help students better understand women’s suffrage

You may also wish to take a look at Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool that offer questions for each type of source material.

Image from S. Wells,
New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character…, NY, 1871

September 8, 2014

“The People happen to love me.”

Image from Page 6 of The Life of Benjamin Franklin

Lesson Study: First Draft

Content: Students will be given a quote by a famous historical figure, or a quote about an important moment in history. Preferably, these quotes would be ones that are not typically associated with the speaker or moment, so that students will have to think harder about the context the quote could have been given in. For example:

“The People happen to love me. Perhaps that’s my fault.” -Benjamin Franklin

Process: The quote (with speaker and the approximate date when it was said or written) would be put up on the projector for the class to read. Each student will then be given a few minutes to think about and write down ideas about what they think the context of the quote is and who the speaker is. This could be long bullet points or a short paragraph, whatever form they decide their work should take. What was the speaker really trying to say? What does it say about the time it was said during? If they know who the speaker was, they can write down what background knowledge they possess about this person. If they do not, they can speculate who they think the speaker was. Students will then share their ideas in pairs or small groups and will come up with a consensus for their group, which will be written down and given to me. I will then read out these ideas, conduct a short discussion, and then give a lecture on what the quote was really about.

Product: This is a lesson to be repeated, and by the end of the mini-unit, the students should each have a collection of reflections written down that they would be able to turn in.

Evaluation: With these reflections, I would like to stress to the students that there are no wrong answers. It does not matter if they were completely wrong about their theory, as long as they are able to clearly explain why they thought the way that they did. They should also be able to reflect on how their thinking changed after they learned about the true context of the quote. Ultimately, the mini-unit would be ended by having each students find a quote of their own, and to repeat the exercise. Another possible final assessment option would be to have each student make up a quote that a historical figure might have said, or about an event. They would then exchange quotes with another student, and would essentially teach a mini-lesson to their classmate.

What kinds of thinking will students need to do to participate in the lesson? Ideally, over the course of the mini-unit, students will have to employ every level of thinking according to Bloom. First, they must remember and understand the history behind each quote to some degree. They will then take what background knowledge they have, and apply that to their understanding of the quote, which they will then analyze and evaluate what the true meaning of it is. With their final assessment, they will have to apply everything they have learned from the previous lessons in order to create a product of their own for a fellow student to evaluate.

To what extent do students have options or choices regarding these lesson components? Students can express their individuality through their own interpretations. Each lesson will start with them being given the chance to think whatever they wish, without any prompting from me. They will also be given choices when the time comes for them to create their own mini-lesson.

Reflection

I went about designing my lesson study by starting with the Benjamin Franklin quote above. I came across it in a reading for a history class, and decided that I needed to come up with a way to implement it into my future teaching. That got me thinking about other historical quotes that I enjoy for their wildness. I decided to structure my lesson study around this idea, and decided to focus it upon context and perspective.

Accomplishing the peer reviews was easy. The hardest part for me was not knowing how much feedback I was supposed to contribute. As a college student, and a soon-to-be teacher, I’d like to think that I am good at taking and giving constructive criticism. Going into the peer review sessions, we knew that we were supposed to be helping each other, and that it was nothing personal. A big part of teaching is being able to realize that what you’re doing isn’t working, and being able to set aside your pride and admit that you need to make changes. Accordingly, a class of future teachers should have no problem with constructive criticism. This is not going to be something I’ll have the chance to teach in this student teaching placement, but I hope I will be able to implement it in my advanced placement.