Category: Classes-13

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Class 6: Work Session at Nikkei Legacy Center

Saito Fish Market

We will be serving as curriculum consultants to the Portland’s Nikkei Legacy Center. The center is dedicated to “Sharing and preserving Japanese American history and culture in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, where Japantown once thrived.”

Tonight’s class met at the Legacy Center to work with their staff to plan our projects – Todd Mayberry (Director of Collections and Exhibits) and Kim Blair (Education Manager). Our task to is to use our instructional design skills to assist the Center in creating curriculum material. More on our project-based approach.

At this point we are considering four  projects:

  1. Self-guided instructional activities for middle school museum visitors.
  2. A teacher’s curriculum / activity guide to accompany a historic document filled suitcase that goes out on loan to the classroom.
  3. Online archive of documents with guiding questions and activities
  4. Selecting historic materials for inclusion in an iPhone App tour of Portland’s historic Japantown neighborhood.

Nikkei

Students explore exhibit of WWII incarceration camp room at Nikkei Center

Above: Saito Fish Market (Taken circa 1915)
Mr. Saito driving the Saito Fish Market car. Saito Fish Market was located in Portland’s Japantown on what is now NW Fourth Avenue.
ONLC 1497, gift of Rose Niguma.
Image credit / Oregon Nikkei Endowment

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Class 5: Exploring Project Based Learning

Henry Sakamoto

Henry Sakamoto
For video interviews and more go to Densho Digital Archive. Use free guest login.
The Densho Digital Archive holds a wealth of visual history interviews and other materials that broadly document the Japanese American experience. These unique primary sources cover a span of history from immigration in the early 1900s through redress in the 1980s with a particular focus on the World War II mass incarceration.

Students explore their world with an expectation of choice and control that redefines traditional notions of learning and literacy. Increasingly educators are discovering that they can motivate students with a project (or problem) based approach that engages their students with the opportunity to think like professionals while solving real-world problems.

Here’s 6 reasons why PBL works:

  1. Traditional instruction is based on “teaching as telling.” PBL creates learning more immersive experiences.
  2. A new information “culture” demands a new literacy. PBL can build those skills
  3. We need to increase the rigor in the classroom. PBL moves students to higher levels of Blooms.
  4. PBL makes learning relevant – student take responsibility for their progress.
  5. Usually the audience for thinking is the teacher – PBL shifts the focus to real world application.
  6. PBL can gain added impact by inspiring and empowering student as change agents in their community.

Instead of simply talking about PBL, our class will be undertaking a PBL project that embodies all the elements above. We will be serving as curriculum consultants to the Portland’s Nikkei Legacy Center. The center is dedicated to “Sharing and preserving Japanese American history and culture in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, where Japantown once thrived.”

Our task to is to use our instructional design skills to assist the Center in creating curriculum material. At this point we are considering three possible projects:

  1. Self-guided instructional activities for middle school museum visitors.
  2. A teacher’s curriculum / activity guide to accompany a historic document filled suitcase that goes out on loan to the classroom.
  3. Selecting historic materials for inclusion in an iPhone App tour of Portland’s historic Japantown neighborhood.

A PBL experience always needs a good kick-off entry event to get students engaged in the task. We will begin our project with a classroom visit by Henry Sakamoto, who grew up in  Japantown and was attending high school at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Henry and his family were subjected to FBI search, transfer to the Portland Assembly Center and eventually interred at Mindoka Concentration Camp in Idaho.

Henry will be introduced by Kim Blair, education manager of the Nikkei Legacy Center. Next week’s class will be held at the Center where we will be able to tour the museum and work with Kim and Todd Mayberry, Director of Collections.

Update: Unfortunately Mr Sakamoto could not make it to our class. We discussed our project work with Kim Blair, education manager of the Nikkei Legacy Center.

Then we did a bit of “speed dating” of our ideas for the DBQ Assignment. Students formed two lines and had 2 minutes to pitch their DBQ design idea to each other and share some feedback. Then one line shifted and we repeated the pitch exchange. In all students pitched their idea three times.

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Class 4: Teaching With Documents

M is for

Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

Class 4 offers strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions.

  1. What did it say?
  2. How did it say it?
  3. What’s it mean to me?

Here’s a pdf handout of my slide deck Week 4 HandOut (6 MB pdf)

Next our class examined two sample DBQ’s that I have designed. The first is my iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America” ~ Free at iTunes. The second is the PDF version of my Homefront iBook series. Link to free PDF.

Students will be assigned the task of designing their own DBQ.

Additional resources:

For more strategies see these tags on my blog:
Close Reading | History / DBQ’s

Other examples of my DBQ’s available as free pdfs.
European Views of the New World | The Impact of Industrialization

Title: “An A B C, for baby patriots”
Creator: Ames, Mary Frances
Publisher: Dean & Son
Place of Publication: London (160a Fleet Street E.C.)
Publication Date: [1899]
Archive: University of Florida UF00086056:00001

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Class 3: Using the Lesson Study Process

Our third class is comprised of three segments:

  • Task 1. I’ll be showing you a sample lesson I created as an interactive iBook. “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America.” Free at iTunes.  I want to demonstrate how I used the lesson study to plan the book and introduce you to what you can create with iBooks author. (I have a cart of iPads coming in).
  • Task 2: Give you time to use your lesson study to offer each other feedback on an upcoming lesson you will teach in your placement. See Lesson Study Assignment (41 KB pdf) given out at Class 2
  • Task 3. Get you set up on WordPress – your assignment this week takes the form of a blog post.

To see students’ reflections on Lesson Study click Lesson Study 1 Category

Here’s a sample “Lesson Study” based on my iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America.”

Content – I have three goals for this iBook lesson:

  1. To study the industrial era of late 19th century US Use an essential question (EQ) that is still relevant to students: “How do we evaluate the social costs and benefits of technological innovations?”
  2. I want students to think about the impact of contemporary technological changes on peoples’ lives. 
  3. Guide students through the historian’s process with Common Core style prompts

Progress and Poverty in Industrial America-coverProcess – I begin by posing the essential question (then to make the question relevant to students) I offer a brief examination of the impact of 21st c technologies / global economy on progress and poverty in contemporary America. I’ve gathered a short collection of historic documents – some text, but also photographs, posters and an early Edison film. Instead of explaining the documents to the students, I have minimal explanation, with short guiding questions to help the students think about the documents and ultimately the essential question.

Product – I left this rather open ended since I published it on iTunes and I don’t intend to be there to deliver the lesson. But in the introduction, I do include a series of possible activities that teachers might utilize.

Evaluation – I did not include a formal assessment in this iBook. (If used by a teacher, I’ll let them figure it out). But at the reader level I do have a series of reflective questions for students related to content goals (the late 19th c industrialization, essential question, and process of historical thinking.)

What kinds of thinking will students need to do to participate in the lesson? For the most part its all higher level thinking (analysis and evaluation) I have many documents with opposing viewpoints on the impact of industrialization. The guiding questions ask student to compare (analysis) and evaluate.

To what extent do students have options or choices regarding these lesson components? I choose all the content. No student choice there. While I offer suggestions for how to look at the documents, there is no specific process or product. So there is a chance for student input. The material lends itself to a debate format, though students might simply use the content to form their own opinions about the EQ. That’s their own personal “evaluation “ of the question.