This past weekend I started to put together an independent project for my students (inspired by a Twitter post from another middle school history teacher – see below). At the time, all I knew is that my district made the decision to close our schools until April 13, which meant that I needed to get creative.
The history of the Middle Ages isn’t inherently interesting to most people, let alone middle schoolers. Having said that, I can make history interesting for my kiddoes, but that involves a lot of interaction (face-to-face)–there are stories to be told, simulations to do, and real-time back and forth banter. Going virtual is another story…so I opted to pause our current unit of study and take a broader approach to learning world history while making connections to current events and social-emotional learning.
I decided to do a Living History Project with my 7th graders. The following tweet inspired me, and the Google Doc that Deirdre O’Connor shared was a great starting point:
The Living History Project is the essence of student-centered learning. Students are creating a primary source (through daily journal posts) about their experience living during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is also one task that they have to complete each day that connects history/social science content, current events, and literacy skills. Students need to complete the task and add that to their daily journal entries. The tasks are organized by day/week on the Daily Menu (P.S. This is still very much under construction).
And because I believe in #studentchoice, students have a variety of options for this project:
Paper or digital
Writing, drawing + writing, video
Students can keep a hard copy journal or they can go completely digital. Some digital options: Google Slides (which I prepared and pushed out), vlogs, or blogs (e.g., Weebly, Wix). All entries will eventually need to be uploaded to the Google Slides for posterity’s sake. NOTE: If you’re wondering what I’m doing for students without Internet access or devices…I left a hard copy of the project and daily menu for parents to pick up from the front office.
I created a Google Form to collect information on how my students planned to record their daily journal entries. I also let them know that I expect them to send me photos or a link to what they’ve been working on by the end of each week. While I don’t want to micro-manage my students, I know that middle schoolers like to err on the side of procrastination, so I’m planning to make sure that they don’t procrastinate themselves out of this project.
Because I also like blogging, I plan to do the Living History Project along side of them. Then when we finally reconvene (anticipated student/teacher return date is April 13), we can share our experiences with each other.
If you are planning to do something similar, please let me know! I would love to see the end products and/or learn about how the process evolved for you and your students.
Schools and the Coronavirus — Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Close the schools, an anxious neighbor says on Nextdoor (a local online bulletin board), when a parent of two school children in the community in which I live came in contact with someone who was infected with the coronavirus (see comment below: a careful reader noted that the source I used said the parent was […]
If you’ve been following my blog or Twitter feed, then you know I am a huge fan of Larry Cuban. His post could not have come at a more opportune time as school closures have become a reality, both in the U.S. and abroad.
As a classroom teacher, I have been thinking about the impact of school closures on the students from my district. I work at a Title I school which means that the majority of my students come from low-SES households. As Larry points out, school closures disproportionately affect the poor. For some parents missing work means losing pay; while for others it means scrambling to find someone who can take care of their child while they go to work. We also provide breakfast and lunch for many students. Concurring with Larry, if my school closes, those students would have to find a different means of getting food. Closing the schools would create an economic hardship for those parents. For parents of middle school children (like the ones I teach), I suppose they could stay home unsupervised, but for children in elementary school…well, that’s another story.
I was thinking about the online learning option that several schools have chosen to do. But then again, the online option assumes that students have access to a device and the Internet which is not the reality for all students at my school, let alone my district.
So what is a school to do? How can we keep the learning going?
To be clear, I’m not worried about making sure that my students acquire the content information or skills to pass the state or district exams. That is not my concern. My concern is to ensure that my students do not fall behind in content and skills acquisition, in general. My secondary concern is to provide for my students some semblance of normalcy in a confusing and scary time. Students often look to schools as a safe-haven because it’s something they know–it’s something they are used to going to five days a week. The events of 9/11 clearly showed that.
How can I support my students when being physically present at school is not a possibility? What can I do for those who do not have access to reliable Internet connectivity?
I don’t have an answer to any of those questions. But I am currently working through some viable options for my students. I hope you are, too.
I’ve written about professional development (PD) several times over the course of the years as I’ve held both the role of presenter and audience member. Most of the PD I’ve experienced in my 25 years of teaching has followed the one-shot, sit-and-get model which research (Darling-Hammond & McLaughlin, 1995; Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Dede, Ketelhut, Whitehouse, Breit, & McCloskey, 2008; Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001) suggests to be one of the most ineffective ways to provide PD. The reasons behind the one-shot PD as an ineffective mode of professional growth is the lack of coherence, relevance, and sustainability. In addition, PD that happens to teachers as in they are talked at for the hour or so is not effective either (Appova & Arbaugh, 2017; Macià & García, 2016). This is why my dissertation study focused on examining the influence of PD that included the following:
Conceptual Map of Best Practices of Teacher Professional Development (Desimone & Garet, 2015)
Disclaimer: While Desimone and Garet (2015) and by extension me (via the findings of my research study) believe that this PD model works, this is by far not the only model of best practices for teacher professional development.
The PD I attended this past Thursday was hosted by the Orange County Department of Education (OCDE) under the leadership of Marika Manos, Coordinator of History/Social Science. This PD was designed around a community of practices model in which educators from all levels (e.g., K12, higher education) came together to learn from other educators (collective participation). There were four sessions planned throughout the school year (sustained duration) with the theme of Environmental Principles and Concepts and application of these ideas to the History/Social Science content (coherence, content focus).
I was unable to attend the first three sessions, so I cannot speak to the level of active learning that occurred on those days. But I can attest to the level of active learning during the fourth session in which the esteemed Bob Bain presented on Surfacing & Engaging Students’ Thinking When Teaching History and the Social Sciences.
To begin, what I appreciated was the fact that he not only asked us our names and what we taught…he wrote those down so that he could speak to us on a personal level by using our names. Bob also started his session by sharing that when he teaches or presents, he asks his audience to think about three things as they reflect on their learning:
What supported your thinking?
What extended your thinking?
What challenged your thinking?
I loved this.
By setting us up with questions that he was going to ask us to address by the end of the day, Bob ensured that we would be actively engaged in the learning.
Throughout the day, Bob presented research, shared student examples, personal anecdotes, and asked educators to share their questions, thinking, and understanding. To anyone who walked by the room, it might have seemed as if we were all passively learning as much of the time we were listening and viewing Bob’s presentation. But that takes me back to the blog post by Blake Harvard titled The Myth of Passive Learning. For years, I erroneously believed that if learners were not physically active during the learning process, then the learning could only be categorized as passive. However, Blake points out that while the body may be physically passive, when the mind is engaged in focused cognition, the person is actively learning. But I also think that just because one is physically active does not equate to learning. I’ll expound on this in another blog post.
And that takes me back to Desimone and Garet’s (2015) conceptual model of PD. Everything about the presentation on Thursday engaged me on a cognitive level. All cylinders were firing–I could barely keep up with the amazing amount of information being presented. So yes, the PD definitely fulfilled the notion of active learning.
But here’s the most important take-away about this PD…I wanted to be there. I made the choice to go because I was interested in meeting Bob and the learning about what he had to share. This is the part of PD that I think is one of the most under-rated: participant interest.
It’s an easy hook…and one that (in my opinion) is often overlooked. This is why I love EdCamps and my network of peers. We talk about what interests us and what we know would interest others. We come together to learn from each other. Our discussions are typically content-based, aligned with what we’ve been discussing in the past, sustained over time, actively engaging, collectively participatory…but more importantly…it is of interest to us.
In closing, here is my reflection of the PD from this past Thursday:
The information Bob shared about historical thinking and the gaps between experts (teachers) and novices (students) supported my efforts both as a classroom teacher and professional developer. It’s important to be cognizant of the in/coherence problem. But it’s more than awareness, I need to find ways to narrow the gap.
My thinking was extended in that I need to provide more scaffolds for my English language learners. I need to spend more time gaining a better understanding of their comprehension of the content so that I can clear up any misconceptions. In other words, I need to make the hidden visible. NOTE: This is something I am currently working on with the brain dumps.
I left the day challenged to be a better educator, not only for my students, but also for the people who attend my PD sessions and who are part of my PLN. I need to not make assumptions about what I think they know. I need to be better at addressing the gaps between expert and novice…teacher/student and teacher/teacher.
I can and will do better.
References
Appova, A., & Arbaugh, F. (2017). Teachers’ motivation to learn: Implications for supporting professional growth. Professional Development in Education, 7, 1–17. doi:10.1080/19415257.2017.1280524
Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., & Gardner, M. (with Espinoza, D.). (2017). Effective teacher professional development. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/teacher-prof-dev
Darling-Hammond, L., & McLaughlin, M. W. (1995). Policies that support professional development in an era of reform. Phi Delta Kappan, 92, 81–92. doi:10.1177/003172171109200622
Dede, C., Ketelhut, D. J., Whitehouse, P., Breit, L., & McCloskey, E. M. (2008). A research agenda for online teacher professional development. Journal of Teacher Education, 60, 8–19. doi:10.1177/0022487108327554
Desimone, L. M., & Garet, M. S. (2015). Best practices in teacher’s professional development in the United States. Psychology, Society, & Education, 7, 252–263. doi:10.25115/psye.v7i3.515
Garet, M. S., Porter, A. C., Desimone, L., Birman, B. F., & Yoon, K. S. (2001). What makes professional development effective? Results from a national sample of teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 915–945. doi:10.3102/00028312038004915
Macià, M., & García, I. (2016). Informal online communities and networks as a source of teacher professional development: A review. Teaching and Teacher Education, 55, 291–307. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2016.01.021
Living the Learning Curve 