Transparent Kansas State History / Government Standards

It’s the first meeting of the Kansas state history/government writing committee today. Lots of history geekiness, lots of great conversation and lots of confusion all at the same time. And because we’re confused, the more help you can provide the better. So here’s the transparency.

I mentioned earlier, during the first two days of the larger standards committee, that I was having a James Madison Constitutional Convention moment. We started out tweaking the old standards and quickly decided that tweaking wasn’t going to be enough. We needed to come up with something that has a strong content component but which also focuses more on historical thinking skills.

So . . . we’re struggling a bit. It’s very easy to create a generic list of historical events – it’s what we have now. But we want teachers and kids to see the big picture. How do these past events connect with one another and with contemporary events?

To help with this, we’ve developed five Big Ideas or Anchor Standards or Core Standards or . . . we’re not sure what to call them but we’re hoping to replace the generic titles like History, Civics, Geography and Economics. The goal is to not have silo-like, separated from each other, content areas but rather broad themes that encourage kids to see relationships and connections across periods and places.

And we’re working to fit content into these five Core Standards:

• Choices have consequences.
• Individuals have rights and responsibilities.
• Society is shaped by beliefs, ideas and diversity.
• Societies experience continuity and change over time.
• The relationships among people, places and environment are dynamic.

We’ve also developed a working course level template. You can get that template here. The first two pages of the template list the five Core Standards and four “benchmark” level statements under each standard. We’re planning on listing specific indicators under each of these benchmarks. The second part is an example of a grade level narrative that attempts to provide a basic overview for teachers listing grade level content, content that is taught before / after this grade and expectations of historical thinking skills. The third piece is our attempt to create a chronological list of the specific indicators. (And realize that the second and third pieces in the template are placeholders and not necessarily actual stuff.)

The group is working today to add content specificity to each of these “benchmark” level statements. It’s hard. It’s hard because we trying to organize history / government / economic / geography content in a very different way. We think we’re on the right track but right now it seems a bit like running in mud.

Curious what you think about the Core Standards, the “benchmark” level standards statements and the template. All are at the incredibly rough draft stage. I would love to hear what you like and what you don’t. (I would be especially curious what non-Kansans have to say!)

Are we on the right track?

New Kansas State Social Studies Standards

I feel a bit like the Founding Fathers at the 1787 Constitutional Convention might have felt. They showed up in Philadelphia with the stated intent of tweaking the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they ditched the Articles and went straight to the Constitution.

Today was the first meeting of the Kansas State History/Government Standards Revision Committee. The stated intent? Tweak the current state standards.

And while we don’t have James Madison or Benjamin Franklin, the committee truly is a collection of Kansas Social Studies studs. Michael Ortman, Brian Richter, Nathan McAlister, Anneliece Kowalik are just a few of the incredibly talented educators in the room.

What happened when the committee got together? They basically pushed the current document aside and went straight to the 21st century standards equivalent of the Constitution – standards that will drive quality instruction and quality assessment. And there was lots of great conversation today that revolved around what the standards document should contain and how it should look.

One of the first decisions made by the group was to organize the new standards around Big Ideas and Essential Questions. Of course, we then had to write the Big Ideas. I’ve pasted our first draft below.

If you were creating a K-12 social studies standards document that will integrate history, geography, government and economics, what additions and subtractions would you make?

Big Ideas

• Choices have consequences
• Individuals have rights and responsibilities within societies
• Diversity and commonality shape and enrich societies
• Beliefs and ideas shape people’s thinking and actions
• Competition for resources and power creates conflict and cooperation
• Societies progress and decline
• People are interdependent
• Societies have similarities and differences that change over time
• The relationship between people, places and environment is dynamic
• Multiple causations and perspectives exist

————-

Update September 27

Big Ideas second draft

• Choices have consequences.
• Individuals have rights and responsibilities.
• Society is shaped by beliefs, ideas and diversity.
• Societies experience continuity and change over time.
• The relationships among people, places and environment are dynamic.
• Thinking and literacy skills are essential to active 21st century citizenship.

 

The History of America ala Facebook – Great start of school activity

Last week at the Teaching America History conference, I had the chance to share with a few groups some ideas for using Facebook as an instructional tool.

During the discussion, we discovered a light-hearted History of America as seen through the eyes of America’s Facebook wall. Got us thinking.

It seems like a great way to start your school year.

Have kids re-create the wall through the perspective of different groups. What would the wall say if Native Americans were typing? African Americans? Different political parties? Women? Other countries? Have different groups of kids create walls and then lead a whole-group discussion about which events to add / subtract from a class wall.

You could have kids re-create the wall for just a specific period of time or for just the period of time covered in your class.

However you decide to adapt the activity, it will stimulate interest, encourage history conversations and provide you with some idea of students’ prior knowledge. I could even see teachers using this all year long as sort of Big Picture graphic organizer.

Let me know how it turns out!

How to get smart again

We’re not stupid, we’re ignorant.

Current US history and civic knowledge among American citizens is not good. And worse, it seems as if the extremists are the only ones who care about that stuff. Moderates are choosing to “tune out” from the political process – making it more difficult for consensus to happen.

So what? What’s our role as social studies teachers?

A few suggestions:

1. Teach the idea and process of something called deliberative democracy -  developed by James Fishkin, communications professor at Stanford.

The premise is simple: poll citizens on a major issue, blind; then see how their opinions evolve when they’re forced to confront the facts. What Fishkin has found is that while people start out with deep value disagreements over, say, government spending, they tend to agree on rational policy responses once they learn the ins and outs of the budget.

2. Replace large, expensive, boring textbooks with well-written, engaging, smaller ones. Niall Ferguson calls these 10 pound history books

an encyclopedia without the convenience of alphabetical order.

And design them to be web-friendly . . . connected to web sites and primary sources and photos and video clips and live news reports and outside experts. Build in social media connections. Not just the same old textbooks put online or in some sort of iPad app format that reads exactly the same. (Though that format would at least allow anywhere, anytime access.) We need a true e-book with true interactive features.

Very few of us have the time, tech skills and history content knowledge to do this on our own. But we can be a bit more picky when selecting classroom materials. Textbooks like Joy Hakim’s The History of US and web sites like NARA’s DocsTeach give us more flexibility then traditional textbooks.

New tools like iPads with installed apps such as Shmoop’s American Revolution and Early Jamestown provide access to materials and resources in ways not possible even two years ago.

3. Use more video games and simulations. More and more companies are designing awesome games specifically for the educational market.

A couple of my favorites? Making History: The Calm and the Storm and You Are the Historian.

4. We need to ask better questions. We need to make history and government more of a mystery. What many kids get out of textbooks and traditional instruction is what author Philip Roth calls “the sense of inevitability.”

Do we know what’s going to happen in Libya and in middle eastern countries? Will China actually become a superpower? In the moment, no one really knows what’s going to happen but we teach history as if what actually happened was “inevitable.”

The American Revolution was not a done deal in 1776. The Confederacy was one victory away from gaining a possible ally in England. The Depression didn’t have to happen the way it did. Roth says that

the terror of the unseen is what the science of history hides.

We lose the “unseen” when we don’t ask good questions and encourage kids to solve interesting problems

We can do better. And based on the results of Newsweek’s research, we probably need to.

Focus on the kid, not the assessment

With state assessment time rolling around, I thought I would re-post something I wrote a year or so ago that fits here.

—————–

It’s a story many of you already know. But perhaps on a Monday late in the school year with state assessments staring us in the face, it bears repeating. I was reminded of the story while browsing through an old teaching strategy article from the Organization of American Historians.

Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Adams and son of John Quincy Adams, served as a Massachusetts state senator, a US Congressman and ambassador to Great Britain under Abraham Lincoln. He was also very conscientious about keeping a daily journal and encouraged his children to do the same.

Henry Brooks, fourth of seven children, followed his advice and began journaling at a young age. A particular entry written when Brooks was eight has continued to catch our attention. Following a day spent with his father, he wrote

Went fishing with my father today, the most glorious day of my life.

The day was so glorious, in fact, that Brooks continued to talk and write about that particular day for the next thirty years. It was then that Brooks thought to compare journal entries with his father.

For that day’s entry, Charles had written:

Went fishing with my son, a day wasted.

Now it’s possible that Charles was upset that they came home empty-handed, having caught no fish. But even so, he seems to have forgotten that the process is sometimes more important than the product. That the time spent with kids is usually more important than what we do with them.

It’s easy to forget the powerful impact we can have with our students just with the time we spend with them. So a gentle reminder during the assessment season . . . make it about the kids, not just their test scores.