Tip of the Week: 75+ professional learning opportunities that will make you smarter

We all love our summers. After a couple hundred days of facilitation, lesson design, students, parents, exciting projects, new ideas, administrators, and assessments, the chance to catch your breath a bit during the months of June and July is hard to beat.

But summers are also perfect for catching up on your own professional growth and for having conversations with other social studies teachers. If you’re planning to take advantage of the many different summer PD options, now is the time for finishing up your applications.

And do I have a Google spreadsheet for you.

Tip of the Week: Forget the gym. These 5 New Year’s resolutions are what you really need

You’re right. Most New Year’s resolutions are made closer to the actual New Year. But it’s still January . . . so I’m good, right?

And it’s never too late to make a few 2019 social studies resolutions. Best place to start? Asking questions about our current practice, especially during this middle of the year period: What’s working? What’s not? What do my students need? What resource needs to be phased out? How can I get better?

The middle of the school year is a perfect time to think about these sorts of questions. In that spirit, here are five New Year’s resolutions every social studies teacher should make:

7 things our kids should be learning in history class. Or not.

In a couple weeks, me and 18 other social studies teachers, district level curriculum coordinators, state education consultants, and other assorted interested individuals will get together to rewrite the state’s social studies standards.

Rewrite is perhaps the wrong word. Revise might work better. Maybe just tweaks. Because the number of changes we make to the document really depends on the decisions we make during our time together. Do we think the current document is flawed enough for massive changes or are we looking at just some simple re-wording?

If you’ve been following History Tech for a few years, you know the story of our current standards. If you haven’t, a quick review.

Several years ago, per Department of Education regulations, a group of us was asked to come together for a scheduled review of the state social studies standards. Long story short . . . we changed them. We went from a document that encouraged the memorization of content to one that supported a balance between the gathering of information with the effective use of that information. We wanted kids to do social studies rather than simply memorize it. Along with the standards document came a performance-based assessment measuring historical and critical thinking skills that replaced the previous test of 60 multiple choice questions.

The goal was simple – change the way social studies is taught is the state. Focus on process and content. Measure thinking, not memorizing. Develop engaged, informed, and knowledgeable citizens. And while there’s been a few bumps along the way, the message that we need to go beyond traditional instruction has made its way through the system.

And now in 2018, we’re back – per Department of Education regulations – to look again at whether the document needs adjustments. It’s been an interesting conversation so far. Everyone is onboard with historical and critical thinking skills remaining a focus.

But the questions we’re really wrestling with are more complex: what should a state level, public document look like that encourages learning about a country and world as diverse, as complex, and as interesting as ours? How does it support the telling of multiple stories and themes and people and ideas without getting bogged down in the minutiae? What do we emphasize and what can we ignore?

As part of the process, I’ve been reading and looking at what other states are doing and what other current curriculum documents look like. During my search, I ran across a recent article in the Washington Post that asked seven historians a simple question:

Tip of the Week: How not to teach the Holocaust & resources for doing it right

Let’s be clear from the get go.

It happened. We have hundreds of thousands, millions, of primary sources. We have photos. Government documents. Train timetables. Movies. We’ve got oral histories. Diaries. Letters. Court transcripts. There are prison confessions. Newspapers. Lists of stolen property. Sacks of hair. Piles of shoes. Boxes of wedding rings. And many of the actual camps, barbed wire, gas chambers, and crematoria still exist.

So let’s be clear.

The Holocaust happened. Over six million European Jews were murdered between 1933 and 1945. More than six million others deemed undesirable were also murdered by the government and party led by Adolf Hitler.

So, please, do not plan an historical thinking activity that asks your kids:

The latest Sam Wineburg book is out! The latest Sam Wineburg book is out!

I will be the first to admit it. I’m in love with Sam Wineburg. The bromance started, I suppose, 15 years ago when I first ran across his book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. It was a fairly typical academic book focused on some guy’s research but I loved the title. And as a newly minted social studies curriculum coach, the content was right up my alley.

A former middle school teacher and college instructor, I was finding it difficult to articulate what quality history instruction could look like and how to share that vision with other educators. After 15 years in the classroom, I knew what had worked for me but I was struggling to find ways to structure that. And perhaps even more important, I wasn’t completely sure WHY it had worked.

Wineburg’s research resonated. I read more of his early articles on historical thinking skills and loved his ideas about how we needed to re-think our approach to teaching history. In a nutshell? We were doing it wrong. It’s not about memorizing. It’s not about multiple choice. It’s about asking kids to think critically about evidence and developing arguments around that evidence. Radical, right?

It’s been over ten years since I first heard Sam Wineburg speak. During a combined Kansas / Missouri Council for History Education conference way back in 2008, Sam opened with a keynote highlighting the main ideas in his book. This face to face meet cemented it. His later books, articles, research, SHEG, Beyond the Bubble, Historical Thinking Chart, civic online literacy tools . . . have all convinced me that the two of us would be great together in an action comedy buddy cop movie.

All this to say that

You want kids to have skills. Read Inquire Write can help.

Last week, I got the chance to work with about 25 teachers and educators from around the state as we started the process of revising our state social studies standards. Long time readers will recall a similar process from seven years ago.

At the time, the Kansas state standards were very much the same as other state level standards documents. The focus was on the details of history – people and places and dates. Assessments tried to incorporate critical thinking but since the entire test was multiple choice, it was difficult to measure high levels of thinking and problem solving.

To be successful on this type of high stakes state assessment, teachers shifted to a drill and kill,  memorize specific pieces of content out of context instructional strategies. These strategies increased test scores but lowered student engagement, failed to create critical thinkers, and didn’t prepare kids to become informed citizens.

So we started from scratch.

The 2011 process resulted in a brand new set of standards that shifted instructional focus from memorizing details to one that encouraged analyzing evidence, solving problems, and sharing solutions. We created five big ideas that acted as our standards. We adapted reading, writing, and communication expectations and instruction best practices to guide local curriculum development. And we left the specific content up to each district.

Teachers appreciated the freedom to focus on the doing of social studies rather than asking kids to memorize minutiae. But this “new” style of teaching can be time consuming and difficult. The old standards had trained both our kids and our teachers that drill and kill was acceptable – now we were asking that instruction and assessment look different.

And teachers had questions. What does this sort of teaching look like? How do you assess the learning? How long should it take? If we don’t have to “cover”so much content, what content is important enough to focus on? What resources are available?

Back in 2013, as the revised document rolled out, there weren’t a ton of examples and resources out there that supported this kind of inquiry based teaching model. But around the country, others were having similar conversations:

• The NCSS pushed out their C3 Framework.
• C3 Teachers built on the Inquiry Arc in that Framework.
• Sam Wineburg and his staff at the Stanford History History Education group shared their curriculum and assessment tools.
• The National Archives cranked out their DocsTeach site.
• The Library of Congress has a ton of tools available.

Things got better.

And now, if you’re looking for examples, resources, lessons, student samples, and rubrics, things are looking even rosier.