What are you zinking about?

There are days and sometimes weeks when I am just drifting along with my head barely above water. It seems as if it’s just one thing after another and I end up switching into survival, one day at a time, get it done cause it’s due this afternoon mode.

And I know it’s the same for you. People tell us that February is the shortest month. But if you’re just moving from one class to another, from one meeting to the next, parent contact to parent contact, February can feel like it lasts forever. We feel your pain.

So it’s a perfect time. Time for some sort of mid-year self reflection.

As educators, I’m convinced that we don’t do enough metacognition. We don’t reflect often enough about our practice. We don’t chat enough with our digital PLNs. And we need to. We need to take more responsibility for our own professional learning. Especially in the doldrums of February.

So your job over the next week or so? Catch your breath, be intentional about setting aside some time, and do a little bit of zinking:

Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast and 5 easy ways to use it

Most of us like to think that we know a lot of history stuff. We’re great at Trivial Pursuit, Heads Up, and You Don’t Know Jack. We love reading non-fiction. We enjoy poking holes in the plots of “historical” movies and generally annoy our friends with random historical facts, Cliff Clavin style.

And, in the back of our minds, we’re always a bit concerned that someone else might just know more about history than we do. So we also are always on the hunt for additional history trivia bits.

A great place to find those cool history tidbits and extra background for your class is

Beyond the Bubble – Stanford History Group’s awesome new assessment tool

If the Stanford History Education Group could cook, I’d marry it. Seriously.

The SHEG has awesome lesson plans that focus on the doing of history, rather than the simple memorization of base knowledge. Led by history stud Sam Wineburg, the SHEG is at the forefront of high-quality history instruction.

And now the SHEG is even more awesomer than it was before. (And, yes, in this case, awesomer is a word. It indicates a level of awesome beyond normal awesomeness.)

But, Glenn, how can the SHEG be more awesomer than before?

One word. Assessments.

One of the problems that social studies teachers encounter is the problem of how to assess historical thinking. If we ask kids to do history rather than memorize it, what does that test look like?

Multiple choice doesn’t work. And, at least in the beginning, kids don’t have the skills to complete a large 6-10 document Document-Based Question. So what do high quality history assessments look like?

SHEG’s answer:
The Beyond the Bubble website with its HATs – Historical Assessments of Thinking.

Short, easy to administer, handy interactive rubrics to go along with, student examples to aid in scoring, supporting materials, extension videos, and aligned with Common Core literacy standards. What’s not to like?

It looks like close to 60 different HATs have been posted so far in a variety of content areas. Each HAT focuses on one or more of the following aspects of historical knowing:

Evaluation of evidence involves the critical assessment of historical sources.  It includes the following:

• Sourcing asks students to consider who wrote a document as well as the circumstances of its creation. Who authored a given document? When? For what purpose?
• Contextualization asks students to locate a document in time and place, and to understand how these factors shape its content.
• Corroboration asks students to consider details across multiple sources to determine points of agreement and disagreement.

Historical knowledge encompasses various ways of knowing about the past, including:

• Historical information is the recognition and recall of important factual data.
• Significance requires students to evaluate the importance of people and events.
• Periodization asks students to group ideas and events by era.
• Narrative is deep knowledge of how the past unfolded over time.

Historical argumentation requires the articulation of historical claims and the use of evidence to support them.

And because they are all designed to take less than an hour and to be more formative than summative, HATs are perfect for integrating into your classroom instruction. They seem like a great tool to support the teaching and learning of historical thinking skills, a middle ground between multiple choice and full blown DBQs.

They also seem very adaptable – add documents to create larger unit tests, use as part of whole-group instruction, allow kids to work together in groups to solve the questions poised by a HAT, or incorporate the documents and questions as part of an interactive lecture.

I know. Awesome, right?

Gamification in the Social Studies

What are the characteristics of a highly effective learning environment?

Yeah, I know. It sounds like the sort of question you’d find on your last college ed final. But it’s still something that’s good to think about, no matter how long we’ve been teaching.

And here’s the answer:

The characteristics of a highly effective learning environment are very much like the characteristics of a highly successful video game.

I started messing around with video games as teaching tools way back when. During my very first month teaching 8th graders in Derby Middle School in Fall 1986, I used a turn by turn game called Archeology.

Catchy title.

We played it on an Apple IIE desktop, with groups of 4-5 taking turns to “dig up” artifacts that eventually revealed a 18th century New England farmhouse.  The game ran on a 5 1/4 floppy disc that I protected with my life because we couldn’t find a way to create a useable backup. But it worked.

Kids were engaged. Conversation was happening. Stuff was being learned. Of course, I didn’t know why. I just knew something good was taking place. It wasn’t till much later that I started connecting brain research to what happened back at Derby.

What exactly was going on? Today I can think back and describe what happened as a result of playing Archeology:

• increased literacy skills
• improved problem solving skills
• simulated authentic situations
• encouraged collaboration
• engaged students in content
• lead to sophisticated research

There was a merging of brain research and effective learning environments.

I didn’t call it “Gamification” back in 1986. (If you would have asked me then, I would have called it “They’re so busy learning that they’re not setting stuff on fire and that’s a good thing-ification.”)

But we’re calling it Gamification now. It’s the idea that we can take video game concepts and apply them to our classroom instruction. This could mean we actually use games and simulations or it could mean we begin to re-structure our lesson and unit designs using gaming concepts.

What exactly are those gaming concepts?

• Players get to modify the game environment and make individual choices.
• Players become the experts.
• Creativity and problem solving skills are encouraged.
• Players receive immediate feedback.
• There’s always an answer / always a way to “win.”
• “Cheating” is supported.
• Trial and error works best.
• Game play is almost always better in groups.

Okay . . . now start thinking about these concepts in a social studies unit design. Let’s say we’re designing a unit on the causes of the Civil War.

• Students get to modify the learning environment and make individual choices.
  Differentiated Instruction allow for students to research using a variety of tools and develop a variety of final products.
• Students become the experts.
  We provide an engaging problem or over-arching question and allow students to find the answer on their own. This is instead of  just giving kids the answers and asking them to memorize them.
• Creativity and problem solving skills are encouraged.
  The unit problem or question is the key. It has to be hard enough but not too hard. Challenging but doable. For example – ” Using primary documents as your main source of information, prove the following statement true or false: States Rights was not the cause of the Civil War.”
• Students receive immediate feedback.
  You will need to constantly monitor progress. This doesn’t mean grading. This means providing information in a way so that leads to the desired end result.
• There’s always an answer / always a way to “win.”
  This relates back to the idea of differentiating the learning. Game designers call it “flow” and most current games will automatically adjust the difficulty level based on how the player is doing. If a player is struggling, the game will make the current task easier. If a player is having lots of success, the game will make the task more difficult. We need to do the same thing with students.
• “Cheating” is supported.
  Almost all games provide cheat codes, walkthroughs and in-game help. This is not seen as cheating by players in the same way that we define academic cheating. So during learning, you need to provide scaffolding – this might be giving more time to finish things, suggesting different tools or web sites and even designing activities that encourage student / groups to share information.
• Trial and error works best.
  We know how powerful mistakes can be in the learning process. So we need to provide opportunities for failure. Never grade first attempts, require 1st and 2nd drafts of work and design problems and questions that can’t be Googled.
• Learning is almost always better in groups.
  We need to connect kids with other kids and adults. This could be permanent groups throughout the life of the unit, temporary teams to solve problems, hooking kids up with adult experts, using technology to join your kids with someone else’s kids or simply asking kids to reflect with a partner after an interactive lecture.

Games and simulations can and should be part of our instructional tool kit. But the brain-based research that is the basis for their design should be part of our kit as well.

Gamification.

Get on it. I’ll be here when you’re done. Let me know how it goes.

History as individual stalks of grass

Bob Edens had been blind since birth. Fifty-one years of darkness, sounds, smells and touch followed. But after a remarkable laser surgery, Bob can now see. For 51 years, Bob had imagined what things looked like based mainly on the descriptions of others.

I never would have dreamed that yellow is so . . . yellow. But red is my favorite color. I just can’t believe red.

He’s now seeing for himself what he had only imagined.

Grass is something I had to get used to. I always thought it was just fuzz.  But to see each individual green stalk – it’s like starting a whole new life.  It’s the most amazing thing in the world to see things you never thought you’d see.

Sometimes I think we do this with kids. We tell them about history and have them read about history but we never let them experience history. They never get to actually “see” the individual people and events and details – students rely on us to describe those things for them. We forget that history is supposed to be a verb, not a noun.

So . . . how can we help our kids see history?

The Heath brothers book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die has some interesting things to say about engaging learners. I especially like what they have to say about creating mystery and using emotional stories to suck kids into your content.

• Web sites like DocsTeach, Stanford’s History Education Group, TeachingHistory and Historical Scene Investigation provide hands-on kinds of stuff for kids to do.
• iPod and iPad apps like Rome: Virtual History, Civilization Revolution and Colonial Williamsburg give kids the chance to solve realistic problems and experience history first hand.
• Free online video games such as Minyanland, Real Lives and Mission US all support the brain’s need to solve emotional, real-life problems.
• If you’re gonna use a direct instructional tool like a lecture, lecture in ways that engage and involve kids in what’s going on. Simply talking at them is not going to work. Try a micro-lecture or interactive lectures.

We shouldn’t be trying to describe the individual grass stalks for our kids. They need to out playing on it.

 

Professor . . . good. Laptop . . . bad?

Okay . . . I get it.

Laptops can be distracting. You want kids to learn something. You have something to share and assume that kids should be paying attention to you.

I can see your point, I suppose. But liquid nitrogen? Really?

I’m not convinced that your assumption is necessarily true. And thanks to the work of Phillip Schlechty, I’ve got my own educational assumptions about the current situation in education:

• Students are expected to do quality work even when the work given to them lacks quality.
• Work given students while in school is not as engaging as activities they attend to outside of school.
• Today’s schools are better than ever at doing what they used to do.
• The attendance of students can be commanded but their attention must be earned.

But I don’t think that we as educators like talking about these kinds of things. We want to live in that fantasy world where all kids would come to school prepared to learn and hang on our every lecture.

And one way to live in that fantasy world is to attempt to ban laptops and other “distracting” items from the classroom. A recent article in the Washington Post documents the movement across the country to do just that.

Really?

We’re still so certain that we’re the only ones that have access to knowledge? We’re still not sure that constructivist learning is an effective strategy? We still haven’t bought into research-based methods of engaging kids?

And yes . . . I understand that technology can be a distraction. But to assume that we don’t need to change how we do our jobs and that we can return to that fantasy world by banning laptops is just wrong.

The Post article does acknowledge this idea:

Plenty of professors still allow laptops. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies and law at U-Va., generally permits them in his classes. He remembers his own college diversion: reading newspapers surreptitiously on the floor beneath his desk. He believes that, ultimately, it is a professor’s job to hold the class’s attention.

“If students don’t want to pay attention, the laptop is the least of your problems,” he said.

There will be times when I might need to use an interactive lecture as part of instruction and I’ll ask kids to close their laptop lids. But I’m a firm believer in the ability of both teacher and students to use technology to create quality work, provide engaging tasks and enhance learning.

The result? Kids learn more.

The bonus? You’ll save tons on liquid nitrogen.