National Council for Social Studies Conference - Saturday, Day Three

9:15am – Using Data to Teach Higher-Order Thinking in American History

Not terribly interesting, some examples of questions in using statistics and maps to teach history, and that the National Archives and the Census Bureau have some good resources.


10:30am – Discussion Strategies to Increase Student Participation

This was also a pretty basic session. We really just modeled a couple baseline strategies for discussion and talked about how we could use them. It was only two, but they seemed worthwhile enough for mention. The “Final Word” strategy and a “Silent TPS” Big Paper strategy.

To prep the Final Word Activity, we did a quick journal write a few prompts. We used an explanation of our names, what the most controversial topic that arises in our classrooms is and how we deal with it, and whether we do and/or should allow our own political views to influence our teaching. We were then randomly sorted into groups of four (not hard, since none of us knew each other we were already pretty randomized), and sat facing each other in a “traffic intersection” form. Each person had 30 seconds to 2 minutes to talk on each prompt (depending on complexity), with the initiator also serving as a summarizing reflector when everyone had spoken. When time was up, the ‘teacher’ yelled switch, and we did no matter where we were in our thoughts. Taking turns initiating/summarizing is supposed to promote active listening, and if it were more authentic we would have finished up with a written reflection on each other’s brief speakings in order to formatively assess the activity.

The Silent TPS (Think, Pair, Share) was set up to analyze political cartoons. Large pieces of paper with cartoons about different presidents and some historical background were up around the room, and we took random partners and different colored markers to work through steps of analysis by writing on the paper rather than speaking aloud. We began with simple observation, circling and labeling what we saw, then guessing what it might mean or represent, etc. Finished up with a line activity, ranking ourselves on how balanced we felt the amount of power was between the executive branch and the other branches was. (Note: this then evolved into a discussion of whether power SHOULD be balanced, but it did evolve into discussion nonetheless)


11:45am – Person, Point, Puzzle: Making History Significant for Your Students

I was never really certain what the title of this session meant, not even when they explained it and continued using the terms. It was never really clear as to how the methods presented were going to make history significant, but it was an interesting method anyway. The concept essentially came down to creating manipulatives for complex ideas. The two teachers presenting were clearly heavy PowerPoint users, which I’m not, at least not yet. All they really did was to create their PowerPoints in such a way that the slides could be cut apart and the ideas on them used for different activities. We ranked reasons the English and Native Americans didn’t immediately kill each other at Jamestown, then reported out and discussed our rankings. We presupposed having just completed a unit on the Constitution, then sorted through quotes from the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the Virginia Company Charter, and a few other documents into what sounded like the Constitution and what didn’t. From this, we would have built a ‘document/ideology family tree’ to see where the ideas in the Constitution came from. They said they were putting materials online… but if I took the address, I lost it. Oops.


2:45pm – Eleven Instructional Strategies that Empower Student Learners

In these, we ran (sprinted) through some very general (maybe overly so) strategies such as debate, role-play, open honest discussion, controversial issues, collaborative activities, music, art, literature, reading strategies, democratic principles, and movement/dance. I really wanted to hear more about using music, art, and movement, since as a mostly verbal/written oriented person, these tend to be weak points for me. While we were given some outline handouts, we weren’t really given too much on using the methods. We roled out a couple, but that was it. With regards to music and movement, I did come to the realization that I need to get out of my own comfort zone in order to use them. Most of the session was taught a dance set to some song from “Chorus Line” – pause to let you picture me dancing, stifle laughter… ready, resume – except for one guy who sat through it. The awkwardness of his unwillingness made me to realize that we can’t be unwilling to do anything we ask our students to do. From which it follows that if we’re going to serve multiple learning modalities, we have to be prepared to model them as well. I’m going to pair this with a recent Edutopia article about the value of teachers participating and trying to learn something they’re really bad at to direct my attitude towards this. Yes, that means I may end up taking music and/or dance classes.


4:00pm – “You Can’t Teach That!” Academic Freedom in Secondary Social Studies

This was a panel discussion consisting of Jack Nelson - academic freedom law expert from Rutgers, Nancy Paterson – social studies education professor at Bowling Green, Michael Baker – retired teacher and adjunct professor, and Prentice Chandler – one-time teacher, now Social Studies Methods instructor.

Jack Nelson spoke for most of his time on the history of academic freedom with regards to NCSS, which was really a rant on how NCSS has failed to keep its members apprised of issues regarding academic freedom in the past. I won’t go into the details, but it was interesting to hear a dissenting viewpoint at their own conference. This is finally (after 70 years!) being somewhat remedied through an online group within the NCSS, and I’m interested to see where it goes. Michael Baker and Prentice Chandler were highly effective teachers who were pushed out because of their methods.

Baker, the only National Board Certified teacher in his state at the time, was pushed out for using a reverse chronology approach to history. He used it effectively for 6-7 years, department leadership changed, and he was forbidden from using it. When he dissented and pushed, he had his history classes taken from him and was pushed towards early retirement.

Chandler used works by Howard Zinn (People’s History excerpts and the Voices collection of primary sources) alongside the standard textbook for a couple years before one family (only one!) complained to the point that he was forbidden from using primary sources at all, despite this being in violation of state standards regarding multiple perspectives, primary documents, and critical thinking. I can’t reproduce the situations of Baker and Chandler as well as they could, but perhaps if you google them, you can find more information.

We were then given advice on what to do if our academic freedoms are stepped on. Namely:
-Be abiding by the law
-Call NCSS, State Teacher Associations, the ACLU, and especially the American Association of University Professors. The last has helped secondary teachers in the past, and they are armed with a solid core of lawyers.
-Gather support from other teachers (basically, network and have friends)
-Be proactive, call the newspapers and a lawyer BEFORE they do
-Don’t hide, don’t give up, if you’re certain what you’re doing is right

On the online forum, there is a list of cited court cases, I’ll try to post about it eventually.


5:15pm – Engaging Reluctant Learners

The building block concept from this session was that kids need age-appropriate, interesting activities to be engaged. We then blitzed through a whole bunch of pre-created handouts to give us ideas on how to create these activities. The preparedness of these handouts was a clue: if the activity is hyper-structured, as worksheets tend to be, students are more likely to engage in them. Activities included writing telegrams (or text messages?) to past historical figures, writing answering machine messages for literary characters, the creation and fictional monsters (or city problems, or conflicts, etc) by groups who then trade with other groups to come up with ways to fight them, writing dialogue between characters/historical figures/etc by using blanked out comic strips, writing MySpace or Facebook pages for famous people, that kind of thing. Some interesting lesson ideas grew out of this session, but none are fully formulated.


7:00pm – International Film Festival

In the evening, there was an International Film Festival with several different options for viewings. One of which was Spike Lee’s documentary of interviews from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, called “When the Levees Broke.” You can get the entire documentary for free, with accompanying curriculum, at http://www.teachingthelevees.org.

I went to one hosted by Farmer’s Insurance. Weird, eh? Apparently, Farmer’s Insurance is very active in creating multicultural educational film resources for educators. They screened some parts of “Freedom Song” (http://www.freedomssong.net/), “The Bronze Screen” (http://www.bronzescreen.net), and “Across the Waves” (not yet completed). Freedom Song looked promising for classroom use, as it’s divided into decade sections from 1900 to the present, and had some good collaborators. The Bronze Screen seemed like it would serve as a good index to movies for excerption in teaching about the Latin-American experience, but perhaps not very usable in and of itself. “Across the Waves” isn’t finished yet, but from what I saw, it would need to be very carefully apart for classroom use. It has som great interviews about the experience of people from different Asian countries, but also some Horatio-Alger-Myth testimony included as well. They’re all available for free, though, so order as you will and judge for yourself.

Tomorrow: I’m reviewing the resources from the exhibit hall today, and I’ll give a run down tomorrow. This might take a while, so it may come in several parts. Adieu!