Elem Social Studies 10 (Marlea)

I was really worried coming in to this class that it would be along the lines of the way I learned Social Studies growing up. I hated social studies until I made it to high school and had a teacher that refused to teach to the SOLs in the way that we had been taught before. She brought history to life for our class and helped us make personal connections to it that deepened our understanding of the content. That was the only year I came one question away from getting a perfect score on any SOL test. (You probably know Mrs. Canipe, Lynne, so this shouldn’t surprise you.) I was really glad to come into this class and discover that we would be learning to keep kids engaged in a way similar to the way that Mrs. Canipe taught. I don’t remember any specific things we did in her class as far as strategies go, but I would not be surprised to find that we did a few of the activities that we learned about this semester in her class 13 years ago. To me, Mrs. Canipe is my Social Studies teacher role model/goals and coming out of this class with the strategies and activities we learned about this semester, I feel like I am on the right track to becoming a teacher who teaches social studies like Mrs. Canipe.

One lingering question I have from class last night is how to teach hard history to primary students. Most of the suggestions we had centered around the students diving into the information themselves from credible sources, but how do you give kindergarteners and first graders who are just learning to read valuable information that they can still understand? By picking things for them to read myself does that take away from those sources because the students did not have the skills yet to pick for themselves? Bringing in an expert to discuss the topic is a way around that, but as someone who has no expertise or experience in some of these areas, how do I know the expert I bring in is giving my students the most recent and truthful information? New information is being brought to light all the time and many people claim to be experts but have not kept up with the newest information.

After reflecting through class last night I think the best way to handle hard questions like this is to have an open line of communication between the teacher, the parents, and the students. That way their can be discussions on all sides to generate ideas for how to answer hard questions. Even if the teacher doesn’t agree with the parents ideas on how to answer something, the parents were still made aware and given a voice in their child’s classroom, making them less likely to be angry over something you tell the students. Utlizing your teaching team and running everything through your administration is another great way to bounce ideas back and forth to put the most effort into not saying something offensive without meaning to.

I absolutely loved the Question Formulation Technique. How to get students to develop good research questions is a question I’ve sort of had in the back of my mind all semester without every fully realizing it until seeing this activity. This is a great way to teach students how to develop good research questions, in any content area, without telling them that’s what they’re doing.

For my other class, 21st Century Teaching and Learning, our final project is a PBL unit. I am doing a third grade science unit titled “Save the Bees!” I have rearranged my calendar to include the QFT on day 2 before diving into the research on day 3 and after a guest speaker on day 1. I think this will be a great way for the students to come up with the driving questions for our PBL and help get them even more engaged and motivated to do the research and the work that this project will entail. They can draw on their experience with the guest speaker from the day before and really begin to dive deep into what they want to learn about bees.

I really enjoyed the jigsaw piece of the activity we did in class last night. I immediately started thinking about how to work that into the biography lesson plan on Maggie Walker that I’ve started. Which then made me realize that it’s not easy to adapt this activity, and most of the others we’ve done in class, to the lower elementary grades. All of the examples we’ve been given have been geared toward a fourth or fifth grade classroom. Working on the biography lesson plan has really made me realize that I have no idea how to scale materials back for a younger audience. I have had the basic idea for my Maggie Walker lesson plan in place for over a week, but I’ve been stuck because there is no content written for primary students yet. I need to pull and scale back the information myself and I have no idea how much or how little is appropriate to include in a lesson on her for first graders. The SOL just says students must know her contributions, but it doesn’t define what those contributions are. I really enjoy the activities we’ve done in class to date, but I would appreciate one or two geared toward first or second grade.

One thing I kind of liked from class last night was the chance to practice working on our lesson plans in class. However, I think it might have gone better if we were given the chance to do a workshop of sorts instead of a prescribed lesson plan. If we were given time to work on our own biography lesson plan and the opportunity to discuss ideas with you guys and our neighbors, I feel like the session would have been much more productive and relatable. That way we could have concrete guidance on something that is actually going to be turned in and we would still get the support of our peers for that time frame. I would personally like to bounce ideas specific to my lesson plan off of my tablemates without feeling like I’m distracting them from what we’re assigned to be working on. It seemed like a lot of our discussion time was discussing what we wanted to do for our lesson plans anyway, which took time away from the prescribed lesson plan.

I really enjoyed looking at the John Smith map in class last night. I was really surprised by how much I had never noticed in the map. I have a copy hanging up at home and I’ve looked at it fairly often, but there were a lot of things I had never noticed. This reminded me that I’ll probably find something new every time I look at the map, much like whenever you find new details in a book you’ve read a hundred times before. I was also really excited to see what my students will find that I haven’t seen yet in the map. I would definitely like to use this with my students, at any grade level. To modify it for the younger students I might have them draw their own version of the map and write down or turn and talk with a partner any questions they have while drawing their own maps to get them to notice and explore as many details as possible. There’s a lot to be learned from this map that I think the younger students can also pick up on.

The questions that everyone came up with based on the map were also really interesting. I found myself coming up with questions I had never thought of while looking at it before, because I was trying to think about what my students might wonder about it. For example, where is Richmond on the map? Henrico County? I think I’d like to give students two copies of this map. Starting with the original, and then create a copy to give them after they’ve noticed and wondered for a while with some of their favorite landmarks such as Richmond, Henrico, Busch Gardens, Kings Dominion, etc. so that they can see how their world fits into John Smiths world. That could lead to a great discussion on change over time and how the people and terrain have changed from the time John Smith drew his map to the present.

I really enjoyed getting to practice using the VA Quality Criteria Review tool for performance assessments in class. Being able to discuss ideas with my group helped me to see things in the performance assessment that I hadn’t noticed at a first glance or added an interpretation that made me view it in a way different from the way I originally viewed it. Our group only made it through the first 4 criteria, but I think that discussing ratings with the group changed the rating I initially wanted to give each piece. For example, for 1B I initially gave it a rating of 2. I did not see a lot of cross-disciplinary concepts or analysis, but after discussing it with my group, they were obvious. Writing a children’s book based off of several sources is cross-disciplinary and highly analytical. Getting a chance to work through this tool and work with it in class with support will be MUCH easier to evaluate the other assessment due in a few weeks.

My AHA moment from the VMFA field trip came from one of the cards that guide visitor interactions with the artwork. The one that really stood out to me was “Strike a Pose.” In this engagement strategy, the student has to carefully imitate the body position and facial expression that is depicted in the artwork. They then have to pause and reflect on how they feel in that pose. Diving deeper, they consider how the figure depicted must feel the same way and compare their ideas to the information given on the label for the artwork. The students are then asked “What makes sense? What is surprising?” I love this whole concept because it really makes the students put themselves in the shoes of the person depicted. It makes them take their own feelings, combine them about historical inferences from the artwork that they might not even be fully aware of, and then draw conclusions about the piece. It’s almost like an understated “It says, I say, and so.” My favorite part of the “Strike a Pose” thought process is the last question: “What ideas of your own would you add to the label if you could?” This is adds a new layer of value to the process for the students. It would be fun to have the students take notes during the trip and have them re-write one or two labels after completing this activity. After returning to school, it would be a great opportunity for a think-pair-share to debrief and reflect after the field trip.

I am continuously surprised by the lack of “historical” thinking that comes out in class, even though I know I only have the ability from my Master’s program. It just comes so easily to me that I have a hard time remembering that it takes explicit training to think that way. The assessment based on the painting made me really think about how I might teach my students to think like historians.

I think I would like to find several of these assessments and have them be morning work one day a week for the first part of the year, or longer depending on whether the students are finding this helpful or not. I would put this assessment and other similar ones up on the board for students to reflect on in their Social Studies notebooks before coming to the rug and discussing their ideas as a class. I wouldn’t grade this, but the students written reflections paired with the class discussions would both be good tools for me to gauge student progress in historical thinking. It would be a good way to teach them to look for critical points of information as well as a being a good way to teach them to think critically in writing and discussions.

My eye opening moment of the night was when I really began to think about how I teach slavery to my kids. It is such a difficult topic to teach because textbooks almost dehumanize slaves, but how emotional do you want this to be for a group of 7-year-olds, especially if you have a predominantly African American classroom? How do you teach them the facts of slavery, without distancing them from it or getting them too close and personal and traumatizing them? All night I kept thinking back on a book I read while getting my master’s degree: The Half has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist. This book attempts to tell the history of slavery through the eyes of the enslaved, and it is certainly not student friendly. It is a riveting and emotional book that anyone studying slavery should read, but it focuses a lot on the daily lives of slaves, including marriages and the like. Small excerpts might be usable in class to help the students connect to the material a little more, but I would do so with caution. I want to re-read this before I teach any unit on slavery so that I can better answer my students questions.