Month: February 2019

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.

 

I absolutely loved the work of piecing together Fred Stohr’s life based on primary source documents. I think this could be an invaluable lesson for kids of any age with the right adaptations. The first thing that came to mind was using it to introduce an important person in an upcoming unit. George Washington, for instance. We could look at letters, diary entries, portraits, and probably several other things to have the kids try to tell the story of his life in their own words. This way the teacher could assess prior knowledge of the figure, plan for filling in the content area knowledge gaps, and create a personal connection to the figure that the students wouldn’t get from just reading the textbook or even analyzing one or two primary sources as a class. Using someone close to the teacher adds yet another layer of personal connection to the project. This would be easier for more recent events such as World War II, the Vietnam War, and maybe even the Great Depression. This would be easier if the teacher had old family documents. For example, I have a lot of records from both of my maternal grandparents (born in 1920 and 1926) so I have school records from the 20s and 30s, food stamps from WWII, photographs, and receipts. I could piece together a good lesson just using my own resources fairly easily.