Out With the Old...

I've decided to change the way I am running my classroom next semester.  At our school, we receive 90% new students when we change semesters, so it shouldn't make a difference to them.

I don't completely agree with the concept of flipping a classroom.  If every teacher did it, students would not have enough time at night to watch every video.  Plus, most teachers just post a video of themselves lecturing, either in front of a board or on a screencast.  All this does is shift the responsibility of teaching onto the students.  This can be helpful for some things as a supplement to the lecture, but not every lecture needs to be done this way.  Students will lose interest very quickly.

I give my students three objectives each day of things they should learn.  At my school, they're referred to as "Learning Targets."  These targets start with higher-order thinking terms such as "Analyze", "Evaluate", "Critique", and "Construct".  The students take these home and either use their book or resources I provide online (thus, differentiating their instruction as well).  When they come back, I lecture on the targets just to make sure they were able to comprehend everything themselves.  That way, it frees up a lot of time in class to practice "Historian Skills" like Sourcing, Close Reading, Contextualization, and Corroborating sources to make a story whole and complete.  I use the Stanford History Education Group's resources for this.  They're excellent and highly recommended!  We will also practice map skills with the content (WWII in Europe, Pacific).  I am sure I will come up with more variety as the semester moves along.

Possible Pros:

• Frees up class time from lecture for more activity-based learning
• More interesting for students (and the teacher!)
• Plenty of resources to choose from and introduce/experiment with.

Possible Cons:

• Lower-end students will not do targets at home and risk falling further behind
• Some students enjoy structure (i.e. special education and those with cognitive disabilities).

Any thoughts?  Please post in the comments below.  Thanks!

Assignments, Grading, and a Life...OH MY!

So...this is my first blog post in quite awhile.  I didn't think that it served any purpose until now.  I made this a part of my teaching goal for the year to be more reflective on my teaching.  Legally, I feel I need to put this in my first post: these posts are my opinion only: not that of the school, dept, other teachers, etc.  So...here we go!

Lately, our US History team has been having some problems being aligned in our assessment of material.  We took a look at our gradebooks and found that some of us were giving way more writing assignments, some were giving more tests, and some hadn't given many homework assignments at all.  We are currently taking steps to address this, but it got me wondering what other teachers do.  I will describe my structure below.

I give out a set of "learning targets" (basically objectives) at the beginning of each chapter over what a student should know in each particular chapter.  We accomplish these in class in addition to maps, analyzing primary sources, and short video clips (2 - 10 min) to elaborate on topics, but never to completely explain something.  Homework is a set of key terms and students must complete an "Identification" over each of them (5 per section).  At the end of the chapter, there is a quiz over the Identification terms and a test over the learning targets.

This system gives me a lot of structure, but it also results in a lot of assignments (which results in a lot of grading).  I was much higher on the amount of assignments given than my fellow department members were.  So I am looking for suggestions to implement in second semester.  I want to switch it up.

What is your classroom like?  Do you have any structure?  What sorts of activities do you do?  How do you incorporate "higher-level" thinking activities such as analysis into your class?  Please leave some advice in the comments section below.

New Direction

From now on, this blog will be my place to improve my teaching.  I am so glad that it has a purpose now, because before, I wasn't really comfortable with what I was doing.  I will post once per week reflecting on my classroom and things I am doing.  Hopefully I will be able to solicit advice from readers/fellow teachers, and maybe even convince you to be more reflective of your teaching as well.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Interactive Map Brings Substance to Emancipation

If you're like me, as a high school US History teacher, not a lot of emphasis is placed on the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. (Indiana divides it into two parts: 8th grade focuses on pre-colonial to the Civil War; 11th grade focuses on Civil War to the present with a small review of 1754 - 1865). Because of this, the Emancipation isn't presented with a lot of heart, meaning, or substance. One day the slaves were slaves, the next day they were free.

Fortunately, it wasn't that simple, and a new interactive map from the University of Richmond details and aggregates tons of information into a visual reference.

Look here for the original article on the Chronicle of Higher Education.

How Does It Affect Education?

Anything that can be represented visually is great for teaching a generation that has a screen in front of them for 1/2 of the day. This is a good way to show that emancipation of the slaves did not happen overnight. There are also lists of the data the map is representing, so you can have students look deeper into the data if you wish.

Zone Out During Life? You're Not Alone

Well, at least I know I'm not the only one...

An article on the PsyBlog takes a look at several studies on the subject and found that people approximately zoned out 5.4 times in a 45 minute period. However, they weren't always aware that they were zoning out (ever read a page and not remember a thing you read?)

So the researchers devised a system to catch these people, and found that minds wandered about 13% of the time while reading. However, what is more disturbing, is that in another experiment, mind wandering occurred in almost half of the participants when they were asked in everyday general life.

How Does It Affect Education?

Well, it doesn't bode well for activities in the classroom, especially with the "need satisfaction immediately" generation we are teaching. If one in two of your students are mind-wandering, or half of your students are zoning out at any given moment, how can you keep students on task?

Some suggestions: keep activities fresh, focus on student-centered learning, and follow up with students about what they just learned.

Do you have any ways to keep students (or yourself) on task? Comment below!

Summer Book Club on Twitter #sschatbook

Some quick words of advice: if you haven't signed up for Twitter yet and you are an educator, do it. Start building your PLN. It was the best professional development I have ever done. I only wish it counted toward my Professional Growth Points as an Indiana educator. Sadly, they lag behind in the technology world.

Once you do get on Twitter, be sure to search for #sschat to connect with fellow social studies educators (there are also #histchat, #psychat, #mathchat, #scichat, etc. if you want to get more specific.). #sschat is having a book club this summer, and they are reading one of my favorites. I like it because it is essentially an educational psychology book, but it can be applied to everyday teaching!

Daniel T. Willingham's book "Why Don't Students Like School?" is a great look at how most teaching is not conducive to how the human mind works, and how to rectify it. I have read it before, but I plan to read it again as a part of this book chat. We are reading 1 chapter per week for 9 weeks. The first chat is on June 24th. See the promotional flyer on Google Docs.

"Everything Comes Down to Poo - Toilet Psychology"

University of Melbourne professor Nick Haslam is pushing the bounds of psychology where it has never gone before...literally.  In the June 2012 issue of The Psychologist, Haslam argues for more research into human excretion.  Although disgusting (at least in this blogger's opinion), I do agree with the points he makes:

“In 30 years of studying the field I rarely came across any recognition that human beings are creatures who excrete.  Much of what we psychologists care about is on the mental side of the mind/body divide, but even when we go corporeal we eliminate elimination. Psychologists have examined the psychobiology of eating, sleeping and sex at great length, and devoted numerous journals and professional associations to them. We have investigated how substances cross from outer to inner but largely ignored traffic in the other direction.”

He also argues that some gastrointestinal disorders are linked to psychological abnormalities, how excretion is linked to social attitudes, and how men and women view excretion differently (men are more open to discussing it, women tend to keep it hidden).


Check out Susan Perry's summary of the article in the MinnPost.
Give Haslam's article a read for yourself: it's pretty interesting (and free)!


How Does It Affect Education?
Well, this might be an interesting way to grasp students attention at the beginning of a unit.  There are multiple units that can open with this as Prof. Haslam has used multiple examples of how excretion is tied to psychology.