Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Maybe this will be the last part of this blog series.  The next 30 minutes are crucial.

If you downloaded and looked at my old Enriched Thinking Curriculum [ETC] lesson plan template, you will have noticed that THE LESSON itself starts with an Engagement bit and ends with Assessment/Reflection.  In between is the actual meat of the lesson, which for my purposes was always an information skills task.  Remember that we were at the time (late 90s) transitioning from the Georgia Quality Core Curriculum [QCC], which demanded we teach all the stuff, into the Georgia Performance Standards [GPS], in which the leaders of our state claimed they wanted us to teach actual performance skills, i.e., the kids should be able to do something with knowledge.  Critical thinking skills.  You may have heard of them.

Anyway, the framework I used is called The Big 6.  Check it out here.  It is a very simple, very powerful way to structure your students’ approach to information problems, aka “research.”

Here’s the bare bones version:

1.  Task Definition
   1. Define the problem.
   2. Identify the information needed.
2. Information Seeking Strategy
   1. Brainstorm all possible sources.
   2. Select the best source(s).
3. Location and Access
   1. Locate sources.
   2. Find information within sources.
4. Use of Information
   1. Engage (read, hear, view).
   2. Extract relevant information.
5. Synthesis
   1. Organize information from multiple resources.
   2. Present the result.
6. Evaluation
   1. Judge the result (effectiveness).
   2. Judge the process (efficiency).

Before I go any further, it’s important to recognize that the very first step, Task Definition, reaches all the way up to 5.2 Present the result: as I would teach the kids, the “information” you need is going to be very different depending on whether you’re writing a paragraph or making a poster.

Since I was implementing this at the elementary level, I found the verbiage to be a little problematic.  “Information Seeking Strategy”?  What’s that?^[1]

Here’s my elementary rewording:

1. What’s the job?
   1. What are we trying to do?
   2. What do we need to know?
2. Where will we find the information?
   1. Where could we look?
   2. What’s the best place to start looking?
3. Find it.
   1. Find the sources of information: books, encyclopedias, Internet, cd-roms, etc.
   2. Look up the information in the sources: use the index, etc.
4. Deal with it.
   1. Read through all the information.
   2. Get just the information we need: take notes!
5. Show it!
   1. Put all the information we found together.
   2. Present the result.
6. How did we do?
   1. Did we do a good job?
   2. Were we good at finding information?

And here I am embarrassed to say that I can’t find the file on my computer with the actual lesson.  Has it vanished?  Was it on another computer? (Not likely.) All I have is the paper in front of me. It might not have mattered: many of the files from that period are unreadable by any software now.  Sic transit…

I will paraphrase:

The Engagement portion presented the two essential questions, “Which American war was the most ‘preventable’?” and “How would we be different if we had prevented that war?”

1. Task Definition
   1. Define the problem.
      1. Ask what is the very first thing we will need to know in order to answer the EQs.
   2. Identify the information needed.
      1. A list of wars the U.S. has fought in 1852-1990
2. Information Seeking Strategy
   1. Brainstorm all possible sources.
      1. Write them all on the board.  Categorize if necessary.
      2. If anyone says “computer” as a source, show them the filmstrip projector [!—it was 1998, after all] and ask if they can “look up” information from the filmstrip projector.  tl;dr: it’s just a machine; so is the computer.
   2. Select the best source(s).
      1. Up to them: if it’s the textbook, it’s the textbook.  Guide the less efficient.
3. Location and Access
   1. Locate sources.
      1. Divide into teams to work out lists.
   2. Find information within sources.
      1. teachable moment: table of contents, appendices, etc?
4. Use of Information
   1. Engage (read, hear, view).
      1. Be seeking relevancy
   2. Extract relevant information.
      1. Have teams write down their lists on scratch paper.
      2. Mid-time, ask everyone to check their performance rubrics (Is aware of and uses necessary resources).  How are they doing?
      3. When time is up, do a round-robin call-out of wars. List them on the board.  If any are missing, challenge the teams to find the missing ones.  “There’s one missing between 1890 and 1900…”
5. Synthesis
   1. Organize information from multiple resources.
      1. Have the whole class participate in putting them in chronological order while you write them on the board.
   2. Present the result.
      1. Pass out the timeline handout. Have students copy the list correctly onto the handout for reference during the entire unit.
6. Evaluation
   1. Judge the result (effectiveness).
      1. xxx [for some reason]
   2. Judge the process (efficiency).
      1. Which resources were best?  Why?  Will they always be “the best”? What was the hardest part?

Finally, for Assessment/Reflection: Ask students to look over their list.  PREDICT.  Begin thinking about the kinds of things they’ll be exploring in order to answer the EQ.  Have them write down in list format on a separate sheet of paper for their notebook.

Am I done here?  I think maybe I am.  Unless you ask questions in comments.

This has been a review of one set of folders I found while clearing out our storage unit.

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^[1] In general, in my teaching career, I have found it to be a waste of time teaching specialized terminology if that terminology is not critical to the task at hand.  For example, I never bored my students with the Dewey Decimal System.^[2]  Why does any human being need to know that the 630s are “Agriculture”?  All a kid needs to know is that the book on puppies she just looked up can be found in the row with the 600 sign hanging over it, and that 636.7 comes between 636.6 and 636.8.  (“Animal husbandry/domesticated animals,” why do you ask?)

^[2] I bored them in many other ways.

Part 1 | Part 2

Today I want to ramble through one of the threads that went into building the units in the 5th grade U.S. History curriculum.

The whole thing was part of my effort as media specialist at Newnan Crossing Elementary School (1997-2011) to support active learning and direct assessment in the curriculum, something the Powers That Be said they wanted but never actually supported.^[1]  I called it the Enriched Thinking Curriculum [ETC] because catchy.

The ETC in turn sprang from my work as media specialist at East Coweta High School (1981-1997), where I and a secret squad of teachers began learning on our own about the new theories of learning/instruction that were beginning to filter out of solid research all over the place.  (We called ourselves the Curriculum Liberation Front, and we actually operated in semi-secret: the principal knew what was up, but the asst. principal actually in charge of curriculum was not in the loop.  Her métier was textbooks.)

One of the main ideas of those days was to work towards actual performance assessment, i.e., what should the kid be able to do with any knowledge you were trying to pour into his head.  The state of Georgia at the time was making the transition from the Quality Core Curriculum [QCC], which was all stuff the kids needed to know, to the Georgia Performance Standards [GPS],^[2] which purported to shift us over to making sure the kids could perform in the competitive new world economy.^[3]  The ETC was part of making that shift.

My favorite source of research on the topic was Robert Marzano, co-author of several important books on the topic, Dimensions of Learning, A Different Kind of Classroom, and Assessing Student Outcomes.  I bought thirty copies of each of these for teachers to check out and read as they struggled to work with me.  It would be interesting to find out if they’re still in the collection.

In Assessing Student Outcomes, the authors provided four-point rubrics for a host of standards based on the five Dimensions, but in order not to overwhelm my learners (the faculty), I selected sixteen standards from three areas in the fifth dimension (Habits of Mind) on which to focus our efforts.  (The other dimensions were concerned with attitudes towards learning, and the acquisition and deployment of knowledge.)  These included:

• information processing standards
• effective communication standards
• productive habits of mind standards

The deal was that in designing your unit/lesson, you would select two or three of the sixteen standards to assess, taking care throughout the year to hit all of them.  Content assessment was separate from these, i.e., knowing that the Civil War started in 1860 was one thing, but being able to “recognize where and how projects would benefit from additional information” was a different thing.  The idea was that when you constructed a lesson to assess the latter, the kid would learn the former in the process.

A quick example: a first grade objective was to “identify animals and their habitats.”  We developed a lesson in which students would attempt to sort animals they researched into the appropriate habitat in their zoo, which was a bulletin board display.  We’d give them a flock of pictures of animals; the kids had to look through books to identify the animal’s habitat, then place the picture in the appropriate habitat on the bulletin board and explain why it went there.

The productive habits of mind standard was “pushes limits of own knowledge and ability,” which we defined as “keeps looking for animal and its habitat even if he/she doesn’t find it in the first few books [in which he/she looks].”  We explained that standard to them and how they would be grading themselves after the project was over with a handout with all three standards on it, each with a series of what we now call emojis: Need to get started/Need to do better/Doing just right!/Doing GREAT!!!, which corresponded to the 1–4 scale of the actual rubric.  (Older students would get the actual rubrics, worded in first person for greater impact.

The important thing about these habits of mind standards was that you introduced them as you introduced the lesson, talked about how the students would meet them, give them the rubric to start with, and then do quick checks during the lesson: how are you doing on rubric x, everybody?  Every time we did this, the kids upped their efforts and their abilities.

In the unit on CONFLICT, the third lesson was to construct a classroom timeline of U.S. History 1852-1996 by creating cards with info on them and arranging them along the timeline, embedding the wars the U.S. fought and giving them context.  The effective communication standard was “The student creates quality products.”  The rubric the kids got was:

I create quality timeline cards.

4   I create timeline cards that are even better looking than they need to be.

3   I create timeline cards that look like the good examples we discussed in class.

2   I create timeline cards that do not meet one or a few important standards.

1   I create timeline cards that do not address the majority of standards we discussed in class.

You can see how in getting this timeline built, we would be providing context for the entire year, for all four units.  By the time we got to the unit on POWER and began discussing the 19th Amendment, students would already know that we had just emerged from WWI and that bunches of things had altered the landscape.  You can also see that providing the kids with a way to measure themselves, they would begin to assume responsibility for their own learning rather than sitting there and shedding the state’s preferred factoids like so many wood ducks in a summer storm.

The other two standards were I accurately determine how valuable specific events may be to creating the timeline and I listen to and evaluate feedback to decide if I need to change my approach to choosing an event to include on the timeline.  Because we really preferred Wilbur and Orville Wright make the first flight at Kitty Hawk, NC to Arthur S. Crankshaft wins Wimbledon.

Again, this post is too long, so one more before we’re done.

NEXT: The Big 6

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^[1] And here I am referring to state and federal lawmakers who never did anything but say one thing and test another.

^[2] Before you cringe at that acronym, consider Virginia’s Standards of Learning.  Every committee everywhere needs to have a 12-year-old boy to vet these things.

^[3] Because they continued to test only for stuff, we never made that shift.  Georgia is now shifting again, to the Standards of Excellence.  Since I’ve hopped off that pendulum, I cannot advise or consent to whatever the hell it is they’re spinning their wheels about this time.

Last week I started talking about a thematic approach to 5th grade U.S. history curriculum that a teacher and I designed (but never were able to implement.)

short version: instead of slogging through events 1852-1996, wherein students would be without context year after year, we would approach the topic through themes, neatly covering all 20 curriculum standards multiple times while doing so.

The four themes were

• CONFLICT
• POWER
• CHANGE
• COMMUNITY

CONFLICT focused on the wars fought by the U.S. between the Civil War and the Iraq War.  POWER focused on political power (including voting rights), economic control, and the change in the U.S.’s global power.  CHANGE focused on technological and social changes. Finally, COMMUNITY focused on all of the above as experienced by Newnan/Georgia.

Ambitious, to be sure.

I will now pause and lament the fact that while paper files will sit in that storage unit until you decide you want to throw them away or actually use them, electronic files are not so durable.  I went looking for the lesson plan template I developed for use at Newnan Crossing with our Enriched Thinking Curriculum, but that was so long ago that nothing will open those simple word processing files, which as far as I can remember were written in AppleWorks.  Oy.  If I have the energy, I’ll recreate it in Word or something and upload it, because it was good.^[1]

The nine weeks we were to spend on CONFLICT were organized to have students answer the essential questions:

• Which American war was the most “preventable”?
• How would we as a nation be different if we had prevented that war?

Ridiculously ambitious.  But I’d rather fail bigly than play it safe with mere memorization.

There are five units in my folder on CONFLICT.  Each would probably have taken three to five days in the media center plus time in the classroom.  I note that the date on these pieces of paper is 1998, so our internet access would have been rudimentary.  Google didn’t exist.  Yahoo did, but it was a hierarchical search engine.

The first unit, The Wars of the U.S., was an introductory lesson.  Pretty simple: teams of students worked together to come up with a list of all the wars/armed conflicts the U.S. has been involved in since 1859.  The actual agenda of the lesson was to introduce the essential questions and to train the students to think independently using the Big 6 as a framework.

The second unit was Producing Context: What did war look like?  Teams of students were assigned specific wars and asked to find images of that war.  The idea was to start a visual timeline to reinforce the sequence of conflicts.  Plus kids love looking up uniforms and weapons.  I note in the materials list a “How to print an image from a website” handout, so we must have had at least that capability.

The third unit was Producing Context: A timeline.  Pretty simple: the class creates a timeline of the U.S. and embeds the wars in them.  Who were the presidents?  What else was going on?  (Here we sneaked in all the other things we would encounter in the other thematic units.)

The fourth unit was Producing Context: What did war feel like?  This one was fuzzier, but the gist was that they would read/watch a variety of first-person accounts, both historical and fictional, about the wars in question.

The fifth unit was Conflict: Defining the problem, and it was then that students would begin tackling the essential questions.  What will they need to know about each war to make their decisions?  Can they construct a “model” for assessing U.S. wars which will give them a basis for comparison?  Here are some bits of the lesson plan that are pretty cool:

• Introduce the concept of “bracketing”: “Yes, this is something [about answering the EQs] we will have to worry about sooner or later, but we don’t have to worry about that right now.”  Students should be explicitly taught to tolerate ambiguity.
• Ask the students to write a journal entry telling which war they predict they will find most interesting, based on what they’ve learned so far.

That’s long enough a post for today.  Next I’d like to circle back and look at all the pieces of educational research that I had pulled together for this entire approach. Stay tuned.

Part 1 | Part 3

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^[1] Here it is, a downloadable Word doc.