Department of Social Sciences

SESSION TITLE: To Rigor and Beyond! Creating knowledgeable Social Scientists through rigorous instruction yielding an overall increase in student performance.
AUDIENCE: MSAssistant Principals
FACILITATOR: Ms. Jackie Viana, Supervisor, Department of Social Sciences
CO-FACILITATOR:Ms. Jennifer Murray, Social Science Teacher
RESOURCES:
Paper Slide Video Instructions:

OUTCOMES: Upon the conclusion of this synergizing presentation, participants should be able to attest to the accuracy of the following statement:
“I understand how the subject area of Social Sciences is a valid and useful vehicle to increase students’ content knowledge and skills as well as improve students’ literacy and writing abilities. I have a clear path to how I need to improve the teacher quality of my Social Sciences department so teachers can plan rigorous and engaging lessons that yield positive outcomes in student performance.”
GUIDING QUESTIONS:What do best practices look and feel like in a rigorous Social Science classroom?
How do rigorous best practices in Social Sciences improve student literacy and writing skills?
How can infusion/use of technological resources support and increase student engagement?
How can I set the wheels in motion to improve the quality of my Social Science teachers?
WHAT? / SO WHAT? / NOW WHAT?
1minute: Introduction of facilitators and overview of guiding questions.
Review session agreements:
Be present, attentive, and active; Be open-minded; Trust the process; Try out something new then, reflect; Acknowledge each other as equals; Assume good will; Expect it to be messy; Confidentiality is supported; Speak from your heart; Get what you need.
20 Minutes: Block Party: A Pre-Reading Text-Based Activity.
Article: The Reasons We Must Learn History/Social Studies See article and protocol on the following pages. See text on the index card provided.
Whole Group Debrief:
What’s the validity of the information presented? What ramifications does the information have for your social science team? Note: Article/Blog included in the agenda on the next page.
Reflection Time: So What? Now What? (How does the content of this article shape your future work?)

1

Why do so many [HS][MS] history [social studies] teachers lecture somuch?

24FridayApr 2015

PostedbygrantwigginsinGeneral

≈117 Comments

Really, why do HS teachers lecture so much? Almost every HS I go to I see teachers talking and kids listening (or not) more inHistorythan any other course.

And you needn’t take my anecdotal word for it. For the past year, students taking our survey have been asked to respond to questions about use of time in class. Here are the results for HS students (the “skipped” vs “answered” number refers to prior years when the question was not asked; this reflects all HS students from this school year, with no filtering out of answers):

So, half ofHS teachers lecture at least 3/4 of the period regularly – some all period.

We also asked students what they think the ideal amount of lecturing is. Interestingly, below is not only the aggregate data, this is almost a universal answer across each school – there is practically no range on the answer to this question:

My question is basic, history teachers. Given that most history textbooks are comprehensive and reasonably well-written, why do you feel the need to talk so much? Your colleagues in science and English, for example,do not feel the same urge.

And PLEASE don’t tell me there is ‘so much to cover’ – that is silly. You are paid to cause understanding, not on how many words you speak.And don’t tell me you can’t do projects and simulations. My old friend and former colleague Mark Williams has prepared kids for AP for decades by doing cool simulations and performance challenges (e.g. Silk Road trading game plus debrief, editorial team decision on how to eulogize Sam Colt, etc.). The best teacher I have ever seen at the HS level, Leon Berkowitz at Portland HS years ago, organized his entire history course using the Steve Allen Meeting of Minds format.

Furthermore, most history programs have mission/goal statements that identify skills, performance abilities, and critical thinking that should be highlighted.(And thenew AP frameworkwhich also does so is based on UbD.) That requires coaching kids to do things.

I can only see two good reasons for lecturing at length, sometimes, in history:

1. You have done original research that isn’t written down in a book

2. You have rich and interesting knowledge based on research that can overcome confusions and missing elements in the current course.

I am NOT saying “Don’t Lecture.” I am wondering why you do it so much, more than I think reasonably is necessary to achieve your goals. (You might want to read theresearch on lectureswhile you’re at it, especially the forgetting and disengagement that comes after 20 minutes for college learners, never mind HS kids).

What am I missing? Or: what might you do differently for 3/4 of the period, to engage and equip students? I think any reasonablejob descriptionof “teacher” demands that you rethink this habit.

PS: A number of tweets and a few comments below cite the reason as: “Kids can’t/won’t read the text.” But then that is amoreserious problem than you lecturing all the time: they will be utterly unprepared for college at any level. Why isn’t this treated as a departmental priority? Why aren’t you looking for better books? Why aren’y you proving them with betterincentivesto read (e.g. necessary for simulations, debates, and Seminars)?

PPS: In response to a query: the data for just MS students:

A guest post on (too much) Lecturing in HSHistory

30ThursdayApr 2015

PostedbygrantwigginsinGeneral

In aprevious post, I posed the question – based on student survey data and my own observations over the years – why do HS history teachers lecture so much? It generated more lengthy and numerous comments than almost any post in the history of this blog.

In that post I mentioned my old friend and former colleague Mark Williams who is as good as anybody I have ever seen at causing history to be learned and loved, with minimal lecturing. At my request, he offered his thoughts on the issue:

Since Grant gave me a nice shout-out in “Why do history teachers lecture so much?,” I am delighted to respond with my own two cents on the question he poses. I begin with this from the past:

Sometime around the middle of the 15thcentury Johannes Gutenberg developed (or copied, if you believe the plaintiffs in the lawsuit) a machine that used movable type to print on paper. It was at that moment that the death knell was struck for THE LECTURE. By 1500 some were discussing something called a “flipped classroom” where students were responsible for reading things called “books” that contained the content their teachers wanted students to learn, and classes were devoted to practicing the given discipline through discussions, experimentation, and other forms of teacher-guided student labor.

Ah, if only our textbooks had such a passage. If only it were true! To be fair, in my undergraduate days, I attended quite a few inspiring lectures. And, no, that was not before Gutenberg. I confess, too, that from time to time I do take a few minutes to tell my students something, rather than have them read it. I must add my support, though, to Grant and his commenters who share his view that lectures can kill.

I don’t want to go on at too great length here – I might be accused of lecturing! And besides, Grant has said it’s OK to lecture if you have some original research to share, and I do.

Some revealingresearch.When I was an undergraduate (in the 20thcentury actually), I was fortunate to be able to work on a project with a friend of mine who had developed a neat little machine that coded the verbal interactions between teachers and students in the classroom. We kept track of how long teachers talked, how long students talked, how long nobody talked, and how long everyone was talking at once. We broke down the “talk” into questions, statements that were answers to questions, teacher talk, and statements and questions from students that were volunteered without prompting. In turn each of those categories were coded by their cognitive level – for example, simple facts were a 1, explanations a 2, inferences, interpretations, and syntheses a 3.

In those days, along with movable type, we actually did have computers. You brought your boxes of punched cards to a window and machines that filled two stories of a whole building whirred and clicked and carried on for 15 or 20 minutes and spit out a big pile of paper with holes along the edges. So, we did correlations, and found that when teachers posed questions that were asking for level 2 or 3 responses, their students not only spoke longer and at the higher levels, but also asked questions and initiated statements at the higher levels. If teachers spent a lot of time talking, or asked a lot of level 1 questions for purposes of recitation or what they thought was Socratic dialog, students spoke a lot less (duh – couldn’t get a word in edgewise), asked few questions, initiated few statements, and seldom ventured into the higher cognitive levels of discourse.

Of course, correlation is not causation. One could argue that simple-minded students caused teachers to follow suit! So, we caused some causation by sharing the data with teachers (most of whom, even the long-winded ones, could not doubt causation when they saw the relationships). Just seeing the data changed teacher behavior and, as they turned to more sophisticated prompts and limited their babbling, their students responded with much more engagement at a higher cognitive level. Immediately!

Ahappy medium.Something that surprised us, nevertheless, was that in classes where teachers spoke very little and students were talking a great deal, the cognitive level of student questions and statements was low. In other words, there seemed to be a happy medium that involved some teacher talk as modeling (it ran in the three-minute range for each spurt of teacher lecture). I noticed some of Grant’s commenters, and Grant himself in passing, recognize that teacher modeling is important. With that in mind, then, it’s clear from some pretty strong correlations that if you want the kids to think, expect them to think, and show them, in economical ways, how it’s done.

Having been impressed by those findings as I entered the teaching profession, I tried my best to strike that happy medium; and I have also shared these discoveries with teachers I have mentored over the years, generally with good results. Some teachers have responded, as some did to Grant’s blog, that they think there is a place for good story-telling that brings history alive. While I have not done a study on enough teachers to provide reliable data, I have done surveys on some that have suggested there was a disconnect between teachers who thought of themselves as great story-tellers and their often disengaged students. (Someone should do some serious crunching on that. Certainly, teachers should do student surveys and assessments to see if their lectures are really arousing interest and actually teaching something.)

Surely another concern among some teachers who lecture a lot is that there is a lot of content to “cover” (so many dates, so little time!). When I hear this from teachers, it always reminds me of the exchange in the filmDead Poets Society(1989) between young teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) and Headmaster Gale Nolan (Norman Lloyd):

Keating:“I always thought education was learning to think for yourself.”

Nolan:“At these boys’ age? Not on your life! . . . Prepare them for college, and the rest will take care of itself.”

Thankfully, almost seven centuries after Gutenberg (has it taken that long?), I have seen many John Keating history teachers hard at work, and thankfully for Grant and me, our early intersecting careers did not place us under the watch of a Gale Nolan headmaster. Yet there are still many teachers who lecture a lot because they feel they need to cram a lot of information into kids’ heads in order to prepare them for college, or tests to get into college, or being citizens. I doubt those teachers will be easily convinced there is a better way. In addition, there are probably many who lecture a lot and actually think that they are teaching kids to think for themselves. Maybe the research I described above can challenge that.

The tug of content and the love of history.Even so, the tug of content is, and actually should be, a very real force for all of us. We all feel it. We think history is fascinating! Actually, I might suggest that this, not egomania, is the real reason some teachers lecture a lot. And this attraction to the content is a good thing! We are passionate about our subject and the wisdom that studying “the story” can convey. We wish people world-wide knew more of the story. Even for teachers who have a diverse arsenal of teaching techniques and who place independent thinking at the top of their list of goals, content is right up there as well. As Grant mentioned in his blog, I engage my students through role-plays, games, reenactments, debates, and a lot of other activities that get the endorphins rolling. But I love the stories. As a writer, I even create history content! I want to share my love of studying the past with my students. But how to do that…..

First, some self-awareness is important. We history teachers love history because we came to it on our own terms. We “discovered” it. We felt the thrill of the aha moment. It wasn’t the memorizing and the tests, that’s for sure. I hate tests. I don’t even like the new US History AP test for all its creators’ thoughtfulness about what really needs to be tested. I just don’t think you can assess historical thinking in a timed exercise. We historians wake up in the middle of the night with our realizations and understandings about what was really going on. We historians write while surrounded by notes and images of documents. We historians think and rethink, and we glory in the invention of word processing that allows us to cut and paste and insert and delete. Timed tests are just not consistent with what historians do.

It is, in fact, the doing of history that we love, even for those of us who just read and don’t necessarily write history. We come to the subject as naturally curious wonderers. But we have to realize that most people are not naturals when it comes to the past. While we may desperately want to share our love for the subject, the content as well as the discipline, everyone needs to come to it on his or her own terms as well. Thus, the soul of pedagogy is NOT “repetition,” it is motivation. Once we get them hooked as we are hooked, then they can learn BOTH independent thinking and content. There will, in fact, be no distinction, as there is none for us.

A revealing case study.Here I must lapse into anecdote, just to give an example of one of the many times I have seen gifted teachers share the love effectively. The teacher was a young man named Greg Hunter, who sadly lost a battle with cancer at an all-too-early age. He had his class of 9thgraders learning about how the American government worked after the Constitution was “ordained and established,” and particularly what role the Supreme Court plays.

All year long he had worked hard at getting them involved through debates, role plays, and most of all, challenging intellectual puzzles. The latter they learned to love because Greg insisted they were smart enough to handle them. By the time they got to the section of the course I was observing, they were quite invested. He had just given them an article from a 1954 issue of theNew York Times, talking about the dramatic decision inBrown v. Board of Education.He asked them to develop questions from the article, and most of them had agreed the biggest question was addressing why the Supreme Court did an about-face and declared the separate-but-equal rule unconstitutional. Following up on this question, which he had helped them to articulate, he had them reading excerpts from briefs submitted to the court and decisions written by the justices, especially C J Warren’s.

They began by responding that the court rejected the oldPlessy v. Fergusonrule because times had changed and people were tired of segregation. The Civil War was long over, etc. Greg was not happy with this off-the-cuff guessing. He demanded they give him evidence, and the evidence wasn’t very good. Then he said he had to do something and just left the room, telling them to work this out by the time he came back!