A Note on Links: When reading back posts, please be aware that links have a short half-life. You can find working links to all of the MHS resources on our Educator Resources Page.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Prose (or Paintings) into Poetry

I almost missed National Poetry Month! But poetry is good all year round, a fact I was reminded of while talking with (now retired) teacher extraordinaire Jim Schulz the other day. During our conversation about ways to use textbooks to teach students (rather than using textbooks to, well teach textbooks), Jim mentioned a strategy for getting students to analyze and summarize information that had never occurred to me: asking them to write found poems.

Jim suggested starting this type of activity by answering an "analysis question," one that asks students to "examine and break information into parts by identifying motives or causes" and to "make inferences and find evidence to support generalizations." Key words, according to the handy Bloom's Taxonomy flip book I keep at my desk include "analyze, compare, dissect, inspect, categorize, contrast, motive, discover, examine." To get students to engage in analysis, that same book suggests posing questions like "What conclusions can you draw," "what's the relationship between," "what motive is there," "why do you think"... 

Jim also suggested using a relatively short section of the textbook for this exercise, rather than an entire chapter. Here's a sample assignment I created based on the idea, using the section "The Dawes Act: Allotments Subdivide the Reservations," from Chapter 11 of Montana: Stories of the Land.)
Using the text (including sidebar quotations, posters, image captions, etc.), on pages 219-222 of Montana: Stories of the Land, create a found poem that answers the following question: What conclusions can you draw about the policy of allotment?
I tried the activity myself just to see if it would work and one thing I noticed is that to write my found poem I had to reread the pages several times; this repeated exposure to the text reinforced my understanding of the topic and my ability to recall specific details.

This isn't the first time we've suggested poetry activities; asking students to write poems about history or using historical sources has the benefit of encouraging close reading, analysis, and a better understanding of perspective and point of view. 

I talked about "Poems for Two Voices" in a post some time back, after which Billings librarians Kathi Hoyt and Ruth Ferris created a lesson plan using the technique and excerpts from speeches by Crow chief Plenty Coups and Lakota chief Sitting Bull. 

Ruth is also the person who first introduced me to found poetry--she wrote a lesson plan for using it with historic newspapers (particularly with Montana's first newspaper, the Montana Post). You can find that lesson on page 23 of the Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study Guide.

“An Artist’s Journey: Transform a Painting into Poetry” (grades 1–7) asks students to examine several Russell paintings using their five senses, before choosing one painting to use as an inspiration for a poem. (If you teach at a Montana public school, your school library should have received the Montana's Charlie Russell teaching packets we created, of which this lesson is a part; we also posted all of the material in packets on our website).

Biographical Poems Celebrating Amazing Montana Women Lesson Plan (Designed for grades 4-6)  asks students to research specific Montana women (by reading biographical essays) and to use the information they gather to create biographical poems. Through their research (and by hearing their classmates’ poems) they will recognize that there is no single “woman’s experience,” women’s lives are diverse, and that people can make a difference in their communities.

What's your experience with integrating poetry and social studies? Let me know and I'll share it with the group. 

P.S. Don't forget to sign up for Making It Real: A Workshop for Elementary and Middle School Teachers, to be held on June 24, 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. at the Montana Historical Society in Helena. Learn more about this workshop, then register to attend this exciting professional development opportunity (6 OPI Renewal Units available).

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Free PD Opportunity: "Making It Real--A Montana Historical Society Workshop for Elementary and Middle School Teachers"

We're finally bringing Jim Schulz, whose been presenting for us all over the state, to Helena!

Along with a few of our Elementary and Middle School Teacher Leader Fellows, Jim will be leading the six-hour workshop "Making It Real," on June 24, from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at the Montana Historical Society. Participants will earn 6 OPI Renewal Units.

The workshop will focus on ways to incorporate writing, engage and empower students, and to teach them to look for evidence to support their claims, all while making the past as real as possible.

The workshop will begin with Visual Thinking Strategies. (My own feeling is you can't have too much training on using this strategy--the more you practice the better you get.)

Then MHS Elementary and Middle School Teacher Leader in History Fellows--all master Montana history teachers--will present their favorite lessons in a lightening round, focusing on "never fail" strategies and resources.

After lunch, Jim Schulz will lead attendees in an exploration of immigration and immigrant life in Montana and provide some time for participants to explore the myriad of resources available for educators on the MHS website.

Interested? Register here. Questions? Please ask!

Monday, April 22, 2019

Native Knowledge 360 Summer Teacher Institute


Native Knowledge 360° (NK360°) is the National Museum of the American Indian's national initiative to inspire and support transformative teaching and learning about American Indians. NK360° offers dynamic educational resources and professional development opportunities for educators. 
They are recruiting educators--especially those whose primary teaching focus is within the social studies, English language arts, or library sciences and who work with students in grades 4–12--to apply for their Summer Teacher Institute, which will be held July 9-11, 2019. The Institute is designed for education professionals (teachers, teacher educators, instructional coordinators/curriculum specialists, librarians/media specialists) who recognize a need for, and are interested in advancing their practice of incorporating more complete narratives about American Indian histories, cultures, and contemporary lives into their teaching.


 Please click on the links to learn more about NK360° and the Institute. Visit their Educator Page to learn more or click on the application link to apply. 
Applications are due May 6. The institute is free of charge and housing and lunches will be provided for the duration of the institute. However, attendees are responsible for the cost of their travel to and from Washington, D.C. 

P.S. Closer to home, we're looking for a few great high school teachers to join our MHS Teacher Leaders in History program and attend our June summit in Helena. Applications are due May 5. Learn more about the Teacher Leaders program here.

Monday, April 15, 2019

Cool Stuff (Link Roundup)

Normally I try to have a theme for these posts, but it's April, and snowing as I type, and I have a list of cool stuff that I haven't gotten around to sharing so today is Teaching Montana History's equivalent of leftovers night, which hopefully provides a little something for everyone.

Sue Reynolds is the founder of the new free Everyday Native 4th-12th grade teacher's resource. It's listed on OPI's website because it meets the Essential Understandings, is multi-subject and and includes the voices of Montana and other Native youth and their families and Victor Charlo's poems about his life. You have to register but it's free and worth exploring. 

Against the Darknessa film serving in tribute to the Montana coal miners, is available on YouTube!

I recently read Abaki Beck's report, "Ahwahsiin: The Land Where We Get Our Food, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Contemporary Food Sovereignty on the Blackfeet Reservation." It's fascinating and I can imagine high school teachers using it as part of an interdisciplinary Geographic Inquiry. OPI's Indian Education Division Health Enhancement web page has more information on food sovereignty.

Speaking of geography, I was intrigued by this post by Larry Ferlazzo, an education blogger I follow: "Now This is Very Intriguing: Students & Teachers Can Now Create Their Own Google Virtual Reality ‘Tours’.” If any of you have used Tour Creator with your students, I'd love to hear from you!

Spring means baseball, and my Cardinals are at the top of the NL Central Division! And baseball, like football, still struggles with the issue of Indian mascots. Here's a good article to spark discussion around the issue: "Redface, like blackface, is a sin of white supremacy." And here's an article from the Missoulian that reports on research conducted by a UM professor, which empirically demonstrated that "Mascots Can Reinforce Stereotypes."   Finally, OPI Indian Education Specialist Mike Jetty recommends the website Change the Mascot, which he called his "go-to site for all things mascot related."

P.S. High School Teachers: If you are interested in helping improve history education in your schools, districts, and regions (particularly the teaching of Montana history), apply to attend our June Teacher Leader Summit and become a Montana Historical Society Teacher Leader in History. 

Monday, April 8, 2019

New IEFA Resources from the Montana Memory Project

Jennifer Birnel at the Montana Memory Project has created two new exhibits for classroom use:

Montana Native American Boarding Schools
Native American Leaders

Both exhibits are based on images that have been digitized by the Montana Memory Project. The exhibits are great in their entirety, but they are also a great way to find images of boarding schools or Indian leaders--and you can download and specific images by "right-clicking" (make sure to copy the provenance!)

With help from Mike Jetty at the Indian Education Division of the Office of Public Instruction, Jennifer has come up with some great discussion questions. I especially like the questions and context provided for the Indian Leaders exhibit. As Jennifer explains, the "image titles and descriptions in this presentation were supplied by the library, museum, or archive that shared the image with the MMP" and the titles and descriptions were often created by the original photographer. Because of this, "items may not be described in appropriate terms or without bias." She's come up with a great set of questions to help students think about the images, and titles, in context, including:
  1. What does it mean to catalog an item? Why does cataloging not take into account cultural rules?
  2. What terms in the description of Chief Big Rock in the Chippewa Cree
  3. section are inappropriate? Why? Can you find other terms in the image descriptions that are cause for
  4. concern? Why are they an issue? What could be done to improve the descriptions?
  5. Look specifically at the images of Chief Koostata of the Kootenai. Ask: Who Created it? For what purpose? When was it created (what context)? Why do you suppose the photographer took these specific images?
  6. Examine the image of Bear Chief in the Blackfeet section. The captions on the image was created by the photographer. Why would he have given this image that specific title? How would you correct it?
  7. Do these images perpetuate the stoic Indian stereotype? Can you find images of Native Americans smiling or laughing?
My favorite images in the Indian Leaders Exhibit are the ones that show the same leader in different contexts (for example, these pictures of Northern chief Two Moons--left, photo by William Harvey Harrison, c. 1910, University of Montana, 72.0749; right, photo by Stanley Morrow, c. 1878, Montana Historical Society, 981-172).


Both Jennifer and I are interested in how you use these exhibits, and how they could be made even more useful to you, so if you use either exhibit in your classroom, let me know how it goes!

P.S. High School Teachers: If you are thinking about applying to become an MHS Teacher Leader in History, can you let me knowLearn more about the program and the application process here or email me with questions.

Monday, April 1, 2019

Russell Tarr and "The Big Picture": Using pictures to help students get a sense of the, well, the big picture

Do you subscribe to Russell Tarr's blog, Tarr's Toolbox? I think you should. At any rate, I do, which is where I find some great strategies for improving student learning.

Back in November, I shared his Time Travel exercise (he has students write a vacation brochure promoting a trip to the past and then a complaint letter from an unhappy customer, talking about how the trip didn't live up to the hype).

Here's another Russell Tarr idea I think could easily translate to teaching Montana history, particularly in middle school: “The Big Picture”: convert a new topic into pictures, then the pictures into galleries.

Russell seems to shape a lot of his curriculum around investigating big questions: "Was industrialization good or bad?" for example. But before having students jump into answering a focus question, he sometimes uses images to help them see the "big picture," or larger context of a historic period.

At the beginning of the unit study, he provides
each student with a different image from a collection shared between the class (paintings, cartoons, photographs of buildings/artefacts/individuals) and challenge[s] them to interpret their meaning. Then, working in groups and then as a class, the students decide upon the best ways of categorising the images. Finally, each student conducts independent research to produce a panel of information to put alongside their own image before putting them all up to create an impressive classroom display.
He details how this works in his blog post, using the Victorian era as his example. The activity starts with quick gallery walk, so each student can see all of the images and decide which are their favorites. Then Russell used
the random name picker at ClassTools.net to select one student, who sat down at the chair in front of her favoured image. I then repeated this process until all students were seated alongside one image. All the students were then asked to consider what title they would give to the image, how they would describe it to someone else, and what deductions they could draw from it. These findings were exchanged in small groups, with other members of the team encouraged to offer further ideas to note down so that each student ended up with plenty of thoughts. For good measure I then jigsawed the groups to get a further round of discussion.
Finally he had students work as a whole class to categorize the images (with no less than three and no more than five images per category).
Once this process appeared complete, each team discussed what their images had in common and therefore what title they would give to their ‘section’ of the gallery exhibition we were working towards ('work', “leisure”, “children” being popular choices). The final stage of the exhibition task was for each student to research their image further and complete a writing frame to summarise their key findings.
 I can see this project working well with any number of Montana history topics. The trick, of course, is finding relevant and provocative images. Let's say you planning on having your class explore the overall theme of agriculture. Perhaps your guiding question is “How did agricultural settlement change Montana?” Or maybe “Was homesteading a great opportunity or a bad bet?” Or even "Was the Homesteading Act good for Montana?"
You can find more great teaching strategies for all grade levels over at Russell Tarr's site. Happy surfing!

This is the third in a series of posts I've been writing on teaching Montana history. See this earlier post on a jigsaw exploration of the fur trade and this one on time traveling back to the open range (expanding on a different strategy that Russell Tarr introduced me to).  If you have something that's worked especially well in your classroom, let me know and I'll share it out!