Connecting Past to Present

 Teacher Leaders in Montana History Cynthia Wilondek and Dylan Huisken  led a dynamite professional development workshop a few weeks ago on "Connecting Past to Present." They created a Google Doc with links to many resources and lesson plans. I'll only highlight a few here. 

In the 2023 case Held vs State of Montana, kids sued the state of Montana over not doing enough to prevent climate change, claiming that the state's inaction violated the Montana constitution's guarantee of a "clean and healthful environment."  You can use this as an entry into discussing Montana's 1972 Constitution. 

Digitized newspapers are a great way to research the history of current events, for example, the closure of a local business or bridge.

There have been a number of recent articles on trying to document all of the students who died at Indian boarding schools and returning the remains to their communities. This obviously connects to a study of the boarding school era.  

Discussions of dark money in politics today tie nicely with a discussion of the Clark-Daly feud, fight for the state capitol and decision to pass the direct election of senators after William A. Clark successfully bribed his way into the U.S. Senate in 1899.

Find links to resources to teach these topics and many more ideas in the Google Doc.

Also, consider participating in our FINAL Monday Meetup, March 11, 2024: Incorporating Children’s Literature into Social Studies. Novels, memoirs, and picture books are a great way to excite your students about history. Bring your favorite titles to share and learn what other Montana teachers are using in their classrooms to teach Indian Education for All, U.S., and Montana history. Register.

Nominate a Rock Star Teacher

 Do you know a middle or high school (grades 7-12) teacher who has done an exemplary job teaching Montana history during the 2023-2024 school year?

Please nominate them for the 35th Montana Statehood Centennial Bell Award by completing this very simple form, which will take less than two minutes to complete. Nominations are due March 31.

Nominated teachers will be asked to submit two one-page letters of support, one from their principal, superintendent, fellow teacher or librarian and one from a student. They will also be asked to submit one to two pages detailing why they enjoy teaching Montana, how they engage their students in learning, how their Montana history course recognizes cultural diversity and anything else they’d like to share about their class or methods.

Nominees will receive instructions on how to submit this material. Deadline for submissions is May 1, 2024. 

The winner will receive the 35th Montana Statehood Centennial Bell Award, which honors the Montana History Teacher of the Year. They and their class will be honored at a ceremony in the State Capitol on Friday, November 8, 2024. The Teacher of the Year will also receive a $3,250 cash prize to put toward classroom materials, field trips, speakers and anything else that will enhance learning in their classroom.

This program, initially created by Montana television newscaster Norma Ashby, is sponsored by the Montana Historical Society with financial support from the Montana Television Network and the Sons & Daughters of Montana Pioneers. 

Nominate a Heritage Keeper

Every community has them--the unsung heroes of local museum or preservation efforts, including Native language preservation. Maybe it's time to let the whole state know about a person who means so much to your community.... 

The Montana Historical Society is seeking nominations for people and organizations whose exemplary commitment to identifying and preserving our historical and cultural heritage makes them eligible for a Heritage Keeper Award. 

Up to two people or organizations will be honored in 2024 by the MTHS Board of Trustees with its annual Heritage Keeper Award. To qualify, the individual must be alive, and organizations must be currently active. The nominee must have demonstrated a commitment to a significant Montana history project or have identified and preserved objects or property of significance to Montana’s history and culture. Organizations also must have a record of preserving and celebrating Montana’s historical and cultural heritage. 

Successful nominees will have shown a commitment to Montana’s historical and cultural preservation beyond the requirements of professional employment or an organization’s specific goals and objectives. In selecting award recipients, the MTHS Board of Trustees will focus on the significance and impact of the nominee's overall work in enhancing, promoting, and stimulating general public interest in a specific aspect of Montana history and culture.

The nomination deadline is April 1, 2024. Here's the link to submit your nomination.

How to Navigate Misinformation Online: A PD with Sam Wineburg

 On March 6, 2024, from 6:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m., the Helena League of Women Voters and the Lewis and Clark Library are hosting a presentation by Sam Wineburg: “How to Navigate Misinformation Online.”

If you are in or near Helena, you are welcome to go to the library, 120 S. Last Chance Gulch, to watch the webinar on the big screen. You can also register to watch it on Zoom. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. I will be offering one OPI renewal unit to attendees who email me at mkohl@mt.gov with a three-sentence reflection after the program.

I've heard Wineburg speak a couple of times before and he's fabulous. I promise it will be worth your time! Here's more information about the presentation.

How to Navigate Misinformation Online

Learn how to quickly navigate the internet to find reliable, fact-based information during an upcoming webinar with Stanford University professor, author and researcher Sam Wineburg.

“This webinar will be an introduction to the kind of strategies the most skilled users of the internet use to separate fact from fiction,” says Wineburg. “They can often find out if something is reliable or sham in as little as 30 seconds.”

Wineburg will share easy steps to quickly find your way to factual information without getting duped by disinformation, fake websites, phony organizations and bad actors. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult for concerned citizens to know what to believe,” he says, “and the worst thing they can do is throw their hands up and say, ‘I can’t believe anything.’” This is the goal of Russian disinformation, “to create a muddled citizenry because a muddled citizenry is more easy to control.”

Wineburg's presentation shares tips from his new book, Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online, co-authored with research scientist Mike Caulfield. It’s being praised by librarians, journalists and educators and was hailed by Nobel Peace Prize winner and longtime journalist Maria Ressa, who wrote, “Verified offers clear advice on how to navigate a world of spin, trolls, and lies.”

MTHS Lessons with Social/Emotional Components

 I've been haunted by the attempted suicide rates that Bill Moe brought to my attention last week, and I applaud all of the classroom teachers who make their students feel valued and loved. You folks are amazing. 

I don't have answers to this crisis. Suicide, and student well-being in general, is very far from my area of expertise, and it borders on hubris to say that MTHS has lessons or materials that can help in this area. Because of this, I almost didn't write this post.  But then I decided, it may not help, but what can it hurt? Here are a few lesson plans that gifted teachers might be able to use to further social/emotional growth in their students. 

• Our Coming to Montana: Immigrants from around the World hands-on history footlocker (designed for 4-6) includes a series of lessons, "Recognizing Similarities and Celebrating Differences," that focuses on helping students recognize that people across cultures share commonalities and that we should recognize similarities and celebrate differences while working to make sure that everyone is accepted. These can be taught without ordering the footlocker if you use a YouTube read-aloud recording to gain access to the book Christmas Menorahs: How a Town Fought Hate. (Find out more about our hands-on history footlockers here.)  
• The Art of Storytelling: Plains Indian Perspectives (designed for K-12) includes art lessons on winter counts (which some Plains tribes used to record their bands' history) and ledger art (which some Plains tribal members used to document individual achievements). Teacher Leader in Montana History Ron Buck uses the ledger art materials from this lesson to have his students celebrate themselves--sometimes accomplishments, sometimes family traditions. Other teachers have used the winter count material as background to create a classroom winter count, rotating record keepers and documenting important class moments each week. They've said this has been great for building class cohesion.
• Reader's Theater: Letters Home from Montanans at War (designed for 7-12) is a three-to-five period unit that asks students to work in groups to read and interpret letters written by soldiers at war, from the Civil War to Operation Iraqi Freedom. After engaging in close reading and conducting research to interpret the letters, they will perform the letters as reader’s theater. When theater teacher Rob Holter's students performed the letters, they walked away believing that history isn't just about the famous and powerful and that they, too, could make a difference and make history. 
• Ordinary People Do Extraordinary Things! Connecting Biography to Larger Social Themes Lesson Plan (designed for 8-12) uses essays published on the Women’s History Matters website to help students explore how ordinary people’s lives intersect with larger historical events and trends and to investigate how people’s choices impact their communities. The takeaway of this lesson is that individuals can make choices within the circumstances (even very tough circumstances) that they find themselves. 

I also reached out to former classroom teacher and counselor Jennifer Graham, who has done a lot of work on social/emotional learning. She pointed me toward the OPI website devoted to Whole Child Skill Development. She particularly finds the Whole Child Skill Development Competencies useful as a reference when creating lesson plans.  

She also encourages teachers to incorporate collaborative learning strategies: "Those strategies encourage collaboration while also building classroom communities and skills that support communication (which results in safety and security)." Two sources she suggest on this are "Collaborative Classrooms Support Social-Emotional Learning," published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and "Cooperative Learning in the Time of C3," published by the National Council for Social Studies.

Jennifer also highly recommends the QPR Institute, whose mission is "to reduce suicidal behaviors and save lives by providing innovative, practical and proven suicide prevention training." 

If you have thoughts on this subject or lessons that teach social studies while helping students develop emotionally and socially that you'd like to share, please send them my way. And, in the meantime, thanks for all you do.

 

Integrating Science and Social Studies

 I believe that the more interdisciplinary and holistic a lesson is, the more likely it is to resonate with students. That's one reason so many of the historical society lesson plans are interdisciplinary, incorporating math, ELA, art, and science. But the truth is, we have not done a good enough job integrating science.

Linda Rost, Baker High School science teacher and 2020 Montana Teacher of the Year, gave a great presentation last October at the MFPE Educator's Conference on ways to integrate IEFA and science, and my brain has been buzzing about her talk ever since. 

Linda wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on building science teachers' capacity to integrate IEFA, and that was the starting point of her presentation. She advocated for everyone to read and learn more from Indigenous scholars and culture keepers and gave a big shout out to Robin Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass. (I loved this book but only learned recently that there's a young adult version, too!) 

Pointing to ideas you can read about more fully on page 6 of The Framework: A Practical Guide for Montana Teachers and Administrators Implementing Indian Education for All, Linda believes that sprinkling a little IEFA into your classroom (mentioning that a plant was used by Indigenous people, for example) is inadequate. Instead, she advocates for a more transformative approach, placing Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) at the foundation of the lesson. 

At her session, she shared lessons focused on material science for fifth-eighth, grade, classifying materials as either strong or tough (or both), and one that looked at having students compare rawhide and tanned leather. Students investigate each step in the hide-tanning process (fleshing, braining, soaking, smoking) and observe changes to the hide using images from an electron microscope. See pages 6-12 of this document, which Linda graciously shared with me.

She also shared her lesson plan, "The Eagle Has Fallen," which she published in The Science Teacher. This lesson follows a format similar to several of Linda's other lessons: 

• Students to read (or listen to) tribal oral tradition stories to learn more about how a tribe regards and manages natural resources.
• Students do "casework"--in this case trying to find out why the eagle population has dropped in Flathead Lake.
• After students analyze the data and solved the case, they investigate different perspectives of resource management, engaging in a pinwheel discussion, during which students explore the perspectives of tribal governments and state governments to manage the ecological problem. 

Here's the PowerPoint she created to go with the lesson, which includes images from Bull Trout's Gift: A Salish Story about the Value of Reciprocity, the data students analyze, questions for the pinwheel discussions and the roles she has students adopt: tribal scientist, tribal council member, state scientist, and provocateur. (I was a bit confused by "provocateur." It turns out not to be a bomb-thrower, but someone who leads the discussion and keeps it going.)

Linda uses the same format outlined in "The Eagle Has Fallen" for several other lessons including ones focusing on climate change and cultural perspectives, using genetic testing for tribal enrollment, and grizzly bear management. For the grizzly bear lesson, her students evaluate grizzly bear data from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and determine whether they should have been delisted. She goes into detail on the grizzly bear lesson in this online video from OPI.

I think including social studies in science (or science in social studies) is a dynamite way to make science more meaningful--and to shed light on social studies issues--so I really appreciate Linda's willingness to share these lessons.

P.S. OPI has more IEFA/Science lessons here.

P.P.S. Don't forget to register for our February 12, 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. PD: Connecting Past to Present.

Ideas from Middle School Colleagues

 The best lessons always come from classroom teachers, which is why I was delighted to hear from two middle school teachers recently about lessons/activities that have worked in their classrooms.

Angela Gordon, who teaches 6th and 7th grade social studies, wrote to recommend the Digital Inquiry Group's lesson on Edward Curtis. "We analyze some of his pictures and talk about his life and obsessive need to capture indigenous people and their culture in traditional dress and native environment. We discuss whether his mission was a success and how his pictures can be of use today."

By the way: Digital Inquiry Group (DIG) is the new name for the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). All of their lessons engage students in historical inquiry, revolve around a central historical question, and feature primary source documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills. According to their website: 

"This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. "

All of their resources are free for teachers (although registration is required).   

Angela hasn't been my only correspondent. Middle school teacher Bill Moe recently sent me two suggestions. The first was a worksheet he uses to help his students explore the Montana brand book during their study of Chapter 8 ("Livestock and the Open Range") of Montana: Stories of the Land.

The second was related to a troubling report by NBC News that more than 13 percent of Montana high school students had attempted suicide in the past year, the highest percentage in over twenty years. In response, Bill put up a sign in his classroom: "The World is a Better Place with You in It." He said, "This might be a good thing for kids to see or hear, or to maybe have kids write in a note or Valentine for their parents. Some of them are struggling." 

Thank you to Bill and Angela! And if you have lessons or resources that you think are worth sharing, please send them on.

PDs: Connecting Past to Present and IEFA Best Practices

 

February 12, 2024: Connecting Past and Present, Online

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and many of the issues we face today were pressing topics in our state's rich and robust history.

Monday, February 12, 2024, from 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m., Teacher Leaders in Montana History Cynthia Wilondek (Big Fork) and Dylan Huisken (Bonner) will lead a discussion on how to use Montana history and MTHS resources to connect the past to the present and share strategies for making discussions and projects surrounding current events more deliberate and reflective. One OPI Renewal Unit will be available to attendees. Register.

March 8-9, 2024: 17th Annual Indian Education for All Best Practices Conference, Billings

Looking for a great in-person PD? Check out the 17th Annual Indian Education for All Best Practices Conference, March 8-9, 2024, in Billings. Registration is free. Highlights include keynotes by Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray (Little Shell) and  Nina Sanders (Crow), author of Apsáalooke Women and Warriors and curator of the exhibit by the same name Find more information and a link to register here.