Social Studies in Elementary Classrooms

I've had many elementary teachers tell me they'd love to teach more Montana history (or social studies generally) but that their principal insisted the time was better spent on literacy instruction. If this is you, I have an article for you to share with your principal: "How to Get Your Mind to Read," by University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham.

In a nutshell, Willingham argues that reading comprehension requires broad vocabulary and factual knowledge. Among his examples is an experiment that gave third graders, "some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor," a passage about soccer. "The poor readers who knew a lot about soccer were three times as likely to make accurate inferences about the passage as the good readers who didn’t know much about the game." Another experiment "tested 11th graders’ general knowledge with questions from science (“pneumonia affects which part of the body?”), history (“which American president resigned because of the Watergate scandal?”), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature. Scores on this general knowledge test were highly associated with reading test scores."

Based on the evidence, he argues that we're teaching reading all wrong. We shouldn't be teaching literacy in a vacuum because the "disproportionate emphasis on literacy" in elementary school "backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension." Instead, he recommends using "high-information texts in early elementary grades." 

We've long taken that idea to heart! We've been slowly redesigning our hands-on history footlockers to include more literacy components, but all of them already have narratives written at about a fourth-grade level as part of the user guides. Most of our other elementary resources (including Neither Empty nor Unknown: Montana at the Time of Lewis and Clark Lesson Plan, Montana’s Charlie Russell, Montana’s State Flower: A Lesson in Civic Engagement, Mapping Montana, A to Z, Lesson Plan, The Art of Storytelling: Plains Indian Perspectives, and Montana Biographies) also contain literacy components. And they have CONTENT! 

Three cheers for research! And for content-rich curriculum! And especially for Montana history!

Beyond Black and White

I want to thank everyone who has taken the time to answer our survey on how Montana history is taught in your district. (You still can!) I've been reviewing comments, and one middle school teacher mentioned that he was looking for lessons to help students engage in discussions without being so black and white about it.

Here are some techniques I have come across that may help:

1. Structured Academic Controversy (SAC), the goal of which is “discussion that moves students beyond either/or debates to a more nuanced historical synthesis.” Here's how it works (Excerpted from "Structured Academic Controversy" on Teachinghistory.org):

Preparation:

• Choose a historical question that lends itself to contrasting viewpoints. 
• Find and select two or three documents (primary or secondary sources) that embody each side. (Remember that you can pull these from existing document collections on the web or in print.)
• Consider timing, make copies of handouts, and plan grouping strategies. 

In the Classroom

• Organize students into four-person teams comprised of two dyads. Together they review materials that represent different positions on a charged issue.
• Dyads then come together as a four-person team and present their views to one other, one dyad acting as the presenters, the others as the listeners.
• Rather than refuting the other position, the listening dyad repeats back to the presenters what they understood. Listeners do not become presenters until the original presenters are fully satisfied that they have been heard and understood.
• After the sides switch, the dyads abandon their original assignments and work toward reaching consensus. If consensus proves unattainable, the team clarifies where their differences lie.

Read more (and find handouts to use this technique) here. The website "Deliberating in a Democracy in the Americas" offers a slightly different version of SAC, but to a similar purpose. I really like their "brief lesson plan", which explicitly teaches the difference between "Debate, Discussion, and Deliberation." Government teachers may also like their lesson plans, which use the technique.

2. Socratic Seminars. Many teachers I respect swear by this technique, which "Facing History and Ourselves" describes as an activity in which "students help one another understand the ideas, issues, and values reflected in a text through a group discussion format."

Procedure:

• Select an Appropriate Text
• Give Students Time to Prepare
• Develop a Classroom Contract. Typical rules include: 
• Talk to each other, not just to the discussion leader or teacher.
• Refer to evidence from the text to support your ideas.
• Ask questions if you do not understand what someone has said, or you can paraphrase what another student has said for clarification (“I think you said this; is that right?”).
• You do not need to raise your hand to speak, but please pay attention to your “airtime”—how much you have spoken in relation to other students.
• Don’t interrupt.
• Don’t “put down” the ideas of another student. Without judging the student you disagree with, state your alternate interpretation or ask a follow-up question to help probe or clarify an idea.
• Remind students that the purpose of the seminar is not to debate or prove a point but to more deeply understand what the author was trying to express in the text.
• Have the discussion leader, a student or the teacher, ask an open-ended question. 
• Sometimes teachers organize a Socratic Seminar activity like a Fishbowl activity, with some students participating in the discussion and the rest of the class having specific jobs as observers. 
• Reflect and Evaluate

You can read more about this practice here. (And credit where credit is due: Arlee teacher Anna Baldwin first introduced me to this technique. You can find her version in the accompanying Inside Anna's Classroom study guide.) 

3. “Circle of Viewpoints.” I talked a little about this recently, in the post discussing the Visible Thinking Routines from Project Zero's Visible Thinking site.  The goal of this technique is to get students to "consider different and diverse perspectives involved in and around a topic." It "works especially well when students are having a hard time seeing other perspectives or when things seem black and white."

Procedure: 

• Ask students to brainstorm various viewpoints on the topic.
• Ask each student to choose one of these viewpoints. Give them time to prepare to speak about the topic from that perspective.
• Go around the circle and act out their various perspectives. 
• Wrap up by asking "what new ideas do you have about the topic that you didn't have before? What new questions do you have?"

Read about the technique in more detail here. 

4. Arbitration. One of my favorite history teacher bloggers, Russell Tarr, suggests this approach to avoid some of the pitfalls of debate and to help students reach more sophisticated conclusions.

Procedure: 

• Create teams of three (or 5), which consist of prosecution, defense and an arbitrator (choose your best students for this role). While the prosecution and defense gather evidence and prepare their arguments, the arbitrator is responsible for anticipating the arguments on each side and working toward a synthesis. 
• Have all the teams conduct a debate in front of their own arbitrator at separate tables. After the debate, have the arbitrator work with the prosecution and defense to design a synthesis statement that both sides are happy to accept.
• Gather all the arbitrators in front of the class to present their judgments.

Read about this technique in more detail here. 

Looking back

Happy New Year! 

I decided to greet 2018 by featuring some of the older lessons we've created at the Montana Historical Society that I think have stood the test of time. If you have a favorite I've missed, let me know! If you've used one of these in your classroom and it didn't work well for you, I'd love to know that too!

If you only have a day or two, I'd recommend trying on of these lessons/activities:  

Women at Work Lesson Plan: Clothesline Timeline (Grades 4-12). This primary-source based lesson asks students to analyze historic photographs to draw conclusions about women and work from the 1870s through the 2010s. Students will discover that Montana women have always worked, but that discrimination, cultural expectations, and changing technology have influenced the types of work women undertook. 

Learning from Historical Documents (Grades 6-12) The Montana Historical Society posted primary sources relating to almost every era in Montana history when they created the Montana: Stories of the Land Companion Website. They are aggregated on this page. A typed excerpt, a link to the original , a brief context, and a copy of the National Archives Document Analysis Worksheet is posted for each document. 

Digitized Montana Newspapers Online (Grades 4-12) Give your students an hour to immerse themselves in the time period your studying. Have them go shopping. Ask them to find something to do for entertainment. Have them select a headline or article that disturbed, surprised or amused them to share with the class. 

Montana's Charlie Russell (Grades K-8) Choose just one of the ELA lesson plans designed to accompany this packet--for example, "Painting into Poetry" or "Living with Animals."

If you can afford to dedicate a week or more to a deep dive, here are some lessons I'd recommend:

Women and Sports: Tracking Change Over Time (Designed for grades 4-8) In this lesson aligned to both Common Core ELA and Math standards, students learn about how Title IX (a federal civil rights law enacted in 1972 that prohibits sex discrimination in education) changed girls’ opportunities to participate in school sports by collecting and analyzing the data to look at change in women’s sports participation over time.

Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study Guide (Designed for students 6-10). This study guide includes lesson plans, vocabulary, chapter summaries and questions, alignment to the Common Core, and other information to facilitate classroom use of Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan, as told to Margaret Ronan, edited by Ellen Baumler. Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, this highly readable 222-page memoir details Mary Sheehan Ronan’s journey across the Great Plains, her childhood on the Colorado and Montana mining frontiers, her ascent to young womanhood in Southern California, her return to Montana as a young bride, and her life on the Flathead Indian Reservation as the wife of an Indian agent. Book One, which provides a child’s-eye view of the mining frontier, is available to download as a PDF (Lexile Level 1180L). Classroom sets of Girl from the Gulches can be purchased from the Montana Historical Society Museum Store by calling toll free 1-800-243-9900. 

"Montana's Landless Indians and the Assimilation Era of Federal Indian Policy: A Case of Contradiction" (Grades 10-12) This week-long primary-source based unit designed to introduce high school students to the history of the landless Métis, Cree, and Chippewa Indians in Montana between 1889 and 1916, while giving them an opportunity to do their own guided analysis of historical and primary source materials. In this Common Core-aligned unit, students will wrestle with issues of perspective, power, ideology, and prejudice and will closely examine the role Montana newspapers played in shaping public opinion toward the tribes’ attempts to maintain economic independence and gain a land base and political recognition.

Ordinary People Do Extraordinary Things! Connecting Biography to Larger Social Themes Lesson Plan (Grades 8-12) This lesson 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. After analyzing two essays on American Indian women from the Women’s History Matters website, students are asked to conduct interviews with people in their own community to learn about how that person has chosen to shape the world around him or her.

Hazel Hunkins, Billings Suffragist: A Primary Source Investigation (Grades 7-12) In this lesson, student historians will analyze photos, letters, newspaper articles, and other sources to learn more about the suffrage movement as experienced by Billings, Montana, native and National Woman's Party activist Hazel Hunkins. 

More Reading for Winter Break

Earlier this week I provided links to the most popular Teaching Montana History posts, in case you missed them. Today, I give you "The Best Ten Social Studies Sites of All Time," according to HistoryTech's Glenn Wiebe.

Check out his blog post and then email me any sites you think he missed, so I can share them with everyone.

Reading for Winter Break

Who has time to read all of the blog posts that show up in your inbox? I know I don't. So I thought that some of you might appreciate a roundup of the most popular Teaching Montana History posts of 2017, to peruse over break, in between showings of "It's a Wonderful Life" or "Star Wars: The Last Jedi."

• Teaching with Montana: Stories of the Land provided links to the textbook's rich companion website, information about the new username and password (Teachers/Agate), and information about the one-hour online training that folks can take for one OPI renewal unit.
• Summer Reading was another look back, with link to particularly popular posts, including "Evidence Analysis Window Frames" and "Teaching Indian Literature and/or Literature about Indians."
• Newsela talks about the Newsela website, which offers nonfiction text (including news articles and primary sources) at multiple reading levels.
• Salt Dough Maps provides a step-by-step tutorial (with pictures) on this popular classroom project. 
• Can We Find a Teachable Moment through the Smoke? suggested resources to teach about the history of fire and fire policy.
• Montana and the Great War talks about the new resources available through the Montana Historical Society's World War I website, including lesson plans, one of which is discussed at length in RAFT Writing and World War I. 

If these posts don't strike your fancy but you still want to troll Teaching Montana History for new ideas, lesson plans, or resources, I suggest visiting the website and scrolling down until you see "Labels" on the righthand side of the page. Then simply click on what interests you--art, contemporary Montana, elementary,  IEFA, teaching strategies. ... You get the idea. (I haven't been entirely consistent in how I've tagged entries over the last seven (!) years, but the tags make a good starting point for exploration.)

p.s. Merry Christmas and best wishes for a happy 2018! I'm taking the week off, but the genie in the computer is hard at work. Hence this email.

Visible Thinking Routines

Last Monday I wrote about Question Starts, a "thinking routine" that I learned about from the folks at Project Zero's Visible Thinking website. I was really impressed by their overall approach and many of the other routines they detail.

The best way to learn more about Visible Thinking is to go to their website (which includes examples of techniques being put into practice in K-5 classrooms), but I decided to offer a teaser to convince you to click through.

According to their website, "Visual Thinking is a broad and flexible framework for enriching classroom learning in the content areas and fostering students' intellectual development at the same time." It is a product of sustained research in which the creators found that "skills and abilities are not enough."

Often, we found, children (and adults) think in shallow ways not for lack of ability to think more deeply but because they simply do not notice the opportunity or do not care. To put it all together, we say that really good thinking involves abilities, attitudes, and alertness, all three at once. 

They believe that "making students' thinking visible to themselves" can help students learn to "manage it better for learning and other purposes."

I was particularly taken with the site's specific "Thinking Routine" suggestions. As the authors explain, just as it is helpful to have routines to manage behavior, it is useful to have routines to encourage thinking.

According to their site, each routine that they recommend:

• Is goal oriented in that it targets specific types of thinking
• Gets used over and over again in the classroom
• Consists of only a few steps
• Is easy to learn and teach
• Is easy to support when students are engaged in the routine
• Can be used across a variety of context
• Can be used by the group or by the individual.

I'm sure you are already using some of the strategies that they suggest you make into "routines." (They explain that the difference between a strategy and a routine is that a routine is a structure used repeatedly so as to become part of the classroom culture and "the ways in which students go about the process of learning.") I know I have.  "What Makes You Say That" is very much part of Visual Thinking Strategies, a technique we feature in many lessons and I've detailed in other posts. And "Think, Pair, Share" is an oldie but goodie.

But there were some strategies/routines that were new to me, others that I had been introduced to but had never used, and still others that provided a slightly different take on a strategy I have found particularly useful. I was particularly enamored with

• I used to Think... Now I think... A routine for reflecting on how and why our thinking has changed
• Circle of Viewpoints A routine for exploring diverse perspectives
• Headlines A routine for capturing essence

Two of them I'd seen in other contexts:  

• Arlee high school teacher Anna Baldwin introduced me to "I used to think, Now I think," when she led a workshop activity on homesteading and allotment on the Flathead Reservation using a simple graphic organizer called a Four Square. The four squares were labeled: "At first I think," "Now I think," "And now I think," and "Finally." She provided us with four different documents, including short pieces of text, images, and maps, one at a time, giving us time to reflect after examining each one, about to document how the new evidence changed our thinking on the topic. She detailed the technique in her video Inside Anna's Classroom and the accompanying study guide.

• Project Archaeology introduced me to "Circle of Viewpoints" through their 8-12 lesson plan "Investigating the First Peoples, the Clovis Child Burial," in which they ask students to take on various roles (archaeologist, traditional tribal elder, etc.) and together to wrestle with the question of reburying the 12,5000-year-old Clovis child and the artifacts found in his grave.

The third seemed incredibly obvious (writing headlines)--after I read about it.

Go check out the site and let me know which of the routines they feature have worked for you, which ones you've tried unsuccessfully, or which ones you'd like to try. Note that both Anna Baldwin and Project Archaeology used these strategies in high school lessons, but much of the focus of the Project Zero Visible Thinking website is K-5. Do you have grade level recommendations for any of the Visible Thinking routines, or do you think (as Project Zero seems to) that they work across all grades? Are there any routines you would particularly recommend? Let me know and I'll share out.

Teaching Students to Ask Good Questions

Asking good questions is hard for students.

I discovered this for myself when I went into an eleventh-grade classroom to help students working on National History Day research papers formulate research questions. Because I'd always rather "borrow" than reinvent the wheel,  I took inspiration from John Schmidt and Jeff Treppa (authors of The Research Paper: Developing Historical Questions), and I brought in handouts they created: Guidelines for Forming Historical Questions and Practice: Developing a Historical Question. And the kids *really* struggled.

I've written before about K-12 appropriate techniques to work this skill including Question Cubes and the Question Formulation Technique. I recently came across another one, one of the many interesting "Visible Thinking Routines" featured on Project Zero's website. It's called Question Starts: A Routine for Creating Thought-provoking Questions. Like most good routines, it is deceptively simple. Visit the Project Zero website to get all the details, but in brief, here's how it works: 

1. Brainstorm a list of at least 12 questions about the topic, concept or object. Use these question-starts to help you think of interesting questions:

• Why…? How would it be different if…?
• What are the reasons...? Suppose that…?
• What if…? What if we knew…?
• What is the purpose of…? What would change if…?

2. Review the brainstormed list and star the questions that seem most

interesting. Then, select one or more of the starred questions to discuss

for a few moments.

3. Reflect: What new ideas do you have about the topic, concept or object

that you didn’t have before?

Do you actively teach asking good questions in your classroom? Why and how? Or why not? I'd love to hear from you.