Reading Critically in Social Studies

Starting the year in Grade 8 Social Studies: Early American History means setting up ways of thinking and doing while tackling content at the same time. Two basic skills in particular are used continually throughout the year: reading primary source documents and thinking critically about perspective and bias within sources. Therefore early in the year it's important to establish strategies for reading informational texts and to consider context while reading.

Our first unit is Residents and Invaders (AKA Native Americans and Explorers). The first textbook chapter focuses in on Native Americans before Europeans arrived. It discusses how they arrived in the Americas and how different regional groups adapted to their environment. As with all textbooks, the information is general and limited, but gives students a basic understanding. It also does very little to address primary sources and bias. 

Therefore, I open the unit with a slideshow that addresses the idea that there is a lot of bias and stereotyping of American Indians in society today. I list the many different terms used, including Indian, American Indian, Native Americans, and First Americans and ask students to consider which term seems to fit the best, and which one the worst. I show images of sports mascots and children's coloring book images that negatively stereotype them, and ask them to discuss what these images are actually showing. This opens them to the idea of considering popular terms and media images with an eye to bias and racism. Then I throw out the question, "If I wanted to know what name to call them or what they think of these images, how could I do that best?" Of course, at least one of my brilliant students comes up with, "You could ask them!" (also "You could Google it!"). 

As I was transitioning through Dulles Airport a couple years ago, I wandered through the Smithsonian Museum gift shop (so cool!). They had a display from the National Museum of the American Indian, and I bought a book called Do All Indians Live in Tipis? (2007). This question and answer book addresses the most commonly asked questions the museum guides hear, and all the answers are written by American Indians. Here was a way we could "ask them!" I knew immediately that this could be my resource for opening the door to primary source documents, and also reading informational texts because the articles are short and at approximately a sixth grade reading level (easy enough for almost all of my students to read independently with good comprehension). I chose four articles to read over the next couple of weeks: "What is the Correct Terminology: American Indian, Indian, Native American, or Native?", "What's Wrong with Naming Sports Teams Indians, Braves, etc.?", "Where did Indians Come From? How Did They Get to the Americas?", and "What is the Relationship of Native Americans to the Environment?".

I taught students how to annotate informational texts using the gradual release of responsibility model (I do it, we do it together, you do it). I started by reviewing the seven major reading comprehension strategies, as outlined by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke in Texts and Lessons for Teaching Literature (Heinemann, 2013):

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT WHILE READING:
·            What I understand right now (short 1-sentence summary)
·            Personal connections that I am reminded of
·            Visual or sensory images I am experiencing as I read
·            Questions I have (including new words)
·            Answers to my questions (including predicting word meanings)
·            Parts that seem especially important or interesting
·            The main idea or message of the whole text

I modeled how to make "margin notes" to capture thinking about the reading while I read, including noticing new vocabulary words and guessing meaning before continuing. Students were good at underlining and highlighting parts that stood out for them; they were less skilled at noting why they marked those particular passages. I gave them a "notes goal" for each passage (usually 3-5 depending on the length of the piece), and asked them to write a main idea summary at the end. I collected the articles with their annotations, and gave them feedback to help them progress. 

One common error that I continually wrote feedback, and taught follow-up lessons, about was the main idea summary. Students often wrote what the article was "about", for example: "This article was about how Native Americans came to the Americas and settled there". True, that is what the article was about, but there is no actual information embedded within that summary. Did they even read it beyond the title? I was looking for the three scientific theories and the Native American's perspective captured within the summary statement. If students followed the "about" statement with main idea details, that would have been fine; however, they rarely did. Nancy Boyles, in this article from Educational Leadership says this about close reading of texts, 

"Paraphrasing is pretty low on Bloom's continuum of lower- to higher-order thinking, yet many students stumble even here. This is the first stop along the journey to close reading. If students can't paraphrase the basic content of a passage, how can they dig for its deeper meaning?"

Students made progress, but there is more work to be done here. We are about to do a short text set unit that will investigate whether Christopher Columbus was a hero or a villain. Within this mini-unit, we will continue our work with text annotations and main idea summaries, as well as noticing how authors include bias in their texts. The foundations laid this first quarter will set us up as we read primary documents from the colonial America era as well as current event articles and research. Each successive reading experience gives me the opportunity to review past skills and add on an additional layer. Hopefully by the end of the year, they will be skilled readers of primary documents and critical thinkers about sources and bias.

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Using Booksource's Classroom Organizer with My Classroom Library

Today I want to put a plug in for a great new tool I've started using with my classroom library: Booksource's Classroom Organizer. This is a free book check-out system that also generates handy teacher reports.

All set up and reports can be managed via the teacher page:

The first thing to do to get things set up is to import your classroom inventory using an Excel spreadsheet. You can choose which categories to include for the books. It's easy to add additional titles individually once the big bulk of the inventory is imported.

Then you need to add students to your list so they have permission to check out (and check in) books electronically. They can do this from the student page:

Admittedly, the graphic is a bit elementary for eighth grade, but the tool is worth it. So far, students have been very responsible about using the system independently (once I posted all the login information in two or three places around the room). One super nice feature is that students will get an email every three weeks reminding them that they have a particular book checked out. This frees me up from looking at the hand-scrawled sign-out paper and trying to monitor that myself. Often just this little reminder is enough to get them to return the book to the library.

I haven't used the teacher reports much yet, since we've only been in school a month. Here are the options









This is my favorite report, Current Books Checked Out. This also gets sent to me automatically via email every three weeks so I can keep track.











This is what the Student Checkout Detail looks like for one prolific reader. I can see he is a dystopian reader mostly, but graphic novels also catch his attention.

I've been very pleased with the hand-off nature of the Classroom Organizer system. There is still an honor system in place for kids to actually do the check-in/check-out process instead of just walking out with a book. But it's no worse that it was before. The Classroom Org. system takes a little time to get set up, but their tech support people were super helpful when I ran into a glitch. For teachers who are trying to track students' reading lives, levels of text complexity, variety of genres, or volume, I highly recommend this system.

Jumping into Scoring On-Demand Assessments

I am about to jump with both feet into the hard work of analyzing student work to make my teaching better. This work is made harder because I am using a new tool, the rubrics in the Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (UoSW) for grade 8 (Heinemann, 2014). These rubrics are written as a continuum of skills along categories that match the CCSS writing standards' performance indicators. There are categories for leads, endings, transition words, organization, elaboration, craft, mechanics, and an overall category. Although these are things I evaluated using our modified Six Traits rubric for the past four years, the wording is different and open to interpretation in places. 

Rubric excerpt from Units of Study in Argument, Information, and Narrative Writing (Heinemann, 2014)

I now have 43 on-demand pieces of argument writing to analyze before we jump into our literary essay unit in a couple of weeks. Because the rubric is so unfamiliar, however, I am looking at this stack with trepidation. I feel unready to tackle this task without a better understanding of what I'm supposed to look for. I need a plan.

I already tried out the rubric once with my department team members, as we collaboratively scored a seventh grade student sample. It didn't go well. We had so many questions like, "How is 'clearly articulated' different from 'logical' evidence?" "The rubric jumps from one thing to another. Is it supposed to be a progression?" We were definitely not comfortable with the tool, nor did we come to any clear understanding of how to use it with any grading consistency. 

I think I need do one more "training" exercise before I try to score my own students' writing. The UoSW provides annotated teacher-written exemplars that meet the grade level standards. I think I need to sit down with the grade 6, grade 7, and grade 8 exemplars as well as the rubrics, and try to match them up. Where the annotation says this is the "clearly articulated" evidence, what does that look like? How can I see it in my students' writing as well? I want to have all three levels in front of me because I know my students will be all over the place depending on their past experiences and their developmental levels. Even my better writers may be at a sixth grade level in some areas, and my struggling writers may reach the eighth grade level in others. In general, though, I expect I will see mostly seventh grade writing, which makes sense because we are just starting eighth grade!

By getting a clearer image of what the rubric descriptors look like in a writing sample, I hope to do a better, more consistent job scoring my students' writing. I also hope that once I get on a roll, I will start being more efficient with my time. I expect the first few (5? 10? 20?) will take about 20 minutes each as I work through the descriptors and make judgments about what I'm seeing in front of me. Getting that down to 10 minutes each would be much more comfortable.

In the end, I will have a bank of data that can lead me into making better teaching decisions during the literary essay writing unit itself. I can plan whole class mini-lessons to target general needs. I can plan small group work where I see clusters of need. I can confer with individuals to move them from where they are to where they need to go. I don't need to guess or wait until mid-unit when I look over drafts. 

I can also ask students to use this writing sample as a way to set some goals to work on during the unit, identifying a few areas to really pay attention to and work to improve. The process of reflecting on oneself as a writer, identifying needs and goals, and working to improve is an act of self-actuality. It puts the responsibility to learn and grow as a writer actively on the students' shoulders, instead of passively waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do. Isn't this the goal of becoming a lifelong learner?

So. Big work ahead, but good work. Important work. Work that will strengthen my teaching and strengthen student learning. Deep breath!