C3's Informed Action: Making It Relevant

Teaching early U.S. History during a presidential election year makes for endless past-present connections... IF one is looking for them. The middle school brain has an uncanny ability to segment information into discreet categories, never the twain shall meet! So teachers need to provide students with the catalyst to open the doors of those categorized boxes and let things mingle. 

We recently finished our long journey down the Road to Revolution, past the Declaration of Independence, and arrived at our destination: The Treaty of Paris. We have less than three weeks until Spring Break, and a classroom full of tired kids. It doesn't seem like the time to jump into the Articles of Confederation, Shay's Rebellion, or the Making of the Constitution. Fortunately, we live in interesting times, and the C3 Framework gives us the structure to take advantage of it.

The C3 Framework includes a fourth dimension: Communicating Conclusions & Taking Informed Action as a way to communicate inquiry findings and connect to relevant democratic activities. Making a connection between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the presidential election campaigns seemed very timely. The students are hearing a lot about the candidates on the news and social media. They are beginning to form opinions about candidates of their choice (or their parents' choice, since they are easily influenced at this age). We decided to grab hold of that current event interest and end the unit with an Informed Action project.

Super Tuesday: We started our Informed Action with a casual, motivational investigation on Super Tuesday. We threw out this question: Should presidential candidates tell the truth while they are campaigning? Students generally agreed that they should, but they already knew that candidates didn't always stick to it. I directed them to look at two websites: PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. These two sites check the accuracy of statements made by candidates and others related to them (e.g., Super PACs). The students were very engaged, looking up candidates they supported, those they didn't support, learning about those who they didn't know much about, and noticing differences between them. They especially enjoyed finding out which statements rated as "Pants on Fire" (complete untruth) via PolitiFact. After about 20 minutes, I brought the discussion back to the group. I asked them what they had found out, and several students shared discoveries. I asked them the inquiry question again, and got pretty much the same answer as the beginning of the class, so I flipped it around a bit: Which candidate is the most truthful? (as of that day, it was John Kasich with Bernie Sanders a close second). Which candidate is the least truthful? (as of that day, it was Donald Trump by a long shot). Students also brought up questions about why the websites would fact check some statements and not others, whether we could trust these sites, and who was finding out about this information. Great critical citizenship! 

Campaign Propaganda: Now that students had some sense of who the candidates were, we are turning our attention to campaign advertisements. The overarching inquiry question that connects back to past learning is What does "consent of the governed" and "alter and abolish government" look like? To start our inquiry, I showed a quick series of campaign ads from the previous week (found on P2016) and asked students to think about how they connected to the two ideals from the Declaration of Independence. They jotted ideas and questions on small slips of paper. We discussed afterward how the campaign ads were trying to persuade voters to give the candidates their "consent" to "alter" the government. The idea of "persuasion" led into the Mini-Q: Campaign Propaganda: Which Strategies Would You Use? Students investigate past presidential campaign ads to identify six propaganda strategies and evaluate them on how informative, effective, and ethical they are. Then they decide which three they would use to make a campaign ad. This builds student knowledge before we get into the project.

Public Service Announcement: It would make sense to have students make a campaign ad for the candidate of their choice at this point. However, we are holding off for now for two reasons: 1) We don't have enough time before spring break for the amount of research and production time they would need, and 2) Students don't have enough information about the electoral process yet to see how their candidate and their issues fit into the big picture. Instead, we are having our students make a Public Service Announcement (PSA) alerting citizens of propaganda techniques used in campaign ads. They will make a short movie/slidecast showing three campaign ads, identifying the propaganda technique the candidate used in each, and explaining how it is informative, effective, and ethical (or rather, how it is not those things). This fits into the role of informed citizenship, taking action for the greater good. 

In the spring, after we teach the Constitution and the electoral college, we will have another presidential project, probably making an advertisement. By that time, students will have time to dig into issues, see where candidates stand on them, and consider which issues are most important to address in order to get the most electoral college votes. The number of candidates will have whittled down a bit as well.

In past years, we connected The Road to Revolution to The Arab Spring through the question: When is it necessary for citizens to rebel against their government? We did interesting projects with this as well. However, rolling with the times and student interest can make for a much more relevant investigation. It will not be too many more years before these 8th graders will be eligible to vote, and perhaps they will think back on their inquiry this year as they do, and wonder, "What should I know about this candidate before I vote for him/her?" This is informed action in the real world!

Working with content knowledge during inquiry

There are many aspects of the C3 Framework for Social Studies that I am still trying to wrap my head around as I simultaneously revise and implement inquiry-based units. The biggest one remains: What is the role of content teaching in the inquiry arc, and how much should students "discover" the content vs. content being "fed" via teacher-led lessons?

As I've been wrestling with this question, I have been trying out some new resources that are more inquiry-based. Some have been moderately successful, while others really hit the nail on the head. An example of the latter was a "Mini-Q" based on this question: The Ideals of the Declaration: Which is most important? (DBQ Project, 2012).

Students had already read the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and we unpacked the four principles of government together. Last year, I just went on to the Revolutionary War from there. But this year, I wanted to linger on the Declaration a bit longer because it forms the foundation of the US government, and if students really understand those principles, then the next units on the Constitution and Bill of Rights make a whole lot more sense. 

This Mini-Q presented a range of primary source documents, from a Declaration from the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 (Equality), to a segment from NPR's "This I Believe" in 2005 (Unalienable Rights), to a photo of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 2009 (Consent of the Governed), to a statement by the Tea Party from 2010 (Alter or Abolish Government). By examining more modern examples of the ideals, students were forced to shift their thinking out of the 18th century Patriots vs. Loyalists debate and apply them to issues in the 21st century. 

The best part, though, were the discussions around the follow-up questions at each table group. Here are some of the questions presented in the Mini-Q:

• Is it possible to achieve equality without liberty? Liberty without equality?
• Can you achieve happiness without the consent of the governed?
• Which is more important: equality or the right to alter and abolish the government?

Students had to really think about what liberty actually entails, whether citizens can have any rights without the guarantee that they can change the government if it's not meeting their rights, and how some of the ideals are embedded in other ideals. (My favorite conclusion was that yes, you can achieve happiness without the consent of the governed, IF the government has citizens' happiness as a priority. Sometimes it happens, but not often.) By working with the four ideals in this way, students examined each one carefully, defended their opinions to others at their tables, thought of examples to illustrate their thinking, and tried to understand other viewpoints. 

image from wikipedia.org

And when asked to answer the main question: Which ideal is most important?, they almost unanimously agreed to this answer: It's not fair! They're all important!, which is sort-of the point of this exercise. Ultimately, they were able to pick one and defend it as most important, thus demonstrating that they understood the subtleties of each ideal. I deem this a highly-successful learning activity!

Back to my original question about content in the inquiry arc. During this Mini-Q, students worked with content, but did not learn new content. They needed to come into the activity already knowing something about the Declaration of Independence and the principles of government embedded in the preamble. Doing the Mini-Q without that content knowledge would have been confusing and students would have done surface-level thinking. Therefore, I wonder still about the value of "knowledge discovery" in inquiry-based units. 

This week we are hosting a consultant who will be addressing that questions with secondary Social Studies teachers. I am excited to hear what she has to say about this. More next week, I'm sure!

Assessment Shifts in the C3 Framework

About a year ago, I wrote a post about practicing argument strategies with an in-class debate structure called Socratic Smackdown during Social Studies. Well, here we are again, doing the same thing at the same time of year. However, this year we are also implementing the C3 Framework, so the unit was revised (see last month's blog about that). This prompted some re-thinking about the order that information was presented, the materials used, how to scaffold student learning, and how to assess.

image from wikimedia.org

Last year, students worked through the content information by reading textbook sections and answering the questions afterward. We discussed the information in class, worked with it during the Town Hall Meetings (using Socratic Smackdown), captured the information on a slick digital timeline (Timeline JS3, Northwest University, 2015), and watched part of The Revolution (History Channel, 2011). At the end of the unit, students took a test on their content learning. It contained 10 multiple choice knowledge questions, three questions interpreting visual primary source documents that we had discussed in class, and one constructed response synthesizing question. Students who studied the textbook did well on this test. 

This year, students looked for answers to historical questions using primary source documents. They used the textbook and video information from The Revolution to help them build the digital timeline, and section questions were optional. We discussed information in class and debated during Town Hall Meetings. They wrote answers to the supporting historical questions.

The C3 unit plan I used as a model, American Revolution (C3 Teachers), has this as its final assessment:

This is obviously very different than the unit test we used last year, and it prompted a long discussion with my teaching partner. First, the compelling question uses so much more evaluative and critical thinking than the test, yet students would need content knowledge in order to answer it. It also flows directly from the unit work we did, especially the supporting questions. We definitely wanted to keep the compelling question as the centerpiece of our assessment. 

Second, we talked long about the format of the assessment. Would a poster or mulitmedia presentation (what is that? a slideshow? screen cast?) give us enough to know whether students really understood? Would we have to add three days to our unit to accommodate the time it always takes for students to make a tech project? Would students who are not good writers be fairly graded if they wrote an essay? Do we want to take the time to grade 46 essays? What format would be engaging yet practical? Ultimately, we returned to the question: What have students been practicing? We decided that having small Town Hall Meetings was most logical because that is what they have been practicing throughout the unit, and it gives them the opportunity to show what they know without having to write long. Students would record their discussions so there could be four going on at once.

But what about those students who are not good speakers? How will they show their learning fairly? Part of the Socratic Smackdown rubric grades preparation, including text evidence and analyzing the evidence.

This is work we emphasized before each of the Town Hall Meetings during the unit. We decided that students should make an outline "that addresses the compelling question using specific claims and relevant evidence from historical sources while acknowledging competing views" on one day, and then use that outline during the final Town Hall Meeting discussion. This captures the thinking of our struggling writers and speakers, as well as making everyone's argument better. The outline would be graded as part of the final summative grade.

Third, we kept coming back to the prompt when it asks students to use "relevant evidence from historical sources". We knew we wanted students to move beyond memorized textbook knowledge and show us they could use primary and secondary sources to answer historical questions. We thought hard about the question, "What do historians do?" Yes, they have a lot of background information in their heads because they have studied it for a long time. But mostly they look at resources and try to put the various pieces together. We decided that students could not answer the compelling question by spitting back memorized textbook information. Therefore, we decided to give their work on the digital timeline relevance by allowing them to use it for the assessment. They could also access all of the primary source documents we worked with in class, as well as their answers to the supporting questions in their Social Studies notebooks. 

So here is the final result, our end of unit summative assessment for the Road to Revolution:

Day 1:
Was the American Revolution avoidable? Create an outline that addresses whether or not the American Revolution was avoidable. It should address the compelling question using specific claims and relevant evidence from historical sources (digital timeline, historical documents, and SS notebook only) while acknowledging competing views.

Day 2:

Was the American Revolution avoidable? Discuss the question in a small group Town Hall Meeting (record your discussion). It should address the compelling question using specific claims and relevant evidence from historical sources while acknowledging competing views (use your outline).

Curriculum implementation challenges my comfort level. It was easy to make, give, and grade the old test. The new assessment will be much harder. However, it is more authentic, meaty, and engaging, and it allows students with various strengths to show what they know and can do. And that is all good!

Inquiring into Inquiry and the C3 Framework

I am attempting to re-write my third Social Studies unit to be more aligned with the C3 Framework, which has as its core the inquiry "arc": starting with a compelling question, students then explore a variety of source documents to answer the question, and then report out their understanding. It sounds simple enough.

Fortunately for me, the great borrower of others' work, there are lots of C3-aligned resources available for me to access via the internet. One that very neatly fell into my lap was created by Engage NY for their Grade 7 unit on the American Revolution. The compelling question, Was the American Revolution avoidable?, is pretty compelling. It is interesting to ponder whether change was inevitable, and if so, did there have to be a war to make it happen. The supporting questions are also interesting: How did the French and Indian War change British relations with the colonists?, How did British policies inflame tensions in the American colonies?, How did colonial responses inflame tensions?, and What efforts were made to avoid war? This unit comes complete with a variety of primary source documents to examine, formative assessments for each supporting question, a final project that addresses the compelling question, and a suggested informed action step to bring relevancy to the unit. I could just take the unit as is and start implementing it tomorrow. Sweet!

But here's my big question about inquiry: Do students get enough understanding of the content through their constructed responses to the primary source documents? Nowhere in this unit are students reading textbooks or other secondary sources to build background knowledge. Nowhere are they watching live action reconstructions to help them visualize the events. Nowhere are they putting themselves into roles to wrestle with the varying perspectives of the time. 

If I implement the unit as is, I can anticipate that I will be having to fill in a lot of knowledge gaps. I like to think of our brains as having a clothesline of background information in our long-term memory, and new learning gets hung on that line, connecting new learning to old to deepen understanding. Being thrown a bunch of data and newspaper articles and diary entries without the necessary background knowledge means students are trying to formulate concepts without anything to hang the information on, and those unconnected pieces just pile up in a jumble. There could be a lot of disconnections and misconceptions.

I anticipate that some students will easily make the necessary abstract connections and inferences to get the point, and others will just be confused. These are middle schoolers, after all, who are just now developing their abstract thinking brains. Some are there, some are still very concrete thinkers, and everyone else is somewhere in between. I will have to scaffold a lot of the deductive and inductive thinking required. 

I also wonder about motivation. Spending weeks looking at primary source documents to understand history is a historian's work-- I get that. But these are 13-year-olds, and they need a bit more action and excitement. They are immersed in YouTube and Instagram and movies; they play soccer and tag at recess; they sing and play instruments and act in plays. History needs to come alive to be interesting.

CC image from Shelbyhistorysite

So I am adding things to the Engage NY unit. I am adding textbook readings that relate to each supporting question to build their background knowledge. I am adding role play: Patriot, Loyalist, and Neutralist colonists debate their response during this "Road to Revolution" period in Town Hall Meetings. I am adding bits and pieces from History Channel's The Revolution and HBO's John Adams mini-series.

image from wikipedia.org

Maybe this isn't "pure" C3 Framework teaching, but I know my kids and I know what helps them learn. The inquiry arc is still there, the compelling and supporting questions are driving the unit, and they will be wrestling with a lot of primary source documents. But they will also be watching movies, reading background information, and debating a historical perspective in a role play activity. That gives them enough information to build on and deepen content knowledge and makes Social Studies fun and engaging. Both of these things make learning happen.

This is all new to me. If you are experienced in the C3 Framework and see that I am way off base, please help me out in the comment section below. How do you implement the C3 while also making learning complete and motivating for middle schoolers?

Considering the Connotations of Word Choice in Media

CC photo by J. Pohl

My family just returned from a winter break trip to Vietnam. One of our first stops was the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. It's called "War Remnants" because it is filled with the flotsam and jetsam the American military left behind when they retreated, including tanks, helicopters, boats, bombs, shells, and the long-term effects from Agent Orange. The big vehicles fill the outdoor courtyard, while inside the Museum building photographs document the horrors of war. It was very disturbing.

CC photo by J. Pohl

But I'm writing about it here on my blog because it was fascinating to view a world event from the opposite perspective from the one I grew up with. I was a child when the Vietnam War was happening, so it was background noise in my happy-go-lucky existence. I have vague memories, reinforced by movie images no doubt, of soldiers in muddy tropical jungles, of drawing the line between the "good guys" (South Vietnamese) and the "bad guys" (North Vietnamese), and of feeling sad for those families who lost a son to the war. The Museum had American journalists' articles and photographs displayed, with headlines like, "Terrorists captured..." accompanying an image of a small shirtless man with his hands tied behind his back being guided into an open jeep. In my memories, Americans were helping the good guys to defend their country from the bad guys and our soldiers were "heroes", but despite our noble aspirations, we "lost" the war.

photo by peregringo.com

In Vietnam, I heard the war called "The American War," a title that jarred me a little (all "our" wars are named for other places: Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the Korean War). At the Museum, I read signs that called the Americans "the Imperialists" who fought against the "will of the people". The Vietnamese soldiers were "martyrs". An international war crimes committee declared that the U.S. had committed "genocide" against the Vietnamese people. 

Wow, that was so totally different than what I had been fed as a child.

It made me think about the power of words, the connotations behind the words we hear in the media and how they can so strongly spin an event to be one way or another. The "terrorist" the Americans captured was the "martyr" to the Vietnamese cause. Of course I know that governments and media show bias through their word choice, but it takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to stop and analyze that bias. How often do our students make that effort? Probably close to never.

As we move into the second semester and closer to the U.S. Presidential elections, it seems ever more urgent to teach students to notice bias-laden language in the media. The CCSS includes reading and language standards (R8.4, L8.5, H/SS6-8.6) that specifically address understanding the connotative meanings of words and how they affect meaning. It will mean drawing students' attention to word choice options, the subtleties of meaning behind synonyms, and considering the perspectives of the author and audience. 

Pretty abstract stuff. I'm hoping that with consistent practice, students will begin to internalize this process so that they take their critical lens to any reading or viewing, so that they don't just take things like "good guys" and "bad guys" to heart without considering the spin behind it.