Strategies
I teach using a problem-based, inquiry approach to learning. Confronted with a problem, students identify what they know, create sub-questions for information needed to help solve the problem, generate research questions, and likely begin some version of this process again as information creates new knowledge and new questions. It is a messy approach, but one that yields the deepest understandings for students and models the kind of thinking we hope becomes second nature.
Problem-Based Learning
Problem-based learning is often guided as a problem formulated into an overarching question or questions. There are two questions that relate to one another for this unit. First, how can we understand the story of a place over time? The second question is how can the understanding of the narrative of place guide our future decisions about the place? The "problem" for this unit is one of limitations of prior knowledge, access to resources, and knowledge of the skills of inquiry. Problem-based learning requires that teachers spend significant time in planning the problem and assisting in the early research. Since this is a second unit for a 9th grade class, much of the research will be supplied and the focus will be in the geographical and historical thinking skills as well as the reading and writing skills defined in Common Core State Standards.
The other, perhaps most important, outcome of problem-based learning is the focus on a larger, real-world problem. It is not enough to learn about the neighborhood for its own sake. There must be some use for the information, some way of applying the knowledge to inform our present and future decisions. To that end, this unit is one part of the benchmark project where students research the economic, demographic, social development of their neighborhood in order to identify a problem in their neighborhood and propose a solution to the problem.
Reading, Thinking, and Writing Skills
Geographical thinking is the analysis of the ways that humans interact within the physical environment. It is answering the question, where is it and why is it there? Historical thinking focuses on another dimension, time, and asks why the events happened when they did. An important aspect of problem-based learning is the teaching of this kind of thinking through contextual challenges where only a brief lecture may be necessary to move students to new inquiries, but the content is an outgrowth of a well-designed contextual challenge.
Both geographical and historical thinking skills work in tandem with the Common Core State Standards to help students learn to read a variety of "texts" (excerpts of monographs, government reports from the time period, maps and photos to name a few) for the central idea and key details. I want to them to look closely in the way any new detective looks at a case by going back again and again to see what was missed. This kind of disciplined research will allow students to understand the meaning in the text in order to write arguments that can be defended using evidence.
Reading Skills
To guide my focus, I use the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in reading (standards listed in appendix). Despite the controversy around them, they serve as a useful guide for a shared language within the grade level and a outline for how to scaffold through our 7th-12th grade classes. In order to know how to effectively and explicitly teach the reading skills in CCSS, I use Heidi Hayes Jacobs' Active Literacy and Jeffrey Wilhelm's Engaging Readings and Writers with Inquiry. Both books aim to engage students in reading for answers to big questions that are meaningful and relevant to them. Many students have learned to be passive readers who, as Hayes Jacobs states, have learned to "play 'fetch' in class. Fetch occurs when a teacher asks a restrictive question that seeks one answer. The student then goes out to fetch that prize. The knowledge is not the student's." 19
In my unit I ask students to read multiple types of "texts" (traditional texts, maps, graphs, etc). If my goal is to have students both comprehend and make meaning of the texts, they need to be armed with a set of well-practiced strategies. In my experience students do little prior to reading and often have to read the document more than once or rely on classmates to fill in the gaps that they missed by reading words but not reading for meaning.
Prior to reading, students review the text and consider the activity to identify structure and understand their purpose for reading. While reading, students annotate the text or take notes with the structure and purpose in mind. After reading, students reflect on the argument of the text and how effectively the author used the structure to make the argument. Such before, during, and after reading habits using texts from my unit are highlighted in the activity section below.
Thinking Skills
As a Social Studies teacher, I am always envious of the clarity that my math colleagues can get from assessing student work as they figured out a problem. "Show your work" has become a mantra in our math department in order to help identify where students are getting tripped up. Identifying points of misconception or error in reading and thinking skills is much more challenging. That said, it was made much easier through the work of Harvard's Project Zero and the book Making Thinking Visible. The book contains specific protocols to use regularly with students to help them "show their work" in thinking. 20
Showing one's work in thinking is often a matter of doing the thinking out loud. To help students develop this skill I use many of the ideas presented in Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford's Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings. Chapter three (Lesson Activities for Developing Core Conversation Skills) has been particularly useful in expanding my pedagogical toolbox with research-based practices.
Writing Skills
The work of teaching writing is often improved by focusing on the two areas above: reading and thinking. Like reading, my writing strategies are inspired by the Common Core State Standards (standards listed in appendix). My focus for this unit is on narrative writing to describe the change over time in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.
Developing Academic Resiliency and Independence
I struggled with what to name this section. It advocates for moving back and forth between two opposite approaches. The first approach is similar to diving into the deep end in order to learn how to swim. You hand the student a document or a small set of documents and ask them to generate a story and clarifying questions. While far from the only strategy in my toolbox, it is one that I think is not used nearly enough in our educational system. More often than not, teachers use only the wading into the deep approach where students are never asked to sit with the inevitable frustrations of research and develop the kind of academic resilience that allows them to reach the high points of self-directed learning.
At the same time, frustrations must be managed through clear, transparent modeling of the kind of reading, thinking, and writing that you expect students to do. There are times when students need to be able to touch the ground and not feel the panic that comes from too much ambiguity. The art of teaching is to know which strategy is needed in the moment for each student.
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