Strategies
Utilizing the Google Classroom environment, students will engage in ongoing activities including close reading and annotation of primary sources, mainly works of the Hartford Wits, and secondary sources such as a study of many lyrics from the Hamilton musical (with consideration of what may and may not be of historical value.) It is important for me to get my students talking about what they are learning, and structured academic discourse such as class-wide Keep It, Park It or Junk It discussion activities are of tremendous value. (A quick internet search under the title should reveal a number of videos that illustrate this immensely useful discussion activity.) The discussion is always followed closely the next day with the constructing of their historical interpretations, which are written responses to the Unit Focus and Lesson Focus Questions as discussed in the next section below. Given that multiple choice assessments have no relation to how problems are solved in the working world of which my students will someday be a part, the historical interpretations serve as the summative assessments in my class. I encourage students to see this process as an open book/open note unit final.
The Historical Inquiry Process
My entire 8th Grade U.S. History course is oriented towards answering the Course Level Question, An American Identity: How has the definition of being an American changed over time? In a cascading manner, each Unit Focus Question takes this question and breaks it down into a summarizing inquiry that helps to answer part of the Course Level Question. And, within the parameters of the Unit Focus Question, each lesson is further broken down into a series of Lesson Focus Questions, which in turn seek to answer the Unit Focus Question. The beauty of this type of hierarchical organization of the focus questions is that as each student writes their historical interpretation for each unit, they are actually writing what will become a full length, culminating essay on what they have learned across the entire year. As they write in the Google Classroom environment, their work is easily retrievable and, at the end of the year, they can organize their interpretations into a final paper of which they can be truly proud because it provides their answer to the Course Level Question.
The learning objectives and the focus questions found in this unit of study are fully compliant with both the Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects 6 – 12, from the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for the State of California, as well as the California History-Social Science Framework for Grade Eight.
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