Historic Week

This week leading up to Thanksgiving we were very busy in class, working on projects, and discussing the 50th Anniversary of the JFK Assassination, and the 150th of the Gettysburg Address.

Tuesday the 19th was of course the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. In my opinion it is the most eloquent and timeless speech in US History. Its relatively short, and yet says so much. I continue to be fascinated with and inspired by those words. We will be analyzing and exmaing this speech in my classes in the next few weeks.

This week there some other educational things I was involved in of significance. On Monday I hosted my first Webinar along with 2 other teachers. Our Webinar was around using the strategy of Compare and Contrast at different levels and in different subjects. We had practiced the week before, but it is incredibly stressful to attempt to explain teaching through an online webinar. At one point I was "booted out" and had to log back in, Luckily I made it back just before it was my turn. The strategy I developed through the Cross Discipline Literacy Network sponsored by the State of Maine was around comparing Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and available for download. Despite the stress, the Webinar went well and we received lots of positive feedback about the strategy. The other two teachers were great and are very easy to work with, I really appreciate their efforts! We will be presenting another strategy at the end of January in another Webinar.

(This is from my part of the Webinar, its a student sample)

(This from one of the other teachers, its a screenshot I took halfway through the webinar)

(This is also from the Webinar)

On Friday I attended a training with several other teachers from my School District held at the University of Maine in Farmington. There were a dozen or so school districts there as well. We were there as "Teacher Mentors" with the goal of beginning to understand how Marzano's Standards for Teaching and Learning were going to be incorporated into our new Teacher Evaluation System. I think that Marzano's work makes sense and has merit. It will represent a significant change for the teachers in my district and the thought of this is quite daunting. There are 9 Design Questions which are quite detailed and represent three different lesson segments. However, the presentation at this training left much to be desired. It was so disappointing that I will refrain from mentioning the presenter's name here. She was well intended and well prepared, I just think she doesn't understand well how to do presentations for teachers or even presentations in general. Its always a bad idea to "guarantee" an ending time and then not honor it! Unfrotunately that was the least of my concerns. There was too much time spent on simple ideas, and not enough time to think deeply about complex ideas. What troubles me most is that this was the first of 3 trainings over the next year. I sincerely hope we have a different presenter next time or I may set a rcord for coffee consumption (it will be tough to break the record I set on Friday).

Next week is my favorite work week of the year... a two day week! So my next blog will be in two weeks. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!

Making changes

These four days weeks are nice in a way, its just too bad that everyone seems to try and squeeze everything they do in a 5 day week into 4 days. So while a short week, it was a very busy one.

Students in US History classes are still working on their Dollar Bill projects. but in addition to this we also started discussing slavery. To help with this, we listened to a former slave talk about what his life was like. Thanks to the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930's and the new technology of the day, audio recording, we have quite a few oral histories recorded in the National Archives that are the words of men and women who had been born into slavery. This Born in Slavery website is wonderful for this. I chose to use the words of one slave in particular named Fountain Hughes. I chose him because what he has to say is interesting and engaging, and he is relatively clear in his speaking. The Site does also offer a written transcript of what the former slaves are saying which I always print and have students follow along with because there are places where because of the age of the former slaves and the old style technology it is difficult to hear what is being said. This is a great discussion starter to get into the basic life a slave. I really like how Mr. Hughes repeats over and over this idea that as a slave "Dogs got it better now than we did then". Which sends a message about the low level of treatment, but very interestingly is not all that detailed. Many of the slave narratives leave out some of the worst details. You do hear these folks says things like "I don't want say too much because it makes folks feel bad." It's just a great resource and I really enjoy the follow up discussions.

(Only known photo of Fountain Hughes)

This week in Ethics we discussed and debated Animal Rights vs. Animal Welfare. This led to a discussion of meat eating and vegetarianism as well. For this we used an couple of online articles and videos. This website on the basics, this article about ethical meat eating, this video about the intelligence of Dolphins, this video about the Gorilla Koko, and this video about Temple Grandin and her work in advancing ethical ways of treating Animals (but not Animal Rights philosophy). In History v. Hollywood we finished watching Schindler's List and continued to study the Holocaust and its legacy. In my online class through Virtual High School, we are now discussing the end of the Cold War in the late 1980's and analyzing Gorbachev vs. Reagan. This course will end in 3 weeks and students will be posting their presentations about future American Foreign Policy.

(Temple Grandin)

(Koko with her pet kitten)

I was very proud of myself this week for taking a the "bull by the horns" this week on two different things. I sometimes can get so caught up in my lesson plans, grading, and day to day routines that I struggle to quickly pick up on issues that need to be addressed. Thanks to a conversation with a fellow Advisor that he started with me, I came to the realization that something was amiss in my Advisee group (and perhaps many 9th grade groups). My Advisees have not made much progress in interacting with each other. My theory is that its because of the iPads to a certain extent. With my last group as 9th graders they came in and sat down and looked to me or each other for what we were going to do. Over the 4 years that evolved into time to do homework and having a small laptop device to help with that. Because they had time to get to know each and other and bond as a group before we made changes, the group seemed to come together well. It happened naturally and not something I had to force. With my new group there is a whole lot of individual work on the iPad (as well as games or whatever) and not much social interaction. So I made 2 changes. From now on, the first 10 minutes of every Advisee time will be spent in a circle at the front of the room with no electronic devices. The other change was that every other Friday for the whole 30 minutes I will bring in some type of food goodies and and we will have a discussion in a circle. I purchased something called Table Topics online that has a series of cards with interesting discussion topics for teens. I learend about this during Advisor training on the first day of school from other Advisors. I am happy to report that both of these changes have been well received and dare I say even appreciated by my Advisees. On Friday we had our first Table Topic discussion and I think we learned more about each other in that 30 minutes than we had learned in all the time up to that point! The other item on which I grabbed the horns was in my study hall. Never before this year have a I had a study hall with so many students on silent study (this means no talking, and no signing out to anywhere). I started the beginning of the year with 5 or 6 and each grade check the number has gone up. In order to get off silent study a students can have no grade lower than a "73". In theory silent study should help them get their grades on track and be "painful" enough that they will be motivated to work harder and get off silent study. This theory has not held true as I now have 20 on silent study out of 31! So this week I instituted assigned seats and purposely put students next to people I knew they were not friends with. I have been doing this on the first day of school in all may classes for a few years now with great success. I never bothered with study hall because until this year I only had 5-10 students ever stay in the room and they stayed quiet without much difficulty. This year has been different. So I announced on Thursday a change. There was moaning and groaning and so I said there is an easy solution- do some work and get off of silent study. I offered to help them, talk to teachers, whatever is needed to help them be successful. I am hope to see some progress!

Next week I will be commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, attending a training on Teacher Obervations as part of our move to the Marzano Teacher Evaluation system and the great pleasure of viewing "The Sound of Music" musical put on by students at my school.

Maine Council for the Social Studies annual conference

I was so excited about the Conference I attended today I couldn't wait to blog about it! Today was the annual Maine Council for the Social Studies conference. I am on the Board for MCSS and so have been a part of the planning for the conference for the last year. Our theme this year was "Content, Instruction, and Technology: Standards-Based Approaches for 21st Century Learners."  We had the largest number of registrations we have ever had! I think we also had the most session options we have ever offered and also had many vendors available selling resources but also giving away a lot of stuff.

(MCSS President Glenn Nerbak)

 

 

The day kicked off with information from Maine Department of Education Social Studies Specialist Kristie Littlefield. Kristie spent some time talking about the C3 Framework (On page 10 of this document you will see my name because I was one of the teacher's from Maine who worked on this document) for Social Studies that is designed to supplement the Maine State Learning Results. Twenty two States were involved in the creation of C3 and so it is hoped this will result in more resources for us. She went on to discuss the law that requires a Proficiency Based Diploma and support available to schools for this. This means the class of 2018 must graduate with a standards based diploma, which also means big changes for my school! At the end of her talk Kristie recognized Maine's last 3 History Teacher of the Year Award winners. This award is given by the Gilder Lehrman Institute. I can't say enough good things about their organization. I attended one of their summer institutes in 2010 and it was tremenodus. They give a lot of money for history education.

 (Kristie Littlefield and the History Teacher  of the Year Award winners)

After the information from Kristie, we had a tremendous keynote speech that centered around the Gettysburg Address and using Common Core standards to analyze it. Jared Peatman, Director of Curriculum, Lincoln Leadership Institute, Vienna, Virginia gave the keynote speech. Mr. Peatman is a Maine native, from Skowhegan as a matter of fact. His speech was outstanding. He discussed strategies for analyzing the speech and using the Common Core to do this. He also talked about his book which gets into the impact the speech had later and in other parts of the world. He raised lots of interesting questions- why focus on 1776 in the beginning of the speech? The Constitution endorsed slavery, the Declaration did not! Why quote Jefferson? Hard for Southerners to criticize a speech based on something Jefferson wrote! What's his message? Democracy doesn't exist without equality! Like I said, it was awesome! There is something Mr. Peatman mentioned I found chilling for some reason that doesn't really make any sense. Mr. Peatman said that President Obama just announced he was declining the invitation to speak at the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. He then mentioned that at the 100th anniversary President John F. Kennedy also declined an invitation to speak because he had already planned to speak in Dallas, TX...

(Jared Peatman discuss the Gettysburg Address)

 

 

 The talk was fantastic! I even attended Mr. Peatman's session on the responses to the Gettysburg Address in other parts of the country. This was also a great activity aligned with the Common Core. I decided to buy his book, The Long Shadow of Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address and he graciously autographed it. I attended a session run by the Choices Institute. They have been around a while and create high quality units around role playing activities. Today's session was on a new unit about the Civil Rights Movement. I got a free copy of the unit which was awesome! I have used other Choices units and they are all well done, I highly recommend them! The other session I attended was about differentiating assessments through technology. It was very interesting and gave me some great ideas for what I can use. The presentation they gave is publicly available here. One of the great draws to these conferences is the possibility of getting new resources form vendors. I got a whole stack of free books and teaching guides. I also got a lot of information about National History Day which is something we have been thinking about for a while and might be ready to take the leap and judge this year so we can see what its like. Fantastic day and I'm happy to have a three day weekend to go through all of the books, resources, and ideas I got today!

The conference was Friday, so I was in my classroom Monday-Thursday this week and we learned a good deal in that time! I introduced the $35 Dollar Bill project in US history classes this week to much excitement and concern. I am always anxious to see who they are choosing and the kind of creative presentations they can come up with. In addition, we had a spirited debate around the Ethics of Torture and we started watching Schindler's List in History vs. Hollywood. 

We had another Department meeting this week and tried to come up with a plan on how to update and improve our curriculum and begin to align it with Common Core standards. We also needed to finalize our budget proposal to submit to our Principal (which we did) and began to make plans to organize this year's Model UN club. Every year we take about 24 students to Northeastern University in Boston, MA for 2 days to participate with other schools in a simulation of the United Nations. The United Nations association of Greater Boston is also involved in organizing this. We are just starting this process now! We included in our budget proposal funding for the National Council for the Social Studies Conference next Fall which will be held in Boston, MA. We figure its the closest it will be to us for the next 10 years so we can't pass up the chance to try and attend! Even if we don't get funding, I will plan to attend and find other funding if I can! 

 

Technology and Good vs. Evil

My Farm or Factory Fake Facebook pages were presented on Monday and they were quite good! I think the students are not as excited because the real facebook has changed its look so much that they can't relate as well to the template. I need to find one that is setup the way facebook is now and use that in the future I think. Having said that, I did still see some of the creativity in the conversations that gave a sense for the tension over immigration, changing roles for women, and the mysteries of industrialization. It was great fun!

I introduced the $35 dollar bill project this week to US history classes. In this project students must nominate someone to be put on this new dollar bill. Its 35 so we are not kicking anyone off of current money and 35 is half way between 20 and 50. For this project, students need to pick someone who had a major influence on the United States. Then write a biography of them focusing on 3 major ways they influenced the US. Then they have to create the design for the dollar bill, dress up like their person, and deliver a 4-6 minute presentation to class defending their nominee for the bill. While working on this, we study Andrew Jackson and analyze whether or not he deserves to be on the $20 dollar bill. So we spent some time this week getting to know Jackson. Jackson was a wildly popular "Tough Guy" who was in over 100 duels in his life, killed a British Solider when he was 12, and had bullets still in his chest while serving as President. As my friend said in reference to Jackson's life "Man's game". Yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that a man like that in the Presidency may not be such a good thing! His interactions with Native Americans and the Trial of Tears is just one such example!

In Ethics we are discussing torture. We explored this week both sides of the debate. We looked at evidence around what can be gained from torture and how important that may be. We also looked at the act of torture itself and delved into an exploration of evil a bit. Here we crossed the Psychology line a little and looked at a couple of famous experiments that shed some light onto evil. The Milgram Obedience Experiment is a classic! Stanley Milgram invited ordinary people to monitor a "Shock Machine" with various switches. The last few switches were labeled "dangerous" and the last one had a skull and crossbones image. The people who were recruited for this would listen to a "learner" give answers and deliver a shock for each wrong answer, increasing the intensity of the shock each time. Amazingly 90% of the people (this includes, women, and all ethnic backgrounds) went all the way to the skull and crossbones. In most cases the learner would cry out in pain and plead with the person to stop shocking them. Because the head of the study was there watching and kept telling the person delivering the shock "It's ok, we are responsible here not you" they kept going. As it turns out the "learner" was an actor paid to pretend they were being shocked and the shock machine didn't actually deliver a shock. But how interesting it is that most people would push the switch that seemed to indicate death just because someone told them they are not responsible! We also looked at the Stanford Prison Experiment whereby College students were randomly assigned to be a guard or a prisoner for 2 weeks to study how prison life effects people. The experiment was stopped after 6 days because of the breakdowns occurring among the fake prisoners. In just a few days the guards resorted to all levels of humiliation, and psychological abuse to get the fake prisoners in line. It was incredible how quickly they lost sight of this as an experiment and how real it all felt. They did these things all seemingly because they were put in a situation with little oversight or training and told to keep the prisoners in line. It was eerily prophetic of the Abu Grahib atrocities committed in 2004. All of this comes out the book The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. His theory is that what creates this evil is the system, not the person. He also concludes that ethics education is the best way to combat this phenomenon so that kids learn about Moral Courage. Great PR for this course!!

(This image is good in that it shows the guards with the sunglasses. Zimbardo's research indicates that the covering of the face with a mask, sunglasses, helmet, etc. can help to psychologically convince one you are no longer an individual but representing a larger organization and just doing what they tell you to do)

Lastly this week in History v. Hollywood, students presented their iMovie Historical Film Trailers. I knew they would be good and they were. But I was blown away by a handful of students who created such an amazing piece of art in 2 minutes! (The trailers are anywhere from 1 minute 15 seconds to 2 minutes long). These few actually gave me a chill I was so impressed with how they connected mood and specific plot points from the film to their trailer and used creativity to make it realistic and easy to relate to. Great stuff! All because of the iPads!! In connection to this, I also stumbled onto a great little media kit that you can snap your iPad into and it becomes a little high quality movie camera!! I'm going to pursue a grant to see if I can get this iographer!

Next week is the annual Maine Council for the Social Studies Conference that I am attending and immensely excited about! I will also be attending the Cross Discipline Literacy Network "Dine and Discuss" seminar to kick off our attempt to improve literacy and implement the Common Core in multiple disciplines!