By Stephen Lazar, on January 24th, 2012
John Goodlad absolutely nails the predicaments of teaching:
Those women–and men–who do enter teaching today work in circumstances that include some gain in their autonomy in the community accompanied by some loss in presitge and status; an increase in the heterogeneity of students to be educated, especially at the secondary level; increased utilization of schools to solve critical social problems such as desegregation; a marked growth in governace of the schools through legislation and the courts; continuation of relatively low personal economic return; limited oppurtunities for career changes within the field of educaiton; and continuation of school and classroom conditions that drain physical and emotional energy and tend to promote routine rather than sustained creative teaching. Merely holding teachers accountable for improved student learning without addressing these circumstances is not likely to improve the quality of thier professional lives and the schools in which they teach.
Take a guess when this was written, click here to find out, and then try not to cry.
By Stephen Lazar, on January 24th, 2012
I’m part of a roundtable on teachinghistory.org on the question, “What do the Common Core State Standards mean for history teaching and learning?” My take:
I am pretty sure I am supposed to be against the Common Core Standards…[but they] offer us an opportunity to broaden the conception of our discipline from one that focuses on helping students acquire an established body of knowledge to one that emphasizes the historical thinking skills that are central to constructing this knowledge. What the standards do in a simple and elegant fashion is clearly articulate the disciplinary skills necessary not only for reaching the relatively low bar of “college and career readiness,” but also for the much greater calling of creating an informed and critical citizenry.
Read the rest of mine here, and the whole series of insightful posts here.
By Stephen Lazar, on January 16th, 2012
Have Your Students Participate in the Manning Marable “Along the Color Line” Speech Contest
While there is more to the contest than just writing about King, one of the suggested lessons focuses on King’s legacy, and Dr. Marable’s view of it. The King lesson is here, and full contest information and suggested lesson plans are here.
Remember King’s Reality
Last Martin Luther King Day, I wrote about four lessons students, and their teachers, can learn about Dr. King that challenge common misconceptions about his life and work:
- Sometimes, history happens by accident
- King dreamed of a whole lot more than white and black boys and girls joining hands
- King fought against terrorists
- King was a human being, with flaws
Learn about the People Who Made King’s Work Possible, and Lessons we Can Learn From Them
By Stephen Lazar, on January 11th, 2012
Seven years ago I fell in love with two wonderful woman named Bernice Robinson and Septima Clark, who founded the Citizenship Education Program, the little known backbone of the Civil Rights Movement. Without these two, I am certain we would not be celebrating Martin Luther King Day this Monday. We in education have much to learn from them:
The primary goal of the Citizenship Education Program was to teach and develop first-class citizens. And every aspect of the program was grounded in this goal—from teacher training sessions to day-to-day practices to the rhetoric of staff correspondence. Dozens of adult literacy programs had targeted African-Americans in the South—but none were as successful as the CEP, because too many narrowly focused on the skill of literacy, rather than its application in citizenship.
In my opinion, we have made a similar mistake with skill-based competency testing under No Child Left Behind. A curriculum and testing regimen that only focuses on skill development outside of meaningful and relevant application cannot prepare students and communities for 21st-century success. I hope that with the implementation of the Common Core standards, we will not make the same mistake again. As teachers, we need to develop a clear sense of our own purpose—and make every effort to ensure that how we teach each day aligns with that purpose.
Read the rest at Education Week Teacher. It’s an honor to share part of their story.
By Stephen Lazar, on January 8th, 2012
At the beginning of the year, I set a number of goals for myself, one of which was to reflect on said goals every two months. My second set of reflections are in italics below.
Teaching
I will improve the way I give feedback to students. Formally, I hope to develop a system to give students feedback about writing that meaningfully a) tells students where they are, b) what they need to do to improve and c) is efficient enough that I can provide frequent and timely feedback to all students. I also need to make sure I am giving informal feedback more frequently to all students. (I hope that moving to a Standards Based Grading system will enable these things to happen organically).
At the end of the semester, I saw that a good chunk of students had changed how they went about trying to improve their grades. Instead of asking for missing assignments or extra credit, students were asking how they could demonstrate improvement in different learning goals. This seemed to be a good indicator that I’m doing well with the first two parts of this goal. I am still struggling with being more efficient in grading, and am thinking that might be a persistent struggle for as long as I teach (and that is okay).
Students will have multiple opportunities to rethink and revise their answers to large essential questions throughout each unit, and will also reflect on and revise all major work.
I have been widely divergent in achieving this goal. I have been better at using large essential questions to guide my class. For the past few months, the question “How Democratic is the US?” has been at the center of everything we have done, and it has been rewarding to see students’ answers to this question evolve as we’ve looked at different events. At the same time, I have yet to have students do major revision of their work, and need to work this into my plans for second semester.
I will solicit bi-weekly feedback from my students to ensure they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and to give them a voice in what happens in the class.
I am abandoning this goal. Bi-weekly was too frequent, and I am finding I am getting much more useful information from informal verbal check-ins than I did from my survey.
Leadership
The Social Studies Critical Friends Group will meet once a month, and will be valuable for its participants.
I’m very happy with how the group has been going. As we meet more often, I’m starting to see lots of connections made between various presentations. I wrote a more thorough update last month.
Advisory
100% of my new advisees will either graduate or earn at least ten credits by June.
Thirteen out of fifteen are on pace. One of my advisees is transferring to a school that will give him a better chance of progressing. Unfortunately, I had an advisee miss most of the past two months for health reasons, but she’s back and I hope to help her get back on track in the coming weeks
100% of my advisees will be accepted to college, and will have a plan to pay for it or whatever else they choose to do next year.
About half of my advisees have been accepted into schools they are willing to attend. In February, we need to begin looking at how to pay for it.
Personal / Professional Development
At least once per week, I will write and publish a piece of writing about teaching social studies, be it about my practice or teaching in general.
I’m still mostly on pace for this one, and am proud that in the last two months I have had three pieces published to much wider audiences:
Every two months, I will write and publish a self-evaluation of how I am doing on these goals.
Check. Check.
By Stephen Lazar, on January 5th, 2012
Two months ago, Nancy Flanagan wrote a great piece about changing her mind when it comes to school reform, which inspired me to do the same at the New York Time’s SchoolBook:
I used to think that if I didn’t know the solution to the problem, I could figure one out. I now think some problems are so complex that there can never be a silver bullet.
I used to think we needed to create model schools that could then be replicated. I now think that it is so hard to sustain a model that each school needs to be invested in its own unique vision.
I used to think our goal should be to create systems of great schools. I now think great schools are so hard to create and maintain that our goal should be to create good and sustainable ones.
Read the rest here.
By Stephen Lazar, on December 20th, 2011
Last year, I found myself teaching a Global History course for the fourth time in my career. Like many history teachers in the US, most of my historical training had focused on American history, and it was my passion for it that led me to become a Social Studies teacher in the first place. The first time in my life that I was in a classroom learning about Ancient Greece and Rome was when I was teaching it as a student teacher, in East Greenwich, RI. There, the course was still “Western Civilization”. I later taught “World History 1” in Virginia (Beginning of Time -> Renaissance), and “Global History 3/4” in New York (Renaissance -> Now). What was evident to me in all courses was that a dominant narrative of the progress of western civilization was the backbone of the course: River Valley -> Ancient Greece & Rome -> Middle/Dark Ages -> Renaissance/Exploration/Scientific Revolution -> Enlightenment/Atlantic Revolutions -> Modernity. The Rhode Island curriculum basically took that as the story, while Virginia and New York used that to organize chronological periods, then adding in units about other portions of the world, often leading to illogical breaks in the stories of other regions, particularly China. I realized there was something problematic about this conception of World History, but did not have the vocabulary or knowledge to articulate anything more than “this seems Eurocentric.”
Thanks to a recommendation in the October issue of Social Education, however, I now have that language. Ross Dunn’s article, “The Two World Histories” is the most important piece I’ve read about teaching World History, and needs to be required reading for anyone who teaches the subject. It clearly articulates two camps on World History:
- World History A: This is the home of most current scholarship on World History, where the focus is on major trends, patterns, and changes on a global scale.
- World History B: This is the home of both conservative Wester Civilization preservationists and those, like my least-thoughtful self, who want to see more attention paid to all cultures, particularly those that are the heritage of the students I teach. This is history as the history of civilizations, cultures, nations.
Nearly all political argument around history, and therefore the development of all state standards, occurs in domain B. The New York Global curriculum and its Regents exam are no exception. Of the 85 terms that are assessed most frequently in the Multiple Choice portion of the exam, 75 represent people, places, periods, achievements, or events that take place within specific regional or national histories.
Dunn argues that what is needed instead is:
to study the history of humankind writ large, recognizing that the Earth is a “place” whose inhabitants have a shared history. To be sure, important developments have taken place within the confines of continents, regions, societies, and nations, but those ver-changing human aggregates remains parts of the globe in all its roundness.
He recommends the AP World History and World History For Us All curriculums as good models of World History A, as well as the National Standards for History. It’s also clear though, for those like myself without a strong background in World History, that further reading and professional development is needed. Though I didn’t fully realize until now why I found it so insightful, I would recommend World History Connected as a good place to start reading.
I hope you will take the time to read the article in its entirety and let me know what you think about it in the comments.
By Stephen Lazar, on December 14th, 2011
(This is a long overdue follow-up post)
A few weeks ago, my students left me with a wonderful problem: they generated so many great questions leading to larger inquiry, that we had to narrow down the list in some way. I must admit, when I came to school that Wednesday morning, I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do, so I took a chance. I gave my students the entire list of questions, and told them they had 30 minutes to democratically choose five of them that would help us answer our unit essential questions: “How democratic is the US?” and “Does my vote count?” I held an election for a facilitator, told students they first had to decide how they would go about making the decision, and then sat down and took notes on their process. What followed in each section captured the American political process in all its flawed messiness.
First Period
This class held no discussion of how to make their decision. The facilitator started by asking everyone which of the categories (that I had rather arbitrarily created) they were most interested in. At one point, the facilitator said, “I think we should take 2 questions from each category with more than 4 votes.” Another student responded, “that doesn’t make sense, we’ll have too many questions,” but the discussion about how to go from there ignored the complaint. The class was much more focused on their objective rather than discussion how to create a better process, much like the American electoral system, where we still vote on Tuesday for antiquated reasons. The conversation also showed just how much ballot construction can influence the results of a vote.
At another point, one student took on the role of the media, encouraging people to continue arguing for his entertainment. When a student lost a vote, she said “I feel like this classroom is not a democracy.” The facilitator asked her, “What would you like to change?” But the instigator then shouted “Fight fight fight fight!” distracting everyone from the base issue that was raised. The process of deciding continued without any discussion of how to create a better process.
Second Period
Much like first period, there was no discussion of process. The facilitator on her own decided to go question by question asking for yes or no votes. People were voting on their interest levels. At one point, a student reminded the class “We need 5 questions to answer these [essential] questions [on the board].” Her comment was ignored, much like how in American democracy, we rarely focus on big picture and long-term, but rather on the issues right in front of us.
About 15 minutes into the process, one student noticed “No one’s even voting!” Nonetheless, the voting continued. Five minutes later, another student berated the class, “Can everyone participate, because you are going to start complaining about our decisions?” Despite the complaint, no further effort was made to include other’s voices.
Third Period
Much like the earlier periods, the facilitator decided how to proceed on her own without discussing with the class. She too went category by category, and then had students vote for one question within each category.
In the end, these were the questions students chose:
First Period
- Where is the government when Black Friday events happened?
- Why is pepper spray legal when police use it?
- If people are allowed to protest, why do police attack protesters for protesting?
- Can we manage to have safer Black Fridays?
- How do we eliminate poverty without becoming Communist?
Second Period
- What makes the US democratic?
- Can my vote get canceled out?
- What limitations do voters face?
- Is there a way to make our country more democratic?
- What would the US economy be with a Communist government?
Third Period
- Why is it okay for shoppers to campout out and not for protesters?
- How are citizens affected by police decisions?
- Why hasn’t there been another form of government in the US?
- How much power should one person have in the government?
- What would you want to pursue other than a capitalist lifestyle?
The questions about communism and capitalism were tabled until our second semester economics course. The remaining closed questions were discussed in class the following days, which eventually led all three classes to questions about the influence of money in politics, which we have been examining for the past two weeks.
By Stephen Lazar, on December 13th, 2011
This was chilling to read:
One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity has been that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity.
This comes from from Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom?, a review paper on the research. As much as I wish I could say this doesn’t apply to me, I know that sometimes it does. On my best days, my favorite students are those who subvert my assignments, challenge me and others, and do so with sass and attitude. But on my worst days, I just want those students to shut up so I can move forward with what I have planned. This realization is something that will stick with me for a long time.
The entirety of the paper is worth reading, as is the post on the Marginal Revolution blog that led me to it. This line particularly resonated with me:
Torrance (1963) described creative people as not having the time to be courteous, as refusing to take no for an answer, and as being negativistic and critical of others.
I wonder to what extent the findings of this review apply not only to students, but to creative educators as well. Are you a creative educator who has been accused of any of the above? I would love to hear from others on this.
By Stephen Lazar, on December 2nd, 2011
Frank McCaughey and I will be presenting tomorrow morning at 8am sharp at NCSS. Hope you can join us physically or virtually. For those who can’t, our presentation and a link to our materials are below. Continue reading Make History Matter at 8am Tomorrow at NCSS
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About Me I am a NBPTS Certified Social Studies and English Teacher in Brooklyn. I work with teachers to support Project and Inquiry-Based Learning. My writing on policy and practice has been published on the New York Times, Education Week, and Gotham Schools websites.
You can also follow me on Twitter @SLazarOTC. |
