Reflections

As we've developed this unit for the ALPS web site, Lois went back to her reflection journal she kept during her teaching career and used it for source material for part of this reflection (formally written several years after she taught the unit). Other parts of it come from her experiences talking with her former students and her current thinking about teaching. The reflection is in the form of answers to questions.

Did it work...in your opinion? how did you know, why think so?

The topic seemed good--they were interested in individual lives, and they seemed able to transfer their interest in friends and people alive now to people alive in history--and then to try to see history through their lives. The time seemed about right (six weeks--long enough to do something substantive, short enough not to get sick of it). The phases seemed right (nice flow from a social entry-point where they were reading biographies of current popular figures, mostly, to disciplinary content in American history, with each phase building on the previous one and accruing. The Questions to Consider really helped bridge ideas we generated early to later phases and keep everything focused on the UGs/TLs--I’d use them again). The balance of personal and group accountability felt right (lots of collaborative brainstorming, support, and group accountability in the early phases, growing individual accountability as the unit progressed, sharing of individual expertise at the end, with individual accountability for learning from their peers). The final performance felt about right (lots of ways to use their varying intellectual strengths, lots of ways to show and share their thinking in the different parts of the assignment, lots of time for drafting, consultation, and revision, lots of ways to experience and interpret how different sources differed). The assessment felt like part of the learning experience, not a separate judgment (self-assessment, peer-assessment, and teacher-assessment blended throughout and served as points of comparison and further learning).

What would you change?

I’d spend more time modeling the process of reading short selections, then running through the questions to consider and writing reflective notes, rather than just taking notes on the topics the author happened to address. I wanted them to develop a disposition to use the text for their own purposes, and I think that needed more emphasis.

I’d try using a rubric with the Throughlines as the criteria and the descriptions of four levels based on the Dimensions of Understanding (and I’d try organizing portfolios by the Throughlines, too, incidentally).

I’d work further on having the understanding goals be what was assessed, and I think I’d do that through having both UPs and OAs stress the Dimensions of Understanding (Knowledge--describe the key concepts and how they link together; Methods--describe how you found out and how valid you think it is, what makes you feel skeptical about what you’ve found, what makes you feel confident about your interpretation; Purposes--describe why this understanding matters to you, how such information could be useful and to whom; and Forms--describe the genre of biography in contrast to an historical narrative, consider how your life album is different because its audience is other seventh graders, and not historians or the general public as a newspaper is)

Thoughts after talking with Brian about tfu/colonial bio, etc. 2 and 4 yrs later

I ran into Ed on the street last year--he was a junior in high school then. “How were things going? How was high school?” I wanted to know. “Fine,” he said, and paused. “I don’t know, it’s pretty easy.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well,” he said,”a lot of the history we had in seventh grade, so I kind of cruised and everybody thought I was really smart. But it was all stuff I thought up in seventh grade.”

Then I talked with Brian, now a senior. He said,

I use throughlines a lot--I think ‘what does this teacher really want me to get?’ and then I’d ask --and mostly they’d say, yeah, that was the main point. And I used that kind of thinking to organize my writing--my teachers think I’m a good writer and I always get good grades on writing. But that’s because I think of the things I learned in seventh grade--state an opinion and then support it with lots of evidence. And if something doesn’t help convince someone that your opinion is right, get it out of there--what you put in your writing has got to do something, and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be there. And I always use lots of sources; I try to represent several points of view before I make my conclusion.

That was pretty gratifying, since those are the main things I was intending to teach. But I told Brian I didn’t think I’d actually helped them enough to take a stand and come to a conclusion. He replied,

Yeah, we got the idea that there were a lot of ways to think about things, but it was pretty hard to choose my own position. But I did learn that, even though I couldn’t do it in seventh grade. I learned it because that’s what you did all the time. You’d sit there and say, well, you could look at it this way because of this and this and this. Or you could look at it that way because of this and this and this. But I think I have to go with this third way, because that and that don’t make sense because of this, and that and that seem like really strong arguments because of this, so since I have to choose, I choose this. That’s how I learned to do it now, even though I couldn’t do it then.

The Biography Project

The biography project felt to me like the best unit of my teaching career (done in year fifteen) because it really fit together. I loved the flow of it from phase one (personal biography) to phase two (Founding Fathers) to phase three (Life album of a selected figure from the Colonial era). The students did seem able to transfer their interest from people they were already interested in, to the genre of biography, to the Colonial people for whom they became biographers. It was satisfying to see them engaged in the disciplinary questions, which was possible because they developed understanding of biography before they had to develop understanding of Colonial people or connect them to the Colonial period.

Pictures of Practice Contents Introduction The Colonial Biography Unit (7th Grade History) A Year of Seventh Grade English A Year of Eighth Grade Science The Jazz Unit Snapshot Using the CCDT to Develop Generative Topics