Start with a Question

You are in the midst of the most important personal and professional challenge of your life.  Everyone doubted your abilities at the outset, but you've actually had more successes than anyone expected... perhaps even beyond what you believed yourself.  You could win this thing! This was the thinking of General Robert E. Lee in 1863 as he planned to go north and execute a stunning victory in enemy territory. Gettysburg. Unfortunately for Lee, Gettysburg would turn out to be a devastating blow to the Confederacy, and it would be just the thing President Lincoln needed to rededicate the Union cause.  So my students needed to find out why. Why was Gettysburg a turning point in the Civil War? Just as the opening paragraph of this post was meant to create suspense around the Battle of Gettysburg, I want my students to see the drama and suspense behind every document and piece of evidence we study in class. What creates suspense more than movie trailers? Here's how we m...

This morning Alfie Kohn  posted this Tweet: Courses should be created WITH students, not just for them. If a course doesn't vary considerably from yr to yr, something's wrong — Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) March 24, 2015 It made me think about how some teachers put real effort into revising their lessons year to year, while others might pull out the same readings and questions no matter whether they really helped students learn or not.  Do I revise and improve my class activities enough each year?  My 10th grade Civil War infographics lesson is one example.  Last year I wrote a how-to guide for helping students create infographics as proof if their learning.  I was lucky enough that it was noticed and picked up by EdSurge as part of their Fifty States Project .  Now that I've gone through the process again this year with my students and I've improved the experience a bit, there are some important lessons learned. 1. Clarify the Goal Last year my stu...

Crafting study of the American system of slavery for my 15 year old sophomores is always daunting.  Slavery is an affront to human dignity.  Teenagers feel little connection to this level of depravity.  I wanted them to experience an emotional reaction to the antebellum slavery debate, rather than to just learn about it as an obligatory part of their studies. To that end, today we did a document study of three different primary source opinions on the morality of slavery thanks to excerpts compiled by  The DBQ Project . The Sources We looked at excerpts from: Frederick Douglass's "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro" George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! or Slaves Without Masters Reactions to John Brown, from The Americans  by Gerald Danzer The Task I divided the class into small groups of 3-4 students and each group was assigned one of the 3 documents. But they were told they could not read the documents yet.  We have been working...

On this one year anniversary of #BostonStrong  part of what we remember includes the suffering and bravery of those who were injured or killed. It was a day that both horrified us and united us. Part of the reason for those two different affects is that death is hard to talk about. On this day of remembrance I had the opportunity to remember a different event that forced Americans to come face to face with death: The Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust and Ric Burns talked about Death and the Civil War at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts . Their talk focused on Faust's book and Burns's film based on that book. Click the image to find out about the book. Click the image to see the film website. Their discussion focused on how the sheer numbers of dead created new realities and attitudes of death. 2% of the whole U.S. population died in combat or from disease during the war. That adds up to approximately 750,000 people. (Based on the U.S. population today, 2...

Even for an enthusiastic history teacher like me, the idea of conducting a class in which students learn generals' names, gruesome casualty numbers, and mark battle locations on a map seems a bit dry.  Without added meaning, facts alone do not generate real thinking. It takes time to look up the factual information that, taken together, can help students understand why one side won and the other side lost any given war. In our case, it was the Civil War. Students would rather work together than trudge through the facts alone, and I would rather help them learn to collaborate with one another. Here's how we did it: Images from Lily's Blog . With this strategy, they learned about the major battles of the Civil War quickly without having to tediously look up all of the dry names, dates, and numbers themselves.  They saved the information in their Evernote or Google Drive notebooks right on their devices as they carried out the scavenger hunt. Of course, I wanted ...

Class discussions are always valuable, but only for the students who participate in them. I suppose some shy students who would rather listen benefit from hearing the discourse, but the maximum learning experience occurs for those students who are part of the give and take. And neither of these roles is as valuable as being part of a collaboration. Padlet has allowed me to assure 100% participation while giving students to time and space to think carefully about what they want to contribute before it is published to their classmates. It provides a space for them to collaborate, rather than just discuss.  Here are a few scenarios in which my students have benefited from pooling their ideas on Padlet before anyone speaks out loud. Share What They've Learned from a Reading My 9th graders were recently learning about Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, the famous tsars of Russia. Rather than assign long primary source readings that can feel overwhelming, Jessica Baile...

Infographics are a visually stunning way to deliver facts and statistics to readers.  They have become incredibly popular recently on Pinterest, Twitter, and lots of other social media tools because users are looking for a quick way to get reliable information.  Great infographics answer questions that people are interested in answering. They also require lots of research, reading, and analysis to create. Sounds like a perfect activity for my students. Lesson Preparation Essential Question First, I needed to create an essential question.  Answering this question would be the goal of their infographic.  As an introduction to our Civil War unit, our essential question was: How did the differences between the North and South affect each region's strategy and success in the Civil War? Numbers to Crunch Next, I needed to provide the information and data my students needed to answer the question.  I found a few sources for statistics: slavery statistics I...

When guiding students through a long term research project over the course of many months it is imperative that the teacher can: assist with finding informative and reliable sources help with proper citations track student progress give tons and tons and tons of feedback provide encouragement when students get discouraged But then what? Once the project is done, how will the world know what a monumental achievement your students have accomplished?  Going paperless helps them carry it out and then share it with the world. My high school sophomore classes recently wrapped up a 3 month research project on the causes of the American Civil War.  The entire project was paperless.  Here's how we did it: Step 1: Introducing the Project Students learned that they would be researching an event, chosen from a list of options, and would be creating a scrapbook of primary sources.  The scrapbook would start with an introductory essay and would tell the story of ...

Although I know we are 4 months beyond the last Memorial Day and will wait 8 more months before it comes around again, I was fascinated to learn how it came to be through my readings from the History Connected program coursework this year.  I knew it became an official American holiday in the late twentieth century, but I did not know the roots of Memorial Day stretch all the way back to the post-Civil War era. To understand this American desire to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice, one must first understand the scale of death that Americans were coping with in the wake of the War Between the States. The number of soldiers who died between 1861 and 1865, an estimated 620,000, is approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.  The Civil War's rate of death, its incidence in comparison with the size of the American population, was six times t...

My sophomore students are wrapping up their unit on the American Civil War.  There is a lot of information for them to take in; massive casualty numbers, battles, generals, politicians, primary source readings like the Peninsula Campaign Letter and the Emancipation Proclamation , the lives of slaves during the war... The final lesson of the Civil War is always the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.  This year I was searching for a new way for my students to study the information.  After a little searching, I found an amazing website: The Abraham Lincoln Papers from the Library of Congress.  One of their special collections is called The Lincoln Assassination .  There I found broadsides, illustrations, and other publications that convey the public sentiment surrounding the shocking events of April 15, 1865. So.... here is my plan for Monday! The Set Up First, I will ask the students to read this short summary of the events surrounding...