Technology V Teacher: The Battle for Attention

In the 1980’s computers were a sight to see in schools. However, in 2015, it’s a sight to not see a computer or cellphone in a school. This change is known as the digital age. I grew up in the strongest time of the digital age. I remember the dial-up computer in my house when I was younger and now there is Wi-Fi and cell phones in ever home. In school, I remember only using computers to play math24 online and now I use computers for all sorts of school work. So this poses the question of can technology be used in schools and is it helpful?

In my opinion, the answer to both of these questions is yes. Applying technology in the classroom is always a way to appeal to the younger generations and also helps to make the classroom more entertaining. As we could see from our readings this week, there are multiple ways to apply technology in the classroom. We’ve come from the “Oregon Trail” game all the way to games that help balance the federal budget (which is useful in a civics class). We can also use resources such as social media boards such as Pinterest to get information. I for one can confirm this works because I have a whole board dedicated to history I want to learn about and history jokes that I read to entertain myself sometimes. It is obvious that there are multiple ways that technology can be applied into the classroom.

Even though technology can be implemented in the classroom, is it a good idea? Allowing students to use technology such as cell phones, tablets, and laptops in the classroom seems like a good idea but it can be abused. Students can be scrolling through Tumblr, texting their boyfriends/girlfriends about how they are allowed to use their phones in class, or playing Angry Birds on their tablet. When students have these distractions, how much information are they getting from our lesson while texting Jessica about what Katie did at the party last night with Brad? As future teachers, we do need to think about how we want technology in the classroom and how much of it.

You Can’t Believe Everything You See in a Textbook

As students in high school, we primarily focus on what our teachers and our textbooks focus on. However, how accurate are our textbooks? Textbooks can be very biased depending on where they are coming from or where they are being sent to. Knowing this, how likely are students to receive an unbiased textbook or a textbook that presents them with the correct information? From what I have read, very unlikely. The unfortunate reality of this however is that because of these books, societies have been shaped to believe that their side was the right side and that wars only happened for particular reasons. One of the biggest examples of this is the Civil War.

The main bias associated with the Civil War is what the war was really over. Many textbooks have two different opinions: states’ rights or slavery. When I was younger, I was taught in high school that it was over states’ rights. As I got older and learned how to analyze documents, I learned that slavery was the main reason for the Civil War. But why is it that I was taught states’ rights and now slavery? One of the articles from the Washington Post states why this is perfectly. What they say is “Publishers mystify secession because they don’t want to offend Southern school districts and thereby lose sales.” Why would the south want to be told the truth when in this day and age we are denying the fact the Confederate Flag stood for racism, oppression, and bigotry? With these questions and ideas in mind, we can look at this as another way to teach history as a mystery.

Knowing that textbooks are inaccurate and biased in most cases, we can look at this as a way to teach. For instance, textbooks assume that students have previous background knowledge which we know to be false. We can take this concept and find a way to approximately gauge how much information our students know. Along with this, you can present a topic to students listed within the textbooks and then have them do a research activity where they try to find the biases within the book and what the reality of the history is.

Accuracy of History on the Big Screen

The Tudors, Reign, The Patriot… What do all of these shows and movies have in common? As much as we love watching them, how much historical accuracy is in them and are they honestly meant for entertainment or information? Or is it a decent mix of both. My argument is that it is a mixture of both. However, Reign is pretty much just for entertainment due to the fact that at least 75% of the show is historically inaccurate from what I know. While The Tudors is primarily meant for entertainment, a good majority of the show is accurate. The entertainment is because it is a Showtime show. However, what category does The Conspirator fall under?

There have been many mixed reviews on this movie. However, both come to one conclusion. While it is historically accurate, it comes across more as a drama piece than as a history piece. As NPR describes it “The Conspirator is a graceful film with a heartbreaking climax, but instead of a great and timeless drama, it’s just a powerful melodrama” due to the fact that even though it does make a great movie for the trial of Mary Surratt, the characters are very overdramatic in their acting. However, AHA Today makes an even better point when describing the historical accuracy of the movie. When you think, Civil War, slavery is normally the first thing to pop into your head. However, there was no mention of slavery in the movie even though a majority of the main characters, were in fact slave owners. When looking at this fact, how can one really asses the accuracy of a movie and whether or not it was just filmed as a drama piece?

In my opinion, I feel that we should be educating our students on how to do this. Students should know about the characters prior to watching the movie. In fact, you could even turn this into an activity while they are watching the movie. Have them do research on what they are about to watch beforehand and then, while watching the movie, have them compare what they know to be true, what had been left out, and what had been falsified. Overall, I think this is the way we can teach our students about history while using modern day cinema and T.V.

Promoting Mystery in the Classroom

The key to a good mystery is anticipation and having the audience guess in their head what is going to happen next. The audience may be wrong or they may be right. That’s what draws their attention. The fact that they can make their own inferences. So, should we be teaching our classes this way?

In the past few years, I have been asked why I wanted to teach history. I was told out of all the subjects, history was their least favorite because it was boring and nothing but memorization of names, dates, places, and wars. My goal as a teacher is to change these opinions of history. One of the ways to do this is to teach history as if it were a mystery and to get the students engaged. The way to do this is by giving them a question to answer and then provide them with the materials necessary.

What Gerwin and Zevin help with is giving us examples of how we are to do this. For example, give them an event and a question, provide them with a packet of documents, give them time to research, and then lead a discussion. The strategy I feel like I would use the most in my classroom that they list is to play the questioner/devil’s advocate/provocateur. I feel like this would best help students realize the answer without giving it to them and also helps start discussion among students.

The Mystery of History

In classrooms today, teaching history as a lecture based course is a popular choice. This choice does not engage students to learn and in fact, can put them to sleep in some classes. However, a new option on how to teach has started to make an impact. That is, teaching history as if it were a mystery. In classrooms, you are told that history is straight fact, when however, it can be interpreted in many ways. What teaching history as a mystery does is lets students interpret their own opinions on historical events or time periods.

When reading Teaching U.S. History as a Mystery by David Gerwin and Jack Zevin, one can get a better understanding of how to teach history as a mystery. In one part of the book, they state that “people have the need to play” and that this method helps people feel like they are “playing” by solving a question. An example of this in the classroom would be taking an event, such as the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower, and then having them do research to see what they can find and have them form an opinion. There are multiple accounts based on this topic from a variety of people and by having students read those accounts, they may be able to form an opinion on what actually happened to the princes. However, some topics may be tricky to discuss due to biases or beliefs held by the students. Teaching history as a mystery also helps students be able to evaluate sources and whether they are accurate or not by following a very important list of criteria for analysis.

Overall, teaching history as a mystery prepares students for outside of the high school classroom. By being able to analyze sources appropriately, we are preparing students for their time in college if they choose to go down that path. Along with preparing students for college, teaching history this way engages the classroom. By letting them form an opinion instead of reading straight facts, students also are able to learn more information on the time. So the question is, in your classroom, do you want to teach to engage and prepare or do you want to teach just to test?

Of versus For

Times have changed when it comes to creating lesson plans and how we assess our classrooms. Teachers have started focusing on not only teaching for tests, but also teaching so that students can learn the basic skills needed to succeed in high school. According to Chappuis, Stiggins, and Arter, this is categorized as “assessment for and of learning.” What this means is that as teachers, do we want to teach with assessment over a unit for the benefit of students and our learning or do we want to teach to test which is the “of” learning portion? So in other words, we need students to be asking more of “How am I doing?” and less of “How did I do?”

A prime example of this was given on the Teaching History website when it discusses inquiry lessons. Students must do research in order to answer a given question which also lines up with the C3 Framework of “Evaluating Sources and Using Evidence.” During this lesson, a question is provided that must be answered using actual research instead of answers based on moral values. When relating this back to formative assessment, as a teacher, we must be able to help guide students on the right track as they are working on answering this question and provide feedback to them as they are doing it to make sure they are getting the most out of the lesson. However, if we were to assess this assignment as a summative assessment, they could possibly be handing something in to us without even being 100% sure that what they turned in was correct.

In my opinion, formative assessment is the way work should be assessed for about 80% of the school year. Yes it is beneficial for student learning but as teachers, I feel like we also need to be able to summatively assess our students to make sure that when EOG/EOC/Midterm/Finals come along, they will be able to pass them and their grades reflect back on how well we are teaching them. Formative assessment also allows for more creativity in the classroom on how to assess student knowledge instead of just handing out a test every unit. Overall, the main goal of formative assessment and why it would be the most helpful in the classroom is because it shows where improvement is needed and helps students get a better understanding of how to fully grasp the content material.

Challenging the Norm of the Classroom

In the Social Studies Preamble of North Carolina, the second paragraph states that “Learning from history requires more than the memorization of people, places, dates, and events.  It requires that students are able to explain the causal connections between and among events, use historical knowledge to resolve contemporary problems, analyze contemporary issues…” Yet for some reason, teachers are still teaching as people, places, dates, and events. Students are not learning the key concepts they should in order to successfully achieve in high school and in college. However, the new C3 framework for social studies encourages rigorous student learning and how to engage it.

It encourages teachers to ask students engaging questions which instead of having them memorize, has them think more on the complexity of the subject. When they are able to analyze a subject in depth, the overall goal of the C3 framework is achieved. That goal is helping students become a more involved citizen in their country or community. Thankfully, I had the kind of teacher in high school who assigned us projects to help us be more active citizens. These projects ranged from a variety of activities such as volunteering, creating our own city, and even holding a mock trial in class to understand the judiciary system.

The way I plan on instructing a classroom is to not base it primarily on lecturing. Instead, engage using activities that use a thematic approach. On the days I do lecture, ask questions that have the students really think about the impact it has/had on them or on today’s overall society. Memorizing dates and names never worked for me in high school so hopefully by challenging this norm can engage more students into going into the history field or even help them in their college career.

Breaking Down Learning

In relation to teaching thematically and chronologically at the same time, I feel like teachers face a bit of a challenge. In my opinion, the way teachers should be able to do this is by picking a common theme from within their time period that can not only be applied to the entire period but can also show an impact on today’s society. However, when attempting to teach this way, teachers face another issue. The issue being how can they teach in both of these ways while also meeting the common standards that their students should be able to know?

I believe that by looking at the standards, and then using the “backwards design” for curricular planning, teachers should be able to achieve this. If they start by picking a theme they want to address and then working their way backwards by setting goals of what they want their students to learn, then having their students show that they understand not through activities but by explaining and inferencing, and then having them do activities, it should be a successful way to teach. For example, when teaching about the Renaissance, a teacher can identify an overall theme such as the radical change of culture, art, religion, and more and then make sure students understand all the information and then have them apply it to the current world around them.

When I teach a history course in the future, I plan on using the textbook as little as possible because I feel that textbooks do not fully teach students what they should know. Learning should come from students being able to make connections to other time periods or even to current events that are going on today. The way to do this is by taking the standards and breaking them down to where students in the classroom can understand them and know what they need to achieve. Once we know that our students know what they need to achieve in the unit, we are able to use the “backwards design” in order to help them reach these goals.

The Change in Taxonomy and Education

As time goes on and things get older, change is bound to come. As our focus on certain studies in the school system has changed over the years, the way we teach has to change too. The big change in our system of how we taught was based on the change of Blooms taxonomy. The base of the taxonomy has stayed the same in that you should be able to remember what you have learned which is also referred to as your knowledge in an area of study. However, what we have our students achieve has changed from being able to evaluate to being able to produce possible questions of their own to even coming to conclusions about a question presented to them. Even though the taxonomy has changed, why is it that some teachers are still following the old taxonomy versus the new one which challenges students on a deeper level?

In the article written by Wineburg and Schneider, we notice that even in an AP U.S. history class, teachers are still following the taxonomy written in 1956 instead of the updated one written in the 90’s. The information they provided us with was even pretty recent as the article was published in 2009.  They had AP students and college students analyze the same document which was the declaration of “Discovery Day” dedicated to Christopher Columbus. I would think that students in an AP history class would have been able to dig deeper into the document to analyze it further but instead, related it back to the time period. The reason I find this shocking is that if they are paying to take classes that count towards college credits, why are their teachers not preparing them for college level analyzing? They are analyzing based on their knowledge and not looking further into the document for any other answers. When Wineburg and Schneider say that the taxonomy should be flipped, I completely agree. We need to start with students generating possible ideas from the document provided to them that way they can do further research and make deeper connections which then leads to better knowledge on the subject provided. However, the question still remains that if we should be preparing our students for college and higher-order thinking, why are teachers still following the old taxonomy? Along with following the old taxonomy, why are teachers also only allowing their students to stop at the bottom tier of the pyramid instead of helping them find the answer at the top?

Bio-Abigail Selph

I am a senior and my major is History, Social Studies Education. The reason I am taking this course is to understand the biases that appear in history textbooks and even within the classroom environment. I am also taking this course to get a better understanding of how lessons are structured for different levels such as a regular class vs. honors vs. AP. When I graduate from Appalachian, I am planning on going for my Masters degree in History. Once I finish my education, I am planning on teaching either back in my home county or possibly in a different state.

Fun Facts: My roommate likes to call me Anna from Frozen because I have a white streak in my hair. I am actually 19 and a senior in college. I have also traveled to a lot of countries in Central America and the Caribbean.