History And Social Science - From standards to curriculum

- We'll be together for the next hour or so, and we'll be learning a lot about the Model Curriculum Unit project and in particular the units that were developed for history and social science for K-12 teachers. Before we get started, I wanted to do a very short poll, and you should see on your screen a question just kind of gauging your awareness or familiarity with the Model Curriculum Units now. So if you would please just click on your response there, we'll keep this open for a couple of seconds and then broadcast the results. Okay, we're winding down now. Okay, so certainly the majority of you are somewhat familiar, and we certainly hope that after today's session, we'll be able to answer a lot of your questions. Our featured speaker is Karen White, and you're going to see her picture in a second. She is the history and social science content lead for the Massachusetts Model Curriculum Unit project. Karen has loads of experience as a teacher, a middle and high school principal, and as a PD provider. She leads workshops on data analysis, urban school improvement, and best practices for curriculum design and instructional practice. Outside of work, she doesn't go too far from her area of specialty. She enjoys nonfiction, historical documents, and discovering little-known facts about U.S. and world history. And Karen is the featured speaker today, so I'm going to turn the mic over to Karen now. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy the presentation. WHITE: Thank you, Carolyn. That was a great intro. I hope that this Karen White shows up today. Welcome everyone to the webinar, and I want to thank you for taking time. I know everybody is pressed for time, so we're just going to get started. You'll see our agenda today is, we're going to be looking at the not-new history/social science literacy standards, the Model Curriculum Units, fondly known as MCUs. And when we talk about looking at MCUs, we're going to look at an example, we're going to go through the components and the background, and then we're also going to talk about the resources. There'll be a little survey and then question and answers. So all right, let's get started. So, a public service announcement from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. These are the four core strategies that ESE is concentrating on in order to help make Massachusetts a stronger school system. Today, we'll be addressing strengthening curriculum, instruction and assessment. So, what's new? There have been a number of shifts, and if any of you are ELA people, you probably have heard these shifts mostly associated with ELA. Social studies educators may not have heard about these shifts so much, so what are these shifts and what do they mean for history and social science? So these key shifts in history and social studies, science and technical subjects, so all of our shifts are the same. And at the end of the day, we're talking about explicit instruction at the grade level and the grade band level as we get to the older grade levels on literacy standards. This is not an exchange, literacy in place of content. This is a more formal description of many of the literacy tools that we already use in our classrooms. But this more formal, standardized way really makes sure that we address those standards as we move our students forward in learning their content. So from then to now, what has not changed? Well, our curriculum frameworks haven't changed, most certainly, and the whole history. Once it happens, it happened. And so if you think about the core of what history and social science teachers do, that core of content really has not changed. And that's a bonus for us because what that means is we can spend more of our time sort of thinking about how to deliver our content in a different way, using the literacy standards. So what has changed? Again, the literacy standards for history and social science and, overall, how we should approach teaching and learning in history and social science. And you'll see more what I mean on this next slide. In history and social science, the movement's towards this idea of academic language for students who speak and behave like historians or other social scientists. If they take the course, throughout their learning, they should practice as if they're historians. So we want students to do the history. We want our teachers to let go of their knowledge and share that with our students. We know that in a lot of schools, maybe a traditional way, certainly it was that way when I was in school, is that, you know, teachers stand at the front of the class and they give a lecture. We're moving away from that. We want to see instruction in history and social science classrooms that's not only engaging, but is exciting as well. There's less focus on dates and people, and using the skills to help students learn the content. Now, if you look at that last bullet, it says, "History and Social Science Literacy: Maps, Letters, and Pictures." What are some other types of literacies or other resources that students becoming historians will need to learn about? And you can just type some of your responses. Ooh, Ann says, "primary sources." Anyone else? What else? Can you be more specific than primary sources? Diaries, graphs, absolutely. All of those are... That's the work of the historian. That's what we do. And so literacy is just helping us make sure our students can practice the necessary literacy in history and social science. So one thing I want to say before I move on from this slide, especially we talk about less focus on dates and people, more of a focus on themes and patterns and making connections. We want students to be able to apply this knowledge in different contexts, or be able to apply the skills that they're learning, the skills that they're using to learn this content in different situations and within different contexts. And so that means that as the educators, as the teachers, we have to make sure that we go further than just the facts. We have to make sure that we are explicitly teaching the content and then showing students how their learning applies beyond the classroom. So this common core talks about three types of writing, and many of these types of writing are writing, once again, that we expect of our students in history and social science classes. An argument, or what might be known as the position paper. That hasn't changed. We want students to take more ownership of the positions that they take, to do the analysis, and to make sure that they support their argument or their position with valid reasoning, relevant and sufficient evidence. And then there's the informative or explanatory, where students are asked to convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately so students are really... You know, it's information. They are giving information, but once again, it's based on the sources, it's based on the content, the organization, making sure that they choose the right information to use in developing their information in the display or the way they're going to convey their information. And lastly, writing narratives. And in history, social science, usually we have our students writing narratives to develop real experiences or events using effective teaching techniques, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences. So if you think about the... I'm going to ask Angel, can you put your question in the question box for me? I see that you raised your hand. I'm sorry about that. We're going to get you a response. Just now we're talking about argument, which is one type of writing. We're talking about informative or explanatory writing. And then we're also talking about narrative. So those are the three types that the common core pays explicit attention to, and that's where we are being asked to put our attention as history and social science educators. Now, in history and social science, we do research. That's a huge part of what we do. And there is this emphasis now in the common core that students do research. So when I say that the core of what we do really hasn't changed, I really feel that way. I feel like in our classes, we have students do research. Can we do a better job of that? Certainly. And I know with all of the new technology and applications that are out there today, students have an awful lot of choices for getting information. And so as the educators, we have to make sure that they have the skills to evaluate those sources and to be effective in selecting the evidence that they're going to be using. A response to evidence-based prompts or questions. And basically, if you think about... Okay, I'm going to explain it this way. If you think about a question that a student can answer without having read any of the content or read any of the sources that you've provided, that is not an evidence-based prompt or a question. Evidence-based prompts or questions really do require students to pull from the sources to develop their answers, to pull that information and to explain why they selected that information. And then there's the response to text-dependent questions with well-defended claims. And once again, when we talk about text-dependent questions, we're talking about questions that go right back to the source. They go right back to the source. Everybody here with me? Even though I can't hear you all? You with me? Okay, so I'm going to start now and see if there are any questions. Thanks, Deb, you're with me. (laughing) And Alison. If you have any questions, I'd like to take a moment. Maybe you could type them. And I'm taking questions on basically what I've just done. I think it's sort of put into a three... We sort of slice it into three large slices of pizza. Now while people are thinking about questions and anything they want to put in the chat box, I want to take another poll. And this poll is asking where your district or your charter school, or if you're a college educator, where are you in aligning your content in history and social science with the new literacy standards? Okay. Give it a little bit more time. Okay, thank you. So we've got a majority of people that have "their planning is ongoing" and that's great to hear or great to see, and then of course we have always people at either ends of the spectrum. And that's what we also want to hear, because we want to make sure that we are able to address those schools in that situation as well. So I have a question here, asking, "Can you summarize the three types of writing?" The three types of writing are: argumentative, narrative, and informational/explanatory. If you have a more specific question about those, I'm happy to answer them. Okay, I see a question here from... I think it's Jose. "I'm having difficulty reconciling the idea "that there will be less focus on dates and people, "but we still have the old history frameworks, which focuses on dates and people." Yes, you're absolutely right, and I'm going to address that later on in the webinar. So why don't we get moving? I thank you for the question. I'm not blowing you off, Jose. It really is a valid question, and it is one that I am going to address later in the session. So now we're getting into, what are these MCUs? What are these Model Curriculum Units? And why so much talk of these MCUs? Well, we have this big chunk of money from the federal government's Race to the Top grant, and under that grant, we were able to fund a lot of initiatives, one mainly to assist districts and schools and teachers in implementing the standards. And I know there's been a lot of focus on ELA and math and assistance with those, but at the Curriculum and Instruction Office here at ESE, our focus is much wider. We're asking teachers to teach literacy in history, social science, science and the technical subjects. We want to make sure we have models out there for people to see and to use as guides. And then lastly, they go from pre-K to 12, they're in the four content areas that I just mentioned, and so roughly it's about two per content area, but we do have some additional units that have been developed to help address the early literacy. And so you'll see on this slide with... You'll see on the slide the number of history and social science MCUs. Why are there 15 in pre-K to 5? Well, in pre-K to 5, of course we know that those are really sort of foundational years, especially pre-K to 3. And so one of the issues that we're having in Massachusetts, we're trying to raise the level of student achievement, especially with reading in third grade. So we back-mapped a series of units that not only address social studies content, but that they also incorporate some of that real skill teaching for the early grades. You'll see in 6 and 7, there's four, and then in grades 8-12, right now we have ten. We'll probably end up with 12 by the end. Those... I go up to 12 because, as you know, our current social studies standards have pathways that different high schools can select and so sometimes different courses are taught at different grade levels. So most of the high school units can be taught sort of in a grade band of 8 to 10, 9 to 11, or 10-11. And you'll see that when you look at the different units. And you'll see some of the topics. Here, what we tried to do was... And when I say "we," I mean the designers. Massachusetts educators were the ones who wrote these units. We brought experts in to help them, and they developed these units over a three-year process. So this is not something that we expect can happen overnight in districts, but we know that with the right support, it can definitely happen. So of course, the Bill of Rights, Western Expansion, Economics and the Evolution of Technology. That's an interesting unit that does combine elements of science with elements of history. So what is an MCU? What are the parts? Okay, I have another poll for you. Please check all that apply. Okay. That's great. That's the kind of data that we need to see that districts and schools are in lots of different places. So we, once again, that's a call for us here at ESE to help provide differing levels of support. So the Model Curriculum Unit, what are the parts that you'll see when you look at a unit? You'll see what we call the unit plan, also known as the UbD Template. And of course, UbD is Understanding by Design. That's Wiggins and McTighe. That's their whole plan for backwards design. It's a process that really concentrates on understanding. Then there's a quick unit introduction in most of the units. There's a table of contents. And then the lesson plans, and each lesson plan is detailed. There's not a script. We are not scripting units. What we do have is a lesson sequence, sort of what you should do first or second, but there's not a script in terms of "Say this now" or "After you say that, say this." Each unit also includes a curriculum-embedded performance assessment, also known as our CEPA, and CEPA and lesson resources. So we'll be talking more about the CEPA as we move through this. It's a very important part of the units, and I heard someone here, or at least I thought I saw out of the corner of my eye someone asking about DDMs, and I will address that momentarily. So by these MCUs, our MCUs, we use this process of Understanding by Design because we knew that there were many districts already out there who were writing their own curriculum and using the Understanding by Design process. So we knew that there was some level of knowledge about the Understanding by Design backward design process. So we brought the 200, maybe 300 teachers together across the three years in the four content areas to create these fabulous units. And of course, you know, nothing's perfect, but these units are a great start, and we're asking that, especially when it comes to district-determined measures, that people see these CEPAs as a place to start, maybe as one data point that they can use in developing the measure that the districts are going to use for the students that will then be used as part of the educator evaluation system. So how is understanding different from anything else that we teach? Well, understanding has that focus to go deeper as opposed to wider. Each unit takes a few standards, and in history/social science, it's more than likely one content standard that will go deeper, and you'll be using various literacy standards to help you go deeper. So making sure that students don't just know, but they have a true, deep understanding of what it is that's supposed to be taught. So the three stages here: desired results, evidence and the learning plan. You'll see this is a screen shot or a copy of the Understanding by Design template that we used. We used Understanding by Design 2.0, which is slightly different from the template that they released years ago. And the new piece of this has to do with the transfer, and that really makes it plain to the teacher, "What will students be able to do independently? "What will they be able to use their learning to do independently beyond this unit or beyond this course?" So we look at meaning, there's understandings, and then our essential questions. Essential questions are really important, and we'll get an opportunity to see or hear about some essential questions later on. If you look to your far left... no, far right, left... Okay. It's okay to laugh at me. I'm really okay. You'll see the established goals. They are the math, history/social science curriculum frameworks, and they are the standards for literacy in history/social science. And when we say goals, we are really not talking about goals that teachers developed in their teams. Our goals are what the state says that we need students to know and be able to do, the outcomes that we need students to reach. If you go down, stage two is the evidence. What is it that will provide, will let me know as an educator that students actually do know the... have met the desired results? So that's that backward planning. First we decide what students, what we need them to know, the skills and the knowledge and the understandings we want them to walk away with, and then we develop a performance assessment. In this particular model, we've used performance assessments to provide us with the data. And lastly, at stage three or C, that there's a learning plan. And in most of the learning plans in our units, it's sort of an outline of what the lessons will be about. So let's take a closer look. But before I do that, I'm going to take a look at some of these questions here. We have a lot of them, and I don't want people feeling like they're being ignored, but some of them will have to wait until the end of the webinar. As far as will ESE include models or exemplars of CEPA projects, that's an interesting question because we've been trying to get districts from across the state who have been participating in using the units to provide us with some samples. So we do have a few districts that are providing us with some samples from a few of the CEPAs or one of the CEPAs that their district tried. And so we have that information. We do not have a library per se of examples, but what we do need and what we do encourage is we encourage teachers to try the units, to try the CEPAs, and see how your students do. The outcomes of the CEPAs, especially with regard to the lessons, all of that is going to be based on the students that are sitting in front of you. And each CEPA also comes with a rubric to try to provide that uniformity when assessing those projects. Yeah, TDM question still has to wait. So we're going to take a closer look at, "Does Industry Mean Progress"? And this unit was developed by educators in Chelsea and Pittsfield. I thought I saw someone from Pittsfield on the call, check in on the call earlier, so (whooping) to Pittsfield for participating in the project and really being dedicated to this process. So the unit is about Industrial Revolution. It's roughly for grades 8-10, and because the literacy standards are by grade level and/or grade band, it's one of those things where the content standards won't change, but the literacy standards will, given that there are a certain level of expectations for each student at the grade levels and the grade bands. So it's a small case study on the impacts of the industrial... of the impacts of industrialization. And they sort of use Lowell as a test case. The two big essential questions, of course, "Was industrialization worth it for the city of Lowell?" "Do the ends justify the means?" And then the literacy skills that are highlighted in this particular unit are primary source analysis and writing an argument using evidence from multiple sources. Those are two literacy standards that are essential to being a good social scientist and being a good researcher. So stage one is the desired results. And so what you see on this screen is the content standard that this design team elected to use for their unit. And you'll notice there's just one, because the history and social science frameworks are written in such a way that there is a lot of content there. There's a lot of focus on dates and people, and so there's... what we have to do as a history/social science learning community without new standards, we have to think about what's best for our students, given that we do have new literacy standards. Do we want to teach it all, or can we teach some of it and go deeper with it? I also want to show you the actual language of the standard that's being used here. You'll see WH9-10.1. That's the 9-10, that's where we get into the grade bands for the literacy standards. So there's our stage one in Understanding by Design. Our stage two, that's our evidence. And the Understanding by Design model really calls for performance-- performance task, performance assessment. How can students apply what they've learned to other situations and other context? And so in this particular CEPA, we have students that are... we're asking students to analyze and to really research what happened in Lowell-- the good, the bad and the ugly-- and then to make a recommendation to the town council as to whether or not their small, rural town should industrialize. And so students will have lots of resources that they're going to be looking at in order to support the claims that they make. And then stage three is a learning plan. I just took a small piece of this learning plan. Lesson two is "Why Lowell and Who Lived There?" Of course, lesson three is "Identify How Industrialization Affected the People of Lowell Using Primary Sources." And this specific lesson is a longer lesson, I think it's about two to three days, but students really go deep with that primary source analysis and with evaluating and learning how to take notes using different types of graphic organizers to get students to a level of understanding. So more on essential questions. I'm going to ask you to just watch this brief video. I am not going to play the entire video, but I'd like for you to just see a piece of it and then I'm going to ask you two essential questions, and I want to see what you think about those questions. JUDI ALLEN: One of the first things we look at in stage one would be the essential questions and understandings. What do we really want students to know and to be able to do at the end of this unit? JAY McTIGHE: The understandings literally describe what we want students to come to understand. The understandings can be about content, principles and concepts. ALLEN: Looking at the essential questions. McTIGHE: And that bridges to the essential question. Where is the one you want to use to really kind of capture the kids and motivate their interest throughout the lesson, or to almost provoke them? TEACHER: "Why do people move?" is tying in perfectly to understanding five. ALLEN: "Why do people move?" was one of the bigger essential questions, and clearly when you think about that, that transcends westward expansion. We can look at that again when we study immigration. It's a question that's going to reoccur. But does "Why do people move?" really capture that tension that's going on between people being forced to move and people wanting to move? What are we trying to get students to do? TEACHER: I mean, we want them to struggle with a big question. McTIGHE: A common challenge in Stage One of backward design is making sure that the understandings and the essential questions are connected. They don't have to be one-to-one, but there should be a relationship here. WHITE: Okay, I hope you enjoyed that snippet. We do have an entire library of videos from teacher classrooms and even an entire manual that can help districts, schools and folks to develop their own units. So what is progress? What does it mean in this context of Lowell and the mills and the goals? How would you answer the question, "What is progress?" Somebody take a minute and throw an answer inside of that. Inside of that chat box. What is progress? Improvement. Thank you, Jennifer. Advancement. Moving toward a goal. Thank you for participating. So these questions we can answer. They're worthwhile answers. Now I want you to think about how your student might answer, "What is progress?" How might a student? And I would say, how might a high school student or a student in grades 8-10, how might they respond to the question, "What is progress?" (laughing): Getting a good grade. Getting better. Getting better at something. Success. Excellent. Thank you so much for sharing in that chat box, because yes, that's how students, that's what they see. School is what their lives are, so of course they're going to take that question and put it into the context of the lives in which they live, but the great thing about an essential question is that you look at that question over the period of the unit, so what we actually see are students' responses to the question growing and changing as they learn more about the specific content of the unit: in this case, "Does industry mean progress?" So in addition to the template, which has all of the Understanding by Design pieces to it, the Stage 1, desired results, the curriculum embedded performance assessment, and the Stage 3, with the outline for the lessons, ESE, in our Race to the Top plan, decided that we were going to extend UbD to include actual lessons. And so we have a template for lessons, because we wanted to make sure there was some uniformity. So in each lesson, the actual standards and the essential questions from that UbD template, that unit foundation, will be in that lesson. So you will know up front as a teacher, or your teachers will know, "Okay, this lesson addresses this standard, "and this essential question is one that I need to revisit during this lesson." You will also see that some of these lessons ask for a certain level of prior knowledge. And we do that because everybody's in a different place, and in order to use the unit effectively, there is some knowledge that students need to come in with. Of course there are objectives, and then you'll also see that there are some suggestions for differentiation that we are looking to expand upon to help make these units as accessible as possible. So the next one is "more components to the lesson." We're looking at the instructional resources and tools. I think someone asked out there, wanted to know if the units come with resources. Yes, they come with resources and tools. And many of the resources, you'll see on the next slide, were provided by our partner, WGBH. I think one of the neat things about our lesson plan template is that it asks teachers up front, and for us it was our educators that were developing these units, it asks, "What might a student think about this topic coming in?" "Or what might they think that's not quite right?" So trying to anticipate the knowledge that students may bring, but that may not be quite right. And that was tough for teachers. It's tough to put yourself in a place where you're trying to think beforehand what might students think is right when it's actually not so? And then of course there's the assessment. Some lessons end in a formative, or maybe after a few lessons, they have a summative assessment, and then lesson details for teacher notes and technology. Digital resources. WGBH, through PBS Learning Media, was a partner with us in the entire Race to the Top grant, but specifically working with the Model Curriculum Project to provide short clips, interactive activities, and some of the sources from NOVA, the Library of Congress, Leventhal Library and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. I believe that's what NCTM is. And so those are the digital resources. And we have a lot of them. But we also have other resources, such as graphic organizers and outlines for students, rubrics that teachers have developed as they have moved through the unit and feeling like, as a classroom teacher, I will need this tool in addition to any of the resources, the digital resources. So all right, time to answer some questions. So someone asked, "Do MCUs include suggested text and resources?" Yes, in the ELA literacy units, they have specific texts that they do suggest, or even text sets, so if you're in the pre-K through 5 ELA and history/social science units at that elementary level, there are suggested texts and there are suggested resources, as there are in all of our units. So I hope that answers that question. Okay, I'm sorry. I was talking to my backup here, Sara and Alice, because I didn't understand one of the questions. Yes, there is help. Help is on the way. We do have... We do want to work with districts to help them with this work, to help them develop essential questions. At the end of the webinar, you'll get a list of links, and I think I'm going to have Carolyn sort of post those links in the chat box for you so you can go to them directly. But we've taken a lot of time asking ourselves the question, "How can we help the districts develop their own curriculum units that are aligned?" And so as part of the Developing Units at the Local Level interactive guide, there is very specific assistance in helping to develop essential questions. "Will there be more units for sixth grade?" Yes. Yes, geography. Sixth grade history/social sciences, geography. So we do have one unit in the sixth grade right now already posted that is geography related, and then the next unit is going to be looking at something more specific, and that has to do with geography and the economics piece of that. Thanks, Janet, for helping me out there with some of those responses. Appreciate it. Okay, so I'm going to move on. So this is Stage 2, and I know you've already seen this before, but this is where things get really exciting. In stage two of this specific unit, but also in tons of other history and social science units, students are being asked to look at a variety of sources and to take notes, ask questions of those sources, and develop and argument and support that argument or to develop a narrative and to support that. This is what is being asked of students on that new PARCC exam, which Massachusetts has not adopted formally, but there is some field testing going on, and so one way to have students practice the skills necessary for PARCC is through history and social science, the stuff that history and social science teachers do as part of the discipline. So writing to text. This is one of the commissioner's priorities. So what he's really asking from grades 8-12 is that there's a lot of instruction and practice in the analysis and synthesis of sources. And by sources, I think we... There was some sharing in the chat box earlier about the different types of sources. We have a rich amount of different types of sources, many that we can get to digitally. And it doesn't matter where they are, we can get there. We can get to them and show our students those sources. So that's great. That's what we do. And developing an argument using evidence, convincing and compelling. Okay, so that's what you think. Why would anyone else care? And then speaking and listening, which are part of the PARCC Simulated Research Tasks. There are some parts of the tasks that require students to read a... excuse me, to listen or watch a brief film. So that's writing to text. It's a practice that will really help students to be better prepared for PARCC, should we move towards PARCC, or even just changes in testing overall, because the standards have changed. This unit was developed with the Tsongas Industrial Museum, or Museum of Industry, and so many of the primary sources that you would see in this unit are just like what you see here. So just take a couple of seconds and make some observations and just write in the chat box. What do you see? Definitely looking at a primary source. We did not take that picture yesterday. Thank you, Jen. Women in the workplace. Excellent. What is that machinery? What might students say if we placed this picture in front of them and just asked them to tell us what they see, tell us what they think is going on? A laminator. Thank you, Maureen. That's a laminator? She's funny. I see a loom. I see a young woman. There's a caption. Gift wrapping-- exactly. So some of those more modern answers like a laminating machine or a poster-making machine or gift wrapping, that's what we can expect from students at first glance with a lot of primary sources. But as they get deeper, as we ask the right questions, as we guide them to ask the right questions of the sources, then they will deepen their understanding and be able to make meaning of what they are actually seeing. So I want to give a big shout-out to the Tsongas Industrial History Center, one of our partners in the development of this unit. They provided us with a lot of guidance and a lot of the primary source materials. So just a quick review, and then I can get on to just questions. What has changed? The literacy, the explicit literacy standards for history and social sciences, and our approach to teaching and learning in history and social science-- how we really need to be more specific about the content and we need to go in depth more with what we're doing. Key shifts. Plain and easy. Once again, it's about those literacy standards. And those page numbers correspond to the green book, which is where, for the current time, the history/social science and technical subjects literacy standards, that's where they live right now. But we are looking at trying to place those, to place those standards in the history/social science framework as it is.