Tag: Texas History

Autonomy In the Classroom

Maybe it’s because I have written curriculum for two districts now and can see the overlap.  Maybe it’s because I have taught all three grades of middle school history.  Maybe it’s because I like to help people.  Maybe it’s because I like to fix things.

All these things are true statements and reasons I’ve always given up time in my own personal curriculum to help introduce students to the 8th grade curriculum.  For the first time this year I heard a dissenting opinion during a district meeting.  The teacher outlines a very well thought out opinion that they should not have to teach any material that pertains to the tested 8th grade curriculum.  It shocked me that someone would say such a thing, but the more I thought about it, the more the debate raged on in my head.

If it is acceptable to ask teachers in non-tested grades to teach some of the tested standards, in Texas it needs to start in the 6th grade.  There is not much overlap from grade to grade, but the conceptual vocabulary definitely can be taught.  When I taught 6th grade I focused on the US Government, the ideas of Revolution and Colonization, and really tried to get the students to understand how natural resources determine a civilization’s economy.  In 7th grade there is more overlap with 8th grade US History.  I usually tried to compare the colonization of Texas to the colonization of the United States, really focus on Westward Expansion, and taught the full 8th grade TEK driven Civil War and Reconstruction units.  The question I always asked myself was, “do I really believe that students are carrying over knowledge from 6th and 7th grade to 8th grade?”  My answer was usually no, but the more times the students are exposed to the material the more likely it is to stick in the heads.  This also wasn’t burdensome for my classroom because I was already teaching those concepts.

As I thought about what it would be like to not have taught those concepts, I think about the freedom that would give me.  I think about all the other ways I could have taken those concepts in my classroom.  It also made me wonder whether that is good for the student or good for the teacher.  We all prefer to teach the way we want and how we would like to teach it, but is that good for the student?  In some ways it would be to the student’s benefit because they could potentially have a more passionate teacher who is teaching things a way that they are super passionate about.  The case that was made to me was that the overlap is what non-tested classes should focus on.  In the case of history this means social studies skills, reading skills, and writing skills.  I’m completely on board with these things.  My counterpoint to this is that if the teacher is already going to be teaching something in their classroom, why not go ahead and help the teacher who will be tested some day?

I guess when it comes down to it, this debate is whether you think that it is valuable to be willing to give up a little of your own time for the betterment of your students or not.  I, personally, will always side on the side of the students and their needs not my own wants and desires.  I want my kids to understand as much material as they can in as easy a way as possible.  I want the teachers that come after me in line to have an easier time with their curriculum than I have with mine.  Does that always work?  No.  But I’d like to think I’m helping in some small way.

Teaching with Zombies

I teach a split class schedule this year, with three gifted sixth-grade social studies classes and two gifted seventh-grade Texas history classes.  I just wanted to make this clear since some of my former posts have talked about my social studies classroom.  My lesson I’m going to share this week is how I chose to teach about the four regions of Texas.

Under normal circumstances, the regions of Texas are boring.  Usually people I’ve observed and I have lectured about the natural resources as well as the uniqueness of the regions.  In that scenario most kids tune you out as soon as you start your lecture and remember nothing about the regions of Texas, which end up playing a big role later on when we look at exploration and settlement.  My first time teaching the regions, I tried splitting my class into four teams and having a debate over which of the four regions was the best.  The problem with that is that there are two plains that are using the same arguments and lose the desire to be competitive quickly.  As I sat down to redesign my lessons I knew I had to scrap everything I’d tried before and completely start over.

I knew I wanted the kids in collaborative teams and I knew that the lesson had to center around the regions of Texas.  I’m always a fan of low stakes competition in my class, so I was trying to think of a way the groups could compete without catering completely to the athletes in my classes.  I decided to use the pop culture phenomenon of zombies to motivate my students beyond the desire to compete.  I started on Monday of this week by setting suspense for Friday by simply labeling it as “Zombie Apocalypse Day” in my agenda for the week.  When my seventh graders saw that on their agendas you could hear the murmurs of excitement.  I knew I had them at that moment.

When Friday finally came around, we started with a simple warm-up that got them to recall the lesson from earlier in the week where we learned what the regions of Texas are.  All the kids were still wondering how zombies played into the regions of Texas, but I didn’t answer any of those questions.  I told them, after hearing their responses from the warm-up, that we needed to start preparing for zombies with a completely straight face.  I told them that it’s not a question of ‘if’ but a questions of ‘when’.  At that point I got them into groups, decided in which order they would select their regions, and get every team a region of Texas.  I then gave them the rules of their scenarios:

  • Decide what you would do if zombies invaded your region of Texas.
  • There are no cities, roads, or other people.
  • You have only American Indian technology before the explorers came to the Americas.
  • They had to reference their textbooks for what resources they had at their disposal.

They basically had to think like an American Indian defending their lands from foreign explorers who kept coming after their land.  The kids looked up and planned how to defend themselves from and imaginary enemy.  The kids were very creative and immediately asked me what the limitations were of zombies.  Most kids agreed that they couldn’t swim and didn’t like fire.  They went to work and I went around and tried to fan their creative flames as they worked in their groups.  Hearing their plans at the end were awesome and funny.  We had good discussions about the weak sides of their plans as well as what they had really right.  These discussions lead to discussions of how the type of zombie that invades would determine how long you could survive.  For instance, if the zombies from The Walking Dead were coming after us we would probably survive longer than if the zombies from World War Z were coming after us.  In turn this lead to discussions of particularly interesting places in Texas that would be easier to defend than others.  It was a great day of learning and talking with my classes.  I think I’ll keep this lesson around for a while and hopefully I can use the lessons learned in this quick assignment to help them understand the explorers relationship with the American Indians.

People and Places

There’s a really good chance that next year I’ll be teaching at least one strand of history that I have little or no experience teaching.  Because of the way scheduling works out this summer, I’ll probably have a couple of my normal social studies classes as well as a Texas or US history course.  I’ve taught Texas history before, but it has been a few years now.  With Texas history being the most likely subject for me to teach next year, I decided that some of my summer reading should be to brush up on my Texas history.

Before school was out, I printed off a copy of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) from the TEA and just read over what I’m expected to cover in my classroom next year.  Just rereading this document helped me rediscover all the things I’ve taught in the past about Texas history.  As I read, I realized that my main shortcoming the last time I taught this material was that I didn’t emphasize the people the state would like me to cover.  The concepts of the material I think I did really well covering though.  I decided to really emphasize the people this upcoming year and made a point to remember what they did for Texas history.

My next step was to dust off my old Texas history texts that I constantly referenced a few years ago.  My favorite of them was called Passionate Nation by James L. Haley.  The book was recommended to me by a colleague who taught Texas history with me a few years ago.  The book does a great job of putting history in understandable terms and creating a narrative story of what happened in Texas at that time.  The main character is Texas, so they don’t go into a lot of the causes for exploration but rather focus on the people and places of Texas.  As I’ve read through the book, I’ve been highlighting the people and their stories from my list of TEKS so that when I get to that spot in history class next year I can be sure to emphasize the stories of these people.

Our department has also chosen to really do our best to link US history and Texas history as well as help the US history teachers out by trying to really teach the civil war well so that the kids will come in with a really great knowledge of that landmark era of US history.  One of the ways I’m going to try and link these two histories this upcoming year is through the idea of a love story.  I went to a training this year where they talked about US history as the “greatest love story ever told” where the states all fall in love with each other, develop a relationship, get married, attempt to get divorced but the judge says they must stay together and work it out.  The divorce is the Civil War era and the working it out is the Reconstruction Era.  I really like that theme throughout the story of US and Texas history, so I’m going to see if it resonates with the kids.  It could be a really powerful idea for connecting knowledge if it is used by both Texas and US history classes in back to back years.

I really love history and I really want my students to love history.  It breaks my heart when I talk with students or adults that had a really bad experience with a history class and ended up hating history from then on.  Hopefully I can do my part in creating students that love history and want to better understand the great history of our state and country.