Can I do anything besides reading documents for Formative Performance Tasks?

In the summer of 2015 I worked on a summer curriculum project for my school district to design a C3 Inquiry lesson for US History curriculum. I’ll admit I was apprehensive about the amount of time in the classroom it seemed like these lessons would take, because as an APUSH teacher our pacing goal is basically a chapter a block with our textbook. Usually I spend one 90 minute block on the Civil Rights Movement, or less. However, designing this C3 Inquiry on the Civil Rights Movement, and hearing more about current events (Ferguson, etc.) caused me to accept and even look forward to spending more time on the Civil Rights Movement in class.

I got stuck in the design process because our understanding that summer was the best way for students to learn and be able to answer each supporting question was through document analysis sets (i.e. three DBQs) as the Formative Performance Task. Thus, both supporting question two (What happened during the Civil Rights Movement?) and three (What were the effects of the Civil Rights Movement?) had students examining documents, filling out a chart and coming to a conclusion at the bottom of the handout. I was apprehensive on how this would work in the classroom, but as all of the examples we saw followed the same format, that’s what I designed.

The lesson was then completely individually done by students in class, (which helped when I got the flu the week of this lesson), but was really boring for the students. They got the supporting questions answered, but based on student feedback engagement was low. This was not really what I had hoped would happen and I then wanted to re-do what I had designed. I just couldn’t yet figure out how.

I had my enlightenment moment this past fall when our school jumped on the Project Based Learning (PBL) band wagon and some of our staff got trained in PBL. During one of our team meetings, attempting to design a PBL for the fall, a colleague made the point that just because you’re doing PBL doesn’t mean that you have to 100% change your instruction. In PBL, students should seek out and find information in a variety of ways (Lonnett, 2016). You can still lecture, you can still have students read documents, secondary source articles, or the textbook, have discussions, use engaging simulations, whatever instructional strategies you have in your teaching toolbox. I started thinking about my C3 lesson. If PBL and C3 both recognize the same demands, then this idea would transfer over nicely.

I plan to change my lesson so that for the Formative Performance Task for supporting question two (What happened during the Civil Rights Movement?) students are engaged in a short lecture then shown clips from a documentary like PBS’s Freedom Riders with a video guide. This will then be followed by a class discussion to gain a complete answer to the supporting question. They’re still engaged in primary sources (video clips), but not sitting in silence reading documents upon documents for every supporting question, thus increasing their engagement and mine.

My biggest take away – many different forms of instruction can be used to help students develop answers to supporting questions. Branch out and try something new, or re-frame something that you’ve done in the past that has worked well.

Once I finish re-designing, my C3 Inquiry will be posted in the Virginia Hub. I’ll provide an update after the lesson in April.

 

References:

Buck Institute for Education. Gold Standard PBL: Project Based Teaching Practices. (2015). http://www.bie.org/object/document/gold_standard_pbl_project_based_teaching_practices

Lonnett, J. The PBL Process. Handout. 2016

Perrier, C. C3 and PBL: A (Taking) Informed (Action) Crosswalk. C3 Teachers Blog (2016). https://c3teachers.org/c3-pbl-taking-informed-action-crosswalk/

Thacker, E. S., et al. Teaching with the C3 Framework: Surveying teachers’ beliefs and practices. The Journal of Social Studies Research (2016).