Donna Phillips
January 2, 2015
We C3 Teachers have been busy at work since this time last year. C3 Teachers all over the country have been blogging and participating in webinars focusing on the four dimensions of the C3. The webinar series has allowed participants to explore in depth each arc of the C3 and see examples of it in action. It is a great tool and resource for experienced and new teachers.
Blogging is another effective tool. Initially, our blogs were celebratory of the C3. As Kathy Swan likes to call it, the 108 pages of awesome were ground-breaking and my first blog is an exploration of what was already familiar to me with the C3 -namely dimensions 2, the content, and dimension 3, the content literacies and skills specific to social studies. I identified the challenge to my instructional practices, arc 1, creating an inquiry, and arc 4, taking informed action and I began focusing more attention in my instruction on these aspects of C3.
I have used the blog as a way to hold myself accountable for sustaining an effort to make manifest the vision of the C3. It is a place where teachers can be honest and authentic, to name challenges and wrestle with solutions and options. It is also a place where teachers can go and feel at home among other educators working through the same shifts in their practice.
As other bloggers and I continue to reflect on our practice through the lens of the C3, what has emerged is an ongoing examination of the C3 instructional shifts.
- Craft questions that spark and sustain an inquiry
- Cultivate and nurture collaborative civic spaces
- Integrate content and skills purposefully
- Promote literacy practices and outcomes
- Provide tangible opportunities for taking informed action
Indeed, these shifts are what is transforming socials studies instruction all over the country as teachers adopt the C3 as their lens through which they teach and reflect.
This year I made the deceptively simple change to one of my classes and structured a class discussion about the nature of justice in light of the events in Ferguson Missouri. We developed our compelling question of “What is Justice?” Seems simple, right? Well that shift alone has since had a trickle-down effect into all of the rest of my instruction. The lessons I had used just last year now take on a new dimension as we anchor everything they learn about government and law back to this compelling question.
I am continually looking for the time in the class period to foster the collaborative civic spaces so students can continue to explore what justice is in light of new cases, current events, and content knowledge.
And again, this deceptively simple tweak -adding a compelling question, has led us down a path where just learning about it and discussing it is not enough. Students want to take action because the sustained inquiry has slowly, but surely, changed their disposition.
I am not sure what form this taking of informed action might be yet, but the students and I are on this trip together as mutual collaborators. THIS is the power of the C3; the power to shape the civic dispositions of our students. The power to transform the classroom into a collaborative civic space. This is why it is transformational. This is why it is 108 pages of awesome.
Okay, so I am still doing a lot of cheerleading for the C3 itself, but after a full year of taking some small, and some bigger steps into the deep, I am a bigger fan than ever, and so are my students.