After a year of lauding hosanna’s towards the C3, during the past month my relationship with the framework fundamentally changed; I started to actually put it into an action. And while my first thought at all times was still, “wow, this is brilliant,” as I spent more time thinking and planning about my teaching for the second semester, the more present thought was more often, “wow, this is going to be hard.”
For the rest of the school year, I’m hoping to use this space to share thoughts on my continued relationship with the C3 as I try to implement it in one global classroom. In this first post in the series, I want to give some context for my work. While every school is unique, mine is especially so in many ways and it is important for readers to realize early on that I have rare freedom and flexibility. In subsequent posts, I’ll discuss the challenges I encounter, how I try to deal with them, and share my inevitable failures and hopeful triumphs. But first, my school and my class:
I teach in a New York City public school right in the heart of Manhattan near Union Square. Harvest Collegiate High School serves a population of students that roughly matches the city’s public school population: we are racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and nationally diverse. NYC does not have zoned high schools outside of its more suburban edges, so students come from all over the city. We do not screen our students in any way, so their educational skills and dispositions range the full gamut. In any classroom in our school, there are students with reading levels fairly evenly spread out from 4th grade to college-level. We are well above the city average for students with special education needs, though below for English Language Learners. A former colleague of mine who came to visit described our lunchroom as a living Benetton ad.
We are also a school only in its second year. I have the privilege of being the school’s very first teacher, and was part of the small group that took the school from its initial approval two years ago to its opening in the fall of 2012. We currently have 230 students in 9th and 10th grade, and will double over the next two years. I’ve written about the school’s founding and vision atChalkbeat NY, for those who are interested.
I have a unique amount of freedom in designing my curriculum. We do not attempt to do a Global survey course with our 9th and 10th graders, but rather offer them three to four theme based electives each semester. We ask teachers to design their “dream courses” and make them a reality for our students. Because I am not indentured to any specific content, I have a unique opportunity to attempt to implement the C3 in the purest sense imaginable.
My course starts with two premises most history teachers I know have dreamed of — What if we started with today and taught backwards, and what if we could do true open inquiry where students’ questions will lead the way? I’m calling it, “It’s Complicated.” When we start this week, my class will pick a significant event or situation currently going on in the world. We’ll ask lots of questions about it (C3 Dimension 1), the most important of which will be, “How Did We Get Here?” I hope by the end of the class, my students will understand that the answer is usually, “well, it’s complicated…” We’ll see how we can use the tools of historians – with likely guest appearances by the tools of economists, sociologists, and geographers – to make sense of the situation (Dimension 2). We’ll then begin gathering evidence and evaluating sources to help us answer our questions (Dimension 3). Finally, we’ll communicate and critique our conclusions, before deciding on some informed action to take in response to the situation (Dimension 4). We’ll complete this cycle a couple times as a class, then students will have the chance to dive into the process individually or in a small group.
So that’s where I start my journey into the C3. I have no idea what even the second day’s content will be, which is slightly terrifying, but at the same time, I feel the C3 has made the skills and dispositions students need to develop so clear that the course already has a solid backbone from which everything else can hang.