As I mentioned in my last post, my first thoughts as I dove into planning my Global History class with the C3 was “wow, this is brilliant,” but 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.” In this post, I want to highlight one of those challenges – the large quantity of indicators – and two ideas I have for dealing with buckets of them in a meaningful way.
In my teacher preparation program, I was drilled in the backwards design process of Understanding by Design, so to some degree, I’ve always thought about planning in terms of what I wanted students to be able to do. As I developed as a teacher, I also developed a system of grading that many call “Standards Based Grading,” where feedback to students is based on certain Learning Goals (see this series of posts on my blog for more information). I tell teachers at my school that 6-12 Learning Goals is appropriate for a semester-long course, though to be honest, I have never successfully done more than seven or eight.
This is in direct conflict, however, with what I found reading through the C3. Given that NY’s Global courses are actually supposed to be History & Geography, there are 45 C3 indicators I needed to think about for this class, not to mention the indicators I was interested in exploring in the second dimension’s other disciplines. I had to find a way to combine and prioritize goals.
My initial process was a little arbitrary: I went through the entire Framework and picked the indicators that seemed relevant to the goals of my course. Since my course focuses on students’ questions budding our inquiry work, I knew it would be important for students to “Explain how supporting questions contribute to an inquiry and how, through engaging source work, new compelling and supporting questions emerge” (D1.4.9-12). At the same time, I didn’t anticipate spending too much time on historiography, so didn’t choose D1.3.9-12, which asks students to “Explain points of agreement and disagreement experts have about interpretations and applications of disciplinary concepts and ideas associated with a supporting question.” This process allowed me to cut the list in half. The list I ended up with, along with the rest of my work on it, is here.
Still, 28 indicators were too many. I then prioritized these indicators, asking myself which ones I was most likely to come back to frequently, explicitly teach students how to do, and on which I would give them feedback and chances to revise. These are the three things students need to actually get better at any skill. Since my class is all about causation, something like “Analyze multiple and complex causes and effects of events in the past” (D2.His.14.9-12) was a no-brainer high priority. I wasn’t ready to drop those indicators with a lower priority yet, so I next sought to look for patterns to see if there were ways to combine indicators into Learning Goals for my class.
After many attempts at coding the indicators differently, I came to three conclusions about many of the indicators I chose:
- Eleven of the indicators could be bundled under “Cause & Effect,” which is really the heart of the course. They became one Learning Goal, “Students will analyze multiple and complex causes of events, distinguishing between long-term causes and triggering events.”
- Fourteen of the indicators could be reformulated as questions that I could offer to students as a toolkit for their inquiry work. These “Inquiry Moves” would not need to be explicit Learning Goals for my class, even though they would be used frequently. For example, in indicator D2.His.3.9-12 students are asked to “Use questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by the historical context.” In the toolkit I’ll give to students, they will have the question, “How does the significance of actions change over time? How are these consequences shaped by the historical context?” My first draft of the full toolkit is here.
- Ten of the indicators seemed to be in the category of “things smart people do in appropriate situations,” such as “Analyz[ing] how historical contexts shaped and continue to shape people’s perspectives” (D2.His.5.9-12). As this group of insights all seemed to be contextual “Thinking Moves,” I grouped them as a single Learning Goal, “Students will offer insightful explanations.”
With a little more synthesis of complimentary indicators, I was able to get my list of Learning Goals down to eleven ones that I hope will work out. The list I’m taking with me as I start the class is here. It’s still a little longer than I would like, but with a relatively motivated group of students, I am optimistic as I start the class this coming week that I have a manageable amount of C3ness to implement.
