Diving into the C3, Part 3: First Trip through the Inquiry Arc

I’m now four weeks into my course, It’s Complicated, and we recently completely our first quick journey through the Inquiry Arc, based around the current conflict Afghanistan.  As this was the beginning of the class, my main goal for the unit was to familiarize students with how we would move through the C3 Inquiry Arc throughout the class.  My hope is that students would begin to develop some of the foundational thinking moves and skills they would use repeatedly throughout the class: questioning (C3 Dimension 1), thinking historically and geographically (Dimension 2), reading and evaluating primary and secondary sources (Dimension 3), and communicating their findings (Dimension 4).  While I hope getting the basics down will yield benefits as we go more in depth through our next topic, which is the developing conflict in Crimea, it is clear to me that sacrifices were made to the depth of understanding students have about Afghanistan.  In this piece, I want to recount what my students experienced in the first three weeks, and reflect on what students did, and did not, learn in the unit.

In It’s Complicated, students pick the current issue we want to look at, and fresh off watching Lone Survivor, a small group of students convinced the rest focus on the War in Afghanistan.  I provided students with three compelling questions: 1) How did we get to the current situation in Afghanistan? 2) What’s complicated in Afghanistan? 3) Why do we care about what’s happening in Afghanistan?   Students then developed supporting questions, using the Right Question Institute’s Question Formulation Technique.   I’ve decided to really focus this part of our course on Indicator D1.4.9-12, “Explain how supporting questions contribute to an inquiry and how, through engaging source work, new compelling and supporting questions emerge.”  Pairs of students chose the their most important questions, and wrote largely mediocre explanations of how these questions would support our inquiry.  Because I wanted to move through the arc quickly, I did the work of organizing our questions about the event, which you can see here.

Students did small research projects on the event and gave presentations to the group before we jumped into trying to think historically, and to a lesser extent geographically, to understand how this event happened.  I was lucky to have an existing curriculum that served our needs from the always wonderful Choices Program out of Brown University.  Using their primary and secondary source readings, conversations in the class focused around many of the Historical Thinking indicators in dimensions two:

  • D2.His.14.9-12. Analyze multiple and complex causes and effects of events in the past.
  • D2.His.15.9-12. Distinguish between long-term causes and triggering events in developing a historical argument.
  • D2.His.1.9-12. Evaluate how historical events and developments were shaped by unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts.
  • D2.His.4.9-12. Analyze complex and interacting factors that influenced the perspectives of people during different historical eras.
  • D2.His.1.9-12. Evaluate how historical events and developments were shaped by unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts.

Students then gathered the various sources they encountered, as well as any others they found through their own research to complete two pieces of writing.  In one, students argued about what US policy should be in Afghanistan moving forward, practicing Indicator D4.1.9-12. “Construct arguments…” and in the other, students wrote an explanatory essay about the long-term and root causes of the current conflict in Afghanistan practicing Indicator D4.2.9-12. “Construct explanations…”

Results were mixed.  Students’ argumentative essays largely lacked any sense of complexity or nuance, which I think was my fault.  We simply didn’t spend enough time on this part; students jumped straight from learning about Afghanistan’s past to arguing for an action today, and couldn’t do it.  This made be rethink my understanding of Dimension 4’s “Informed Action.” I realized it won’t be nearly enough for students to merely be informed about the past, but they will also need to have equal amounts of time and support to become informed about various options for action.  I hope to do this better next time.

Students’ work was much better on the other side of Dimension 4, “Communicating Conclusions.”  When asked to write an explanatory essay about our first two compelling questions, students largely produced satisfactory work.  Students displayed a wide amount of detailed knowledge, and were able to make connections between different long-term causes (Afghanistan’s geography, legacy of Imperialism, the Cold War, the Soviet Invasion, the development of the Taliban), triggering events (the rise of the Taliban to power, 9/11) and the current war.

The biggest area for growth I saw across the board was in making reasoning, connections, and analysis explicit.  For the overwhelming majority of students, the connections between events, as well as the analysis of what made them all complicated, was only implied.  My next step with the class will be to practice making this thinking explicit in their writing by giving them some identifying and transitional words and phrases they can try out using in their writing.