Oftentimes the best learning happens in the most organic and natural ways. Learning happens when we are genuine. Too often it is easy to let complicated procedures or a set of rules get in the way of that. We see a really cool activity that involves setting up a crime scene in our classroom and having students open envelopes that lead them to solve the root causes of World War I. We imagine our students engaged in the lesson and the mystery of history. Yet what can be hard to consider is how the rules and procedures of these lessons get in the way of genuineness. Sometimes they raise procedural barriers to entry and cause students to engage in ways that we don’t actually want when we reflect on it. Did we want students interested in the envelope hunt through our class cabinets, or did we want them to engage with the precarious balance of power in the world leading into World War I? When our tasks become too complicated, we inevitably raise these procedural barriers to entry.
One way to build trust in a classroom is to show students you trust them to engage with meaningful historical topics on their own terms and with each other, that they don’t need the constant oversight of a teacher to come to conclusions. Tasks that are built around simplicity and subjectivity allow students the space to wrestle with history.. Students are trusted with the process of knowledge creation based on the sources and questions they are presented.
Building Block Inquiries (BBI) already build some core aspects of what a trustworthy classroom looks like. These are classrooms that trust students to deliberate and collaborate around complicated sources and to produce meaningful work that answers important compelling questions. These elements of deliberate, collaborate, and produce are hard-wired into the BBI blueprint.
Looking back at our BBI stack around Government Trust, the Iran-Contra scandal leverages tasks well when presented with complicated sources. The sources in this blueprint contain excerpts from interviews with a variety of people about the Iran-Contra scandal. Some ideas are complicated, some excerpts are longer than others, and they range in span of time, making them hard to make sense of together. With this in mind, the task is relatively simple and puts the idea (breaches of trust and public perception) forward. Students are asked to simply identify one trust breaking element in each interview. Seeing as the excerpts in total are not as important to get at the idea, students are asked to focus on one piece of each that is important, one they are trusted to identify on their own. Then, to make meaning of this, students are trusted to match their own identified elements to generated headlines about the Iran-Contra scandal. There is no answer key. That is the point. Students are trusted to produce an answer to the question entirely on their own through elements of the source they identified. Knowing that the sources are longer and take more effort to understand, the task students are asked to do with it is more subjective and relatively simple. In this way, the straightforward tasks compensate for the complex sources and builds trust with students by lowering procedural barriers to entry.
