This is the second in a two-part blog from special education teacher Lauren Burda with her social studies colleague Heather Vivan. Part one is available here.
With a basic understanding of the C3 Framework and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), Heather and I were ready to try it out. We developed an inquiry on global trade routes and cultural diffusion in the ancient world – a heavy topic indeed! Even though the content was challenging, Heather and I were confident we could support all of our students to be successful in the inquiry.
The first time we used IDM, we just wanted to learn what worked and didn’t work with my students. I watched closely to see if my students were able to use the accommodations we provided as they accessed primary source material. For my struggling readers and those who needed a read aloud accommodation, I made major modifications to the sources. I used Rewordify, an awesome tool that helps teachers lower the lexile level of text. Rewordify offers choices of words that need to be changed in order to aid comprehension. I took these modifications one step further and also made audio recordings of the sources. Having my lowest level readers listing to the sources provided me with more time to work with the middle level readers. This type of flexibility, in working with a wide range of learners, is an essential part of everyday special education classroom routine. With these source modifications in place, my students were able to successfully complete the series of formative tasks in the inquiry.
Heather and I then decided to take the inquiry one step further and have students discuss the topic of global trade routes and cultural diffusion. We felt confident after our work modifying sources and now wanted to take on the challenge of scaffolding discussion. We knew our students would need lots of support. In order to make the discussion process more explicit, we used a discussion prompt matrix (pictured below) as a way to help students generate their own discussion points about global trade routes and cultural diffusion, Heather and I carefully made heterogeneous groups and assigned each student a quadrant in the matrix. The lower level readers got the top two quadrants and our higher readers got the bottom two. The top two quadrants include more concrete prompts and require less analysis and inferential knowledge, whereas quadrants three and four are more analytically based.
Using this matrix was a lifesaver as students were able to generate some amazing ideas that were able to drive classroom discussion. Through the modification of sources and the use of the discussion prompt matrix, students were able to complete the formative and summative performance tasks in the inquiry successfully. We haven’t had time to start the “Taking Informed Action” piece yet, but Heather and I have been discussing it with our students and they are excited to start this process soon!
Heather and I think the C3 Framework and IDM are great resources to have in our toolkit and now that we have completed one in small chunk, we look forward to doing several lessons next year from start to finish using what have learned from our first experience.