C3 Instructional Shifts – Shift 4: Promote literacy practices and outcomes
I have a pretty challenging class this year. Surprise, surprise, they’re my freshmen. All my fellow high school teachers are nodding in agreement…but the challenge for them is not behavior. In fact, I have few problems with them, aside from the occasional bursts of energy. My biggest class disruption lately has been when they break into applause at random moments in class. Of all class disruptions, this one builds my ego, so I let it slide.
The challenge has also not been about conveying complex concepts – they are very bright and pretty consistently engaged. I actually mean it when I tell parents that they are a “delight to have in class.”
OK – I feel as though I have lost some readers. They read that and think: “what’s the problem? Sounds like a dream!” The problem has been one of my own making. The class is meant to cover many disciplines within the school year: history, political science, civics, economics, geography, and anthropology. This was my first time teaching the class in a few years, hence the first time since I began my journey through the C3 Framework. Now, I could have taught it the same way I had in previous years, but that thought never felt like an option. Our geography unit would NOT be a unit of map-coloring! Our government unit would NOT be a series of lectures to memorize! I wanted them to truly immerse themselves in each respective discipline.
My larger goal with this course was a reflection of the fourth C3 Framework Instructional Shift: Promote literacy practices and outcomes. The C3 Framework wants students to develop two types of literacy: inquiry and discipline-specific. Inquiry literacy is more of an umbrella label for the type of analytical thinking we want students to use when writing: creating a question, gathering evidence, developing a claim, and communicating their conclusions. Disciplinary literacy builds on that notion and tasks us with giving students the appropriate analytical toolkit for each social studies subject. In this regard, an economics class should not be structured the exact same way as a geography or history or political science course.
For my freshmen class, I consciously thought about the skills used by experts in their respective discipline, then created assignments that allowed students to practice those skills. When we were talking about civics, they wrote a proposal as to how the president should balance the budget…which transitioned nicely into our unit on economics. When this semester began, I turned them into mini-cartographers. They created a variety of different maps using data sets and research. Then, they had to draw conclusions by comparing their map sets. For our anthropology unit, they had observation homework and wrote ethnographies. The key thing is that they complete assignments that mirror what the experts do, even if it is in bite-sized pieces.
Though we are defining the uniqueness of the different disciplines, this is a way to strengthen each, rather than divide and weaken. It is meant to foster the holistic development of students as learners, so as to add to their intellectual arsenal. Personally, I know that my diverse academic background has improved my overall ability to write and think critically. So, I know that this year, with all of its burdens on my time and energy, will ultimately be worthwhile. My freshmen will emerge from this class not only as improved learners, but empowered learners.