Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

In summer, using reflective standards based grading was amazing . Students were engaged and learning, they felt confident about what they had learned and what they needed to learn next, and I felt like I had hit a high point in my teaching. The first step to effective reflections is ensuring students understand the goals they are working towards. Here are their learning goals for our unit on World War I.  Then I took that experience and tried to make it work for the regular school year. I thought about how the regular school year gave me more time so students could go into more depth and so there was a lot of time between reflections (in summer school students reflected every day.) This caused problems for me, it felt like every time we stopped to reflect I had to teach the process over again to more and more students. I realized that summer had been so successful because of the culture of reflection I had developed, I needed that culture to become a part of every day in my ...

I love the new C3 Framework from the NCSS . I think building a history class around 1. Developing questions and planning inquiries; 2 Applying disciplinary concepts and tools; 3 Evaluating sources and using evidence; and 4 Communicating conclusions and taking informed action is a fantastic way to make the learning real and engaging for students. Each step in the C3 Framework  provides meaningful opportunities for students that are applicable outside of the history classroom. What I am not a fan of is how California took the idea of questioning and inquiry and created questions for their framework that were anything BUT compelling or engaging. So when working with the new framework for California , I needed more help and guidance on how to develop questions for the inquiry process. Leave it to the awesomeness of Twitter to give me guidance: Have you looked at this book? https://t.co/lzgKcaAgE3 It simplified the compelling question process for me. #casocstu...