Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

I am one of those people that absolutely loves the idea of New Years Resolutions. I like reflecting on the past year and finding places where I can improve and change. I'm usually pretty terrible at keeping my personal resolutions but pretty decent at keeping the ones I make for my classroom. So to start the year off right, here are three resolutions I'd like to make for my teaching practice and what inspired me to make these changes. 1. Know My Students Better Than Ever I was inspired by this article from Cult of Pedagogy on student engagement to find something new and more purposeful I could do to better build relationships and trust. While I feel like building student relationships is one of my strengths overall, I know this last semester those relationships really suffered because I was out of the classroom a lot more than usual. This is why I am going to start dialogue journals with all of my students. I want to know more about them and find ways to be there for ...

My classroom is not one-to-one and the devices I do have often have a lot of issues because they were small sets of devices that I was asked to pilot to see if they would be the best fit for busy classrooms like mine. Because of this I often have to take things like hyperdocs and find ways to make them work for limited device classrooms. Three Things I Do To Make Hyperdocs Work In A Limited Device Classroom  1. We Use Worksheets  GASP! I said that evil word that has supposedly been banned from teaching. But to be real, the easiest way to do this is to have a worksheet (yup, I still use worksheets), partner kids up, and then have them follow along on a shared device. You could use Nearpod or Peardeck (both of which are amazing tools) but if the students need to go back to the information and review it only the student logged in will get a copy of the notes they take with Nearpod or Peardeck. This where I will defend worksheets, the value of the worksheet has to...

Right now on Twitter, you can follow my student-led classroom account @TweetsfromB210 to see students using Social Media in positive ways. It is important to me to meet students where they are at while also teaching them and modeling for them positive digital footprints. Hey guys it’s me Migs taking over! We’re doing something super exciting today. Stay tuned! #ERHSTweets #ByarsMeetsWorld pic.twitter.com/HAD8X9Ctjh — 🌍👨‍🎓👩‍🎓B210 Tweets👩‍🎓👨‍🎓🌎 (@tweetsfromB210) October 16, 2018 I pick one student each class to host the account by sending them this link via Remind. It's an easy way to teach digital citizenship, give students voice, engage with an authentic audience, and build your class culture. All week I am going to share some of my favorite ways to bring social media into the classroom to help create Social Media Leaders and change the conversation around digital citizenship from a list of "don't" to a list of "do." - Mrs. Kathry...

I've talked a lot about the challenges of reforming your grading practices but I want to give you a chance to see what those challenges really look like. I am currently rewriting and revising all of my AP World History Course with more specific objectives. A mistake I made last year with that course was making the objectives too broad and not having students reflect often enough, s o now I am taking a totally different approach and you are invited to visit my in progress planning document and leave questions and comments on the document as I work on it! One common question I get is about skills based objectives. The Common Core standards put literacy in every classroom (which I love) but the standards also ask teachers to assess skills and the skills are typically not one and done, they build throughout units or throughout the year. They are a part of multiple lessons and it is hard to determine the best way to approach reoccurring skills when Standards Based Grading. This i...

I was so lucky to attend a breakout by Jennifer Casa-Todd about Digital Leadership instead of Digital Citizenship. She is the author of the book SocialLEADia and an advocate for empowering students to use social media to share their voices with the world. I took my notes and tweets from her presentation and created this digital #sketchnote. It was the kind of session that made me feel like I had to do something right away because if I didn't, I was failing my students. Social Media allows students to experience all aspects of digital citizenship and 21st-Century skills. If we as teachers are supposed to develop these skills, why are we not using social media in class? No longer can we stand behind a lecture on digital citizenship or a video, students need to go out there and try things in an environment where they will be supported. Let students be online in a way where we raise them up and celebrate their success and help them learn and grow from their mistakes. We can...

There are so many amazing new ways students can share what they've learned and create incredible projects, videos, websites, and presentations to show what they've learned. This is a quick list of 5 I've used this year that my students and I really liked. I won't go into too much detail about each product, this more of a whirlwind tour then an in-depth tutorial. Enjoy!  If you live anywhere on social media, even if you spent like 5 seconds on twitter this year, you probably already know about this one. It's not my favorite (and to be honest, my students don't LOVE it) but it has a ton of potential and has some really amazing features.  How It Works:  Students record up to 5 minute long videos reacting to a prompt. Students can comment and react to each other (but those features can be turned off) feels like instagram of videos but is self contained (you control who has access to the grid and can post.). What I like about it: It feels like s...

In my last blog post I made the following statement regarding tech in the classroom " Just because something is better for me as a teacher doesn't mean it is best for my students and this just might be an example of that." After writing those words and hitting "publish" I kept thinking about them and felt the need to address the real issue that led me to write those words.  In my last post, I talked about challenges I was facing with reflective grading. A major challenge this school year has been consistent and equitable access to technology for my students. That week, I had to pull the plug on using technology to submit their reflections because I could not promise my students would have consistent and equal access to the technology required to do that. In that moment, technology was making my life easier but it was making things inequitable for my students. It was clear that I needed to make a change.  But I have a huge problem with this. There are tw...

I am just a few days into the new school year and I am already loving some of the big changes I made this summer. I am hoping this momentum lasts because right now my classroom feels energized, positive, and creative when students are in the room. The Standing (& Rolling) Desk I am obsessed. It all came about because I wanted to make sure I was more engaged with my students during class. We teach on block schedule and I found myself sitting more than I liked during class last year. It made it so students had to come to me for help and I felt like that made the classroom focused on me as the teacher and not as focused on the students as I wanted my room to be. I want my students to never feel uncomfortable asking questions, when I am sitting behind a giant desk are they as willing to raise their hand and call me over? I noticed a few other teachers had standing desks but I just couldn't justify spending money on something I wasn't 100% sure about, what if I nee...

I am one week into teaching a four-week long summer school course that I am grading using only students reflections on the learning objectives and right now my mind is racing. I started writing about why I decided to go "grade-less" last week and in five short days of summer school World History, I have a lot of thoughts and emotions to sort through. Everything is kind of messy, but the good kind, the kind that feels like progress. Here is a brief update on a few of my thoughts so far. 1) OMG I love Station Rotation Dear Catlin Tucker , Thank you. Your blogs and tweets about Station Rotation in secondary school inspired me to try it and I get it now. It is the best way to find time to meet with students, to host interventions, to differentiate instruction, and to keep students engaged by keeping class moving with a variety of activities and assignments. This model of teaching allowed me to meet with students one-on-one in a way that was effective and meaningful.  ...

It's Friday morning of my first week of summer and I am getting things together to take back to campus because I start summer school on Monday. I love summer school. Four short weeks of accelerated teaching, a crash course of content with students who all have a reason to be there, summer school is full of this energy and drive you don't get in the normal year. I also love summer because it is the perfect place to try something new. This summer, I am changing my grading practices. I am changing my grading practices because I am frustrated by how often students copy and cheat, I am frustrated by how defeated students become from a zero, I am frustrated by the question "how many points do I need on this assignment to...?", I am frustrated that compliance is more important than learning, I am frustrated that the traditional system offers little room for growth mindset, I am frustrated that my traditional grading practices don't focus on learning at all. So, I ...

Why I Picked up the Book How do you grade? What is the purpose of grades? And what do grades actually mean? These are questions that plague me as I stare at stacks of work to grade and wonder if the grades I give truly serve me students the way I want them to. I've already read on the subject but still had more questions so I decided to focus my next reading on a book about Standards-Based Grading.  The Review Rethinking Assessment by Cathy Vatterott  clearly explains what standards based grading is, how it can help our students and change our classrooms, and how to practically implement both on the classroom level and school wide. Throughout this book, she raised the exact questions I have been facing in my classroom and made clear and solid arguments for how adopting a Standards Based Grading practice could address those issues.  The most compelling case made in this book is that we need to move away from compliance only classrooms. That by teaching comp...

When I started this year a colleague of mine was obsessed with #BreakoutEdu and she kept building these incredibly intricate lessons and showing pictures of students highly engaged in their work. During first semester, I had dipped my toe in the water by making a scavenger hunt that had some locked google forms that students had to open to get the next clue but they were mostly review questions and did not have the same elements of a true breakout.  I knew I wanted to do something big to bring up morale and energy when students returned from Spring Break and I also wanted a lesson that was a mix of review and new information, to get students back into World War II after a week away. So I created by first Breakout lesson and it was amazing.  What is BreakoutEdu? Well, it's kind of like an escape room for your classroom but instead of having students locked in a room and trying to break out of it, they are trying to break into a series of bags and boxes that each h...