Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

Like most teachers, I spend the first few weeks establishing class culture, routines, and procedures with my students. This is also when I try and give my students some lessons and activities around how I grade since I am one of the few teachers they will encounter on our campus doing Reflective Standards-Based Grading.  I don't go over the syllabus or rules the first few days but I used the Fast and Curious EduProtocol to help introduce those things to students and as situations or transitions came up I explained how things worked in my classroom and then we practiced them. This isn't groundbreaking stuff, each time a new transition or procedure was introduced I'd paused class, teach it, we'd try it, we'd try it again, and then we'd move on.  To teach students how I grade, I kept my learning objective for the week prominently displayed:  LO#1: I can explain in my own words the classroom procedures, expectations, grading policies, and classro...

I am a part of a Facebook Group for AP World History teachers that also has a shared Google Drive (that I actually currently manage). It is a collection of amazing resources and one of my favorite lessons that comes from the drive is called "They Thought The Earth Was Flat" by Bill Strickland. It engages students in the common story of Christopher Columbus being one of the few people in the 15th century to believe the earth was round. The students read and analyze a series of 'documents' that seem to support this myth and then shows them the Farnese Atlas which was created in the 2nd century. After a few more pieces of evidence start to poke holes in this longstanding story of Columbus the lesson asks students to consider how historians look for validity in sources and how historians do the work of figuring out our past. I love this lesson because it really introduces what historians do and how messy history can be. It gets students thinking and talking about ho...

A goal I have set for myself this year is to reflect on lessons daily. I've been trying to think of the best way to talk about the lessons, what worked and what didn't and for now, I am going to try and use my blog as the platform for how I reflect on my lessons. I want to make sure that I document what I do each day and what I need to change and improve for next year. To start, here is the lesson I did for the first day of school. I wanted the focus to be on building a class culture and getting to know each other while also starting to introduce classroom procedures and expectations. I want to make sure students leave excited to come back the next day. I had originally planned to do a station rotation of getting to know you games and I would sit at one station and play with the students at that one station, giving me a chance to really talk to them and get to know them but when I looked at my class lists and saw that my class sizes varied significantly, my brain just wa...