Once or twice a year the Social Studies Department gets together for some professional development to help us teach our students to think like professional historians.
Background: about three years ago the Social Studies Department shifted the focus to a more skills-based curriculum. Writing and using discipline-specific skills are now emphasized as opposed to old-school rote memorization of names, dates, and events. The cognitive skills we want our students to master include cause and effect, change and continuity over time, etc., and are included in our department writing rubrics. If students effectively practice these historical thinking skills, they will learn all the necessary content in a more meaningful way while becoming coherent thinkers and stronger writers.
What does this sort of thinking actually look like? How do we know our students are demonstrating these cognitive skills in a fluent and meaningful way? How can we hold each other accountable to properly teach these skills?
Here is what we do: once every semester (or two) the Social Studies Department does the following PD:
- One teacher is selected in advance to bring 3 previously graded student essays to our department meeting. The teacher pulls one high scored essay, one medium, one low, and then scrambles the order. Each essay was scored by the teacher as per our department writing rubric.
- We blind-score the essays.
- Each teacher shares out while the rubric is projected on the LCD projector. Here is what the rubric looks like at the end of the process.
The benefits of doing this are:
- Our grading is calibrated so our students get a fair grade regardless of which teacher they have.
- The process facilitates deep and enriching discussion in our department meeting. Some of us will disagree on one particular category, or we might comment on a passage in one of the essays. The rubric guides our discussion of student work. By the end of the meeting, we have gained more clarity on how we want our students to think about historical events and how to plan future units accordingly.
In general, this is the same methodology used by the College Board to train AP Readers to score AP exams. However, in our department meetings, we take it a step further with in-depth discussions of student work and our subsequent changes in the units we teach. Ask some of our history teachers what they think about this process and the value it brings to their instructional planning. You may want to try this as well…