Reflections on team teaching 18th Century Vermont

Vacations are earned! That's something I know. But they are earned by teachers and students alike, especially after completing a whirlwind unit like we just did.  For the month of February the ELA teacher on my team, Joy Peterson, and I did our first integrated humanities unit. There was an adjustment period for us as teachers- opening the wall between our two classrooms, collaborating on an hourly basis and resetting norms for the big room during non-academic times. So I have to assume the students took some time to settle in as well!

I really enjoyed the experience. It was great to see the flexibility and having multiple experts in the room to refer students to so they could really get the support they needed. I think a true example of personalized learning! Need more research options or random facts about Vermont? Go see Mr. Bailey. Need some support laying out your presentation and properly citing sources? Go see Ms. Peterson.

We started the 3 week unit with a week of stations (documented throughout on our team Instagram feed), where each day students were exposed to different aspects of 18th Century Vermont. People/Settlement/Conflict was the first station, Agriculture/Food the second, Industry the third and Growing Up in Vermont the fourth. We had students keeping exit tasks books throughout as well as self-assessing their focus and interest levels to see how the numbers for focus change as the number for interest in the topic changed. From there they brainstormed personal research projects and used this padlet to research. I was really proud of the focus we intentionally set out for Native American life during that century. A lot of students took an interest in that and did projects with that topic.

The Learning Targets we were assessing the work on was the Humanities target of "Speaking & Presenting" and the Social Studies target of "Culture". I did a lesson with direction instruction around Speaking and Presenting using the Highlights magazine cartoon of Goofus & Gallant. Joy and I created indicators for the target, doing some translating of the language within the target to be more 5th/6th grade vocab friendly. In the mini-lesson, I broke tables groups out to create a Goofus & Gallant using just one part of the target (highlighted in this google doc).

This past week was for presentations, and I can confidently speak for Joy and myself in saying how blown away we were by the content and delivery across the board. I'm so excited to be putting in a variety of examples in below. I'm also pleased that a few students are going to extend their experience by entering their presentations in Vermont History Day in April.

Now it's time to do my part as an 18th Century Vermonter and wait for the weather to cooperate so I can start sugaring season. We run it old fashioned- buckets, lines and a wood fire. An ode to those who've come before. Enjoy the student examples below:

Triumph & Tragedy in 18th Century Vermont

Morgan Horses

Potash

18th Century Vermont Life

This group visited the 1 room schoolhouse as part of their project

The Work of a Fainting Goat

When I'm home at night with my family, my girls (ages 10 & 5), we like to unwind after dinner watching some funny videos. The go to, first request is always fainting goats. For those of you unfamiliar to these animals, see the video below (be prepared to play on loop and have a good laugh):

There's nothing medically wrong when they fall, it's just when it is time to do something, they fall over. Like my youngest, Sophie says "It's like they're plastic!"

For me this made sense when thinking about wrapping up our most recent Social Studies unit which focused on the inquiry question of "Are Freedoms Free?" To tackle this important question we looked at the Constitution, Bill of Rights and all 27 Amendments. When putting together the summative assessment the goal was clear for kids. Unlike the fainting goat, their work needed to stand on it's own merits.

To accomplish this, the sharing out was round-robin format. Students left their work at the table why circulating to other presentations. They were not allowed to stand and explain what their peers were reading. As we work through the CVSD Transferable skills, we have already done a lot of work around Claim and Evidence. This unit was scored on Reasoning & Analysis. Their ability to look back at all the work we did over the unit and analyze how it supported their claim.

The way in which the work was presented was open-ended. I told students to play to their strengths. I received a lot of different formats. Slideshows, posters- both digital and on paper, some videos, a skit or two and even a poem were all part of the things shared out. I was more than impressed with how these turned out and learning students demonstrated. I've included some examples below.

On a related but separate note- I had a great initial brainstorm meeting on Wednesday with Emily Rinkema to start mapping out next year. My big takeaways was that I will be using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the spine of my curriculum. My homework for Emily is to create some graphic to represent that as a curriculum map. I'll be building a website to house the work for next year. The idea will be to integrate the C3 National Social Studies Standards with the Global Goals and work down through the district transferable skills and learning targets to be the critical thinking skills needed to address solutions to the goals all while using the lens of history to teach it. One theme I'm considering for the year is "Using the past to solve the present". Let me know what you think of that!

Here are some of the examples. Two are from 5th grade girls and the other from a 6th grade boy:

Poem

Slideshow

Essay

Dreams for next year

I'm not even sure if I remember how to write a blog post it's been so long, but I'll carry on in the hopes that it's like riding a bike. Apologies if it comes across disjointed but I'm going to simply share out my ideas for two reasons- the first is that by publishing them I'll build some accountability for myself to implement them and the second is creating a place to come back to when I forget what any of them are!

In an effort to see these ideas come to light I'm already setting up times to meet with our school's PBL coach Emily Rinkema to start laying the groundwork. I know for me, one of my weaknesses is sustaining big ideas unless I've set routines and structures in place ahead of time. The chaos of the school year just takes over and I go in to staying a float mode rather than swimming ahead.

As I'm looking over my first year of teaching Social Studies, I've been pleased with the level of discourse and thinking that's been produced using an inquiry based design approach. The course I took really helped shape my ability to design units where students think critically about topics. I want to keep that in place while adjusting the curriculum map itself to focus on the following areas:

• Using the UN Sustainable Development Goals as the core curriculum experience
• Engage students with real world collaboration opportunities with community members to help their work in these goals
• Begin to use Empatico to connect globally to classrooms around the world as a way to promote empathy, tolerance and understanding
• Continue to improve the PLP process to have students set goals based on the transferable skills our district has set out

• Finally, in my own professional journey I'd like to do this (blog) more and include student voice  by having them use tools like WeVideo and OnlineVoiceRecorder to have them create vlogs and podcasts.

I'm planning on doing another post this week to highlight the amazing learning that took place on the unit we just finished on the Constitution and Bill of Rights where we answered the question- "Are Freedoms Free?"

Comments and feedback greatly appreciated!

Jared