Researching for History Curriculum

Thanks Penrith Library!

I thought I'd share with you today one of my current methods for researching and writing History curriculum. There's no single way to program, of course, but I do know that if someone had outlined a few methodologies to me back in my university days then it might have made things a little easier. I've experimented with various ways of writing programs for teaching and I guess that 2020-21 was the moment where I finally became happy with an approach to researching for the subject of History. So I thought I'd share it!

There were a few contributing factors that helped me arrive at the method I now use... 

• In 2019 I was commissioned to write some chapters for the Cambridge History Transformed series. In order to feel comfortable in providing a baseline from which other teachers could work, I knew that I would have to undertake a considerable amount of research.
• At my new school I was placed onto Ancient History, a subject I hadn't taught for at least 9 years. For all intents and purposes I'm basically teaching it for the first time so I needed to refresh my approach.  
• I fortuitously attended some online PL conducted by the History Teachers' Association of NSW. This 'Introduction to Ancient History' module was run by Dennis Mootz, who highlighted the use of Excel Spreadsheets as a powerful aggregation tool for historians to use. 

My approach isn't revolutionary but I'm finding it increasingly useful and it's something I'll be teaching a variation of to my students for the upcoming Historical Investigation component of Ancient History. I'll also teach it when I next have a History Extension class. 

Step 1: Look at the syllabus. 

I start by reading through the part of the syllabus I'll be teaching. In this case, for example, it's the introductory Nature of Ancient History topic 'The Treatment and Display of Human Remains'. 

Then I code the content dot points within the syllabus for my own reference, using the following schema: 

• 1 = The Nature of Ancient History as it's the first module in the Preliminary course. 
• 6 = The Treatment and Display of Human Remains as it's the 6th topic within the module. 
• The four main dot points within this topic are then labelled A, B, C, D.
• Any sub-dot points within these are labelled with a further number, EG. 1, 2, 3, 4. 

Here is what it looks like after I code it...

Students investigate:

• The condition of the human remains and how they were preserved, discovered and/or removed from where they were found 1-6-A
• The methods and results of scientific analysis (dating of finds and forensic techniques) and modern preservation of the remains 1-6-B
• The significance of the human remains and other sources, for examples written, for an understanding of the life and times in which they lived, including: 1-6-C
• The social status of individuals 1-6-C1
• The beliefs and practices of the society 1-6-C2
• The health of ancient populations 1-6-C3
• The nature of the environment 1-6-C4
• The ethical issues relevant to the treatment, display and ownership of the remains, for example the use of invasive methods of scientific analysis 1-6-D

Step 2: Read.

I recently read a tweet where the poet Eileen Chong made reference to a creative process figuratively labelled as 'wool-gathering'. This refers to the necessary time that writers need to spend on reading, gathering up the intellectual resources that will allow for creation. In preparing to teach an area of history I will gather together any available resources I can find, place them in a stack on my table, and start reading. 

Step 3: Raw notetaking. 

I find that, without focus, examining history can become quite overwhelming. Reading one thing will lead to another and I'll be fascinated by the minutiae of particular events only to realise (when it's too late) that it has no relevance to what I need to teach. This is where the above coding from Step 1 comes into play.

Using an excel spreadsheet, I will keep one eye on the syllabus content points and make notes on what I'm reading. Each separate entry is coded with one of the 8 codes from the above syllabus. This is what it looks like:

Click to enlarge.

The columns are as follows:

• Information: My notes from the source in question. This can be a summary, or a quote, or a suggestion.
• Key Word: In something like this topic it's useful to be able to separate the entries geographically as the plan is to examine significant bodies from different parts of the world (EG. Bog Bodies from Europe, Mungo Man from Australia, etc.).
• Reference: This lets me know the source I've used. I keep another tab in the Excel spreadsheet running to collect together my sources as a proper bibliography. 
• Page Number: So I can follow up in case I come back to the entry and realise I need more context, or need to check if I've quoted something correctly. After all, I don't want Keith Windschuttle to come after me (that's a joke for the History Extension teachers).
• Syllabus: The coding from Step 1. This becomes most important in the next step.
• Format: The type of source it's from. This can help me evaluate how I plan to use the information.
• Category: A categorising column additional to the Key Word column can be useful when it comes to sorting the document afterwards, in case there are different ways of ordering the information (EG. By culture/body rather than by geography).

Step 4: Sort.

The final step before I start programming my unit (in other words, planning out my sequence of lessons and populating it with resources) is to take all the raw information and make some sense out of it. This is a simple but powerful step where the spreadsheet is re-sorted by using the coding. All the entries are then reorganised in order of the syllabus, allowing me to work through it methodically. 

I then move onto creating my unit of work. Recently, for example, while creating a unit for the Boudicca Case Study, I've been able to refer back to all my entries on Boudicca's representation through history and use this to create a lesson focused on just this one aspect of the syllabus. It's been incredibly useful. 

And that's it. I have other ways of using the spreadsheet but I think this will do for today :)

Introducing Year 7 to the Concept of Literature

While teaching, I find myself coming back to English over and over again and thinking about what the discipline is and why we teach it. Looking at the NSW syllabus document and examining the content points becomes useful because I can use it to reframe how I approach things. It gives me ideas about other 'ways into' the subject. If I get stuck while programming a unit of work I'll keep bouncing back to the outcomes and looking at the content points, which contain loads of ideas embedded in them. This also seems to be one of the most effective pieces of advice to give pre-service and beginner English teachers who find themselves stuck for ideas when lesson planning. 

On top of this, we also have the English Textual Concepts, which act as a synthesis of the major ideas and methods that have come to exemplify English. These can be incredibly useful when designing an overall unit of work but also have merit when looking at singular lesson activities.

When moving from Primary to Secondary school, students will need to be introduced to English in a new way - a more developed way that will hopefully sustain their growth as critical thinkers and challenge them by placing them in that 'zone of proximal development'. I've been thinking about this and how it can be scaffolded for students with varying degrees of literacy and other additional learning needs. How, for example, can the concept of Literary Value be introduced to Year 7, assuming that this terminology has not yet been mentioned to them in a Stage 3 context?

I think the first step is to break down what 'Literary Value' means in wording that the average Year 7 student will understand. Part of this is reframing the concept in a way that has authentic meaning in a wider context, so I'll swap out 'Literary Value' here for 'Literature'. When I used to work in a bookstore, the term 'Literature' was recognisable as a term with its own connotations separate from 'General Fiction' - a distinction that also extends into the realms of literary criticism, publishing, marketing, and popular review categories in newspapers, magazines, websites, etc. Using this idea along with the English Textual Concepts descriptor for Stage 4-level Literary Value, we can arrive at a workable definition that looks like this:

Literature: Fictional written works, especially those considered to be of superior or lasting artistic merit.

Activity 1: The first step is to place this definition in the centre of a board. Rather than do a mindmap or brainstorm, the teacher should lead a discussion on what each constituent part of the definition means and annotate it. Students should copy the definition into their book first and then add the annotations as you go. This serves a dual purpose - it scaffolds and models the process of determining meaning, and it also teaches the skill of annotating which will become more useful to students as they get older and begin to interact with more demanding texts.

The parts you will need to discuss with students and annotate are as follows:

• What does 'fictional' mean?
• What does 'superior' mean? Who decides what is superior?
• What does 'artistic merit' mean?
• What does 'lasting' mean?
• Note also that 'especially' leaves the process open-ended - what one person determines to be 'literature' may be subjective.

Activity 2: Students can then be given a worksheet with six examples of written works, ones that they will hopefully recognise or for which they will at least understand the context. The worksheet scaffolds the process of determining what 'counts' as literature. You may need to read aloud some of the fine print on the book examples as they probably won't be large enough on a printout for students to see. You should also project it on the board so they can see it in colour (assuming your photocopy of the worksheet is in black and white). 

Focus the conversations around things like:

• The age of the book (IE. Is the book 'lasting' in that we still know about it after all this time?)
• Prizes the book has won ('Pulitzer Prize', 'Australian Children's Book of the Year')
• Is the book fiction or non-fiction?
• The last example, Wonder, will be interesting because a lot of students read it in Primary school. In their eyes, this will make it a 'classic' of sorts. This could lead to interesting discussions on whether it may one day be considered a classic in the future and therefore have lasting artistic merit. 

Activity 3: As always, try to get your students writing independently for a bit. Tell them to pick one literary text from the worksheet and write a few sentences explaining why they think it continues to have impact after such a long time (or will continue having impact into the future). 

You can find the worksheet here - Literature. 

Differentiation: Using Assessment for Learning

Batman: definitely a fan of education

I often find myself coming back to the concept of Day One.

Day One can be the point where you first meet a class, or the point where you decide to start again with a class you already know. Day One is a beautiful thing because it allows you to essentially reboot; you can reboot your expectations, reboot your teaching methods, reboot the resources you use, and even reboot your opinion of the students. Day One can be therapeutic, for both the teacher and the students. Don't we all deserve a new Day One sometimes?

Day One is a time for trying new things. It doesn't matter if it all goes horribly exercise-book-ripped-in-half wrong because when you get to the end of Day One you get to make a decision: is tomorrow Day Two or will you forget and try again with another Day One?

Day Twos are good when they build on something that's worked, and it's important to remember that even the lessons we perceive as 'failures' are still useful lessons in what does and doesn't work, but if a Day One doesn't completely pan out then it's inevitably best to give everyone (yourself included) a second chance. An potentially essential part of an effective Day One is collecting data on your students to assist with their instruction in the days to come and I guess this post, in essence, is about allowing ourselves as teachers to evaluate students from scratch at multiple points throughout the year.

If, like me, you're teaching in a context where the majority of the classes are mixed ability, you'll find yourself tasked with a need to differentiate your curriculum. The idea of targeting your resources to match the strengths and needs of your students isn't a new one. It should be noted, however, that if you're starting out in teaching or just looking to stretch yourself, it won't always be clear how exactly one should identify the differing needs of a class of 20-30 students. You can lean on your Learning and Support Teacher if you have one, and they should be able to give you some helpful pointers, but at the end of the day it's up to each individual teacher to evaluate and judge the abilities of their students accordingly.

This brings us to the three modes of assessment in our current syllabuses: assessment as, of, and for learning. The qualification of assessment into this particular taxonomy is designed to make explicit the need for a teaching-and-learning cycle; that process where we teach, and then we learn, and then we use that learning to teach again (only better). Assessment for Learning is perhaps the most important factor in a healthy and innovative teaching-and-learning cycle. By assessing students at the beginning of a unit of work we can figure out the general level of the class's knowledge about the subject and, more pertinently, ascertain the full spectrum of ability amongst the students. 

In the course of programming a Year 8-aimed Heroes and Villains unit built around visual literacy I wanted to have a diagnostic activity that would allow me to create ability streams in the mixed classroom.

The idea is that students would start out by designing their own superhero. They would be given a period or so to write details about an original character and drawing said character. The 'test' can be found just below.

Activity: Design Your Own Superhero

After this the teacher takes the product the student has created and marks it in four different ways, using the analytical criteria below:

Through the use of this criteria, the student is being evaluated four separate times before starting the unit of work. These criteria are:

• Visual Representation: The teacher assesses the student's ability to use visual literacy to represent ideas. This will be seen in the image created by the student to represent their hero, and the use of symbolism and other visual techniques to show ideas related to their character.
• Textual Representation: How closely do the image and student-written content link together? Has the student taken their written ideas into account when designing the visual part? This is also where skills in creative writing can be assessed.
• Literacy: Starting out with a class always gives the teacher a chance to check on each student's ability to form sentences, write at a whole-sentence and whole-text level, use correct spelling and punctuation, and draw upon a wide vocabulary.
• Topic Knowledge: You're about to teach a unit on heroes and villains so finding the students who already have a strong background knowledge on comic book characters and the generic conventions associated with them will be invaluable in the days ahead. This means that it's incredibly useful to check this work to see which students know their stuff.

After you've used the analytical criteria to mark the students you can then began to see where their strengths are, and what areas need working on most. Students can subsequently be sorted into separate 'streams' of ability so that activities throughout the unit can be targeted towards different ability levels (IE. Differentiation). 

A thing to remember with differentiation is that you won't need to do it all the time - the separation of marks into five separate streams (see below) doesn't mean that you have your class split into five groups with five different kinds of work every lesson. That would be impossible to organise. The idea is that, sometimes, you can do some group work (with three different streams - core, adjusted, and extension) and other times you can individually target students who may be extremely talented in one particular area (visual literacy) with some homework.

The analytical criteria and the stream guide is included in the activity sheet linked further up. Obviously not everyone teaches heroes and villains to their Stage 4 students but feel feel to backward map anything and adapt it accordingly to suit other units of work.

English Studies - What it Was, and Where it's Going.

This weekend I trekked up the countryside to the Hunter Region to attend #EnglishStudiesDay2016; a wonderful collegial experience driven by passionate English Studies advocate Sam Schroder; one of the architects of the English Studies course during its piloting stage.

One thing that set the tone of the day was the welcome to country provided by a local student, a young Worimi man, who conducted it in his people's language. I don't think I've ever seen a welcome or acknowledgement of country given so beautifully. It really struck a chord with me.   

Anyway, aside from getting the opportunity to network with other teachers, teachers who have such positive opinions of the English Studies course as a forum for authentic engagement with English, the day provided a real moment of clarity in which Sam Schroder provided an overview of what the English Studies course is. Where it came from. Where it's going.

If you're a new teacher you may very well find yourself allocated to the English Studies course, and knowing where it is has come from and how it's continuing to develop is something that will be pertinent to you. And if you're not teaching English Studies, well, it might still be of interest to you anyway because maybe you're awesome like that.

The Birth of English Studies

Prior to English Studies, there was the 2 Unit Contemporary English course. From 1997-1999, the Contemporary English course was phased out to usher in the increasingly complexity of the Standard and Advanced courses. Many teachers were happy to see Contemporary English go as it was widely perceived as a 'dumbing down' of the English course and did not benefit those preparing for university study. Standard English grew out a response to this as a course for students who weren't suited to the Advanced course but would still be going to university and needed to be able to engage at an academic level when they got there.

Two more things then also led the way to the development of the English Studies course:

• In a national content, the Melbourne Declaration of 2008 acknowledged that a set of standards should and would be applied to all Australian students, with two specific goals:

• Goal 1 dealt with equity and excellence, the idea that opportunities should be provided to every child, not just those who wanted to become doctors, lawyers, etc.
• Goal 2 was the idea that all young Australians should become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens.
  
• The other influential factor was that, on a state level, 2010 saw NSW increase the leaving age from 15 to 17.

This means that even those who aren't equipped for Standard or Advanced English should be able to have a scope for success in English, and that's where English Studies comes in. English Studies should be a forum for students to be taught how to be critical thinkers; active citizens who question what they see and are able to communicate their opinions.

How it Happened

In 2009, BOSTES invited submissions for the creation of the English Studies course. 76 schools were selected to pilot the course in 2010, and students at some of these schools had to apply for the class and were considered 'lucky' to get in. This was followed by extensive evaluation, and the Department of Education then invested in the writing of units to support the course. In 2011, the course was rolled out across the state.

After this, things become a little hazy... there is some feeling that the course hasn't been given the support it needs. Non-government sectors have expressed no interest in developing resources, and some schools opt not to run the course in the belief that a non-ATAR version of English has no validity to their communities. The RAP data, however, shows that English Studies is, essentially, doing the job it was designed to do - students who would have gotten Band 1 and Band 2 marks in Standard are instead catered for in the English Studies course.

How it Works Now

There are two mandatory modules. In the Preliminary course this is Achieving Through English, which focuses on the worlds of education, careers and community, and in the HSC course it is We Are Australians, which takes the form of studies on citizenship, community and cultural identity. There is a possibility of crossover with the subject of Work Studies in terms of resume writing (which forms a crucial part of Achieving Through English), however, Sam Schroder suggests that this is a perfect opportunity to engineer cross-curricular study between English Studies and Work Studies, which allows for team teaching and the avoidance of unnecessary repetition across subject areas.

The other modules are elective, with scope for 1 self-developed module in the Preliminary year, preferably something that is appropriate for your school's context. Examples given by some of the teachers in attendance at #EnglishStudiesDay2016:

• Surfing (a coastal school)
• Pig-shooting (a school way out west)
• Indigenous studies (a school with a large indigenous community)

Where it's Heading

The proposed syllabus is currently slated to begin in 2018 with an exam option that allows English Studies to achieve an ATAR, something that (judging from anecdotal and empirical evidence) is unlikely to change before it rolls out. Working in tandem with this is the introduction of a common module across English Studies, Standard English and Advanced English, which is the element of the course that will enable this ATAR option.

Your mileage may vary as far as whether this is a good idea or not. I'm not against it, but I'm also not particularly passionate about it. In fact, I tend to feel this way about most things before they happen - I reserve judgement for when I see things in action. We'll see what happens. What I will say though is that students often change their minds, change their goals, and anything could happen in a student's life between the commencement of Year 11 and the time in which they finish up their high school education - so, therefore, it follows that we shouldn't be locking students out of opportunities just because they've committed to English Studies at the end of Year 10. The allowance of an ATAR option means that students can, right up until the day of the HSC examination, choose if they want to do this or not.

I'm looking forward to seeing how everything goes in 2018. 

English Textual Concepts Framework - What Is It?

With English, we can analyse EVERYTHING! Look at this great advertisement.

I will just say this first, up front - I love the English Textual Concepts. I want to turn them into a blanket and wrap myself up in them, or throw it all into a smoothie that I can drink every morning. The English Textual Concepts framework makes English into a clearer subject in terms of teaching and learning, crystallising a seemingly infinite subject area into 15 broad but separate concepts and 6 concurrent process. 

English can be a 'slippery' subject (Eva Gold's words, not mine!) so a solid framework on which we can hang the subject is manna from heaven for English teachers. That aforementioned slipperiness is reflected in everything from the blank look on a student's face when expected to respond to a question about their favourite TV show, to the discipline's extensive use of impenetrable holistic criteria to assess student work. It's in that moment when a kid finally cracks, and exasperatedly exclaims, "I hate English, sir, I don't get it!" or another student remarks, "What do we even need this for?" (that old chestnut!) 

I used to struggle with explaining to laymen what English was even about. It's tempting to sometimes say 'books' or 'reading and writing' because that's what most people see it as, but as any English teacher (sadly?) knows, books are a very small aspect of the subject. And in contrast, reading and writing is every teacher's job - literacy is a concern for all subject areas, not just English. With more experience under my belt, I now quickly tell students and parents, "English is about thinking". 

But whilst that is true, it's still a bit nebulous - slippery - for some folks to get their heads around. So that's where this English Textual Concepts framework comes in, transforming a difficult key learning learning area into something much more solid for everyone to get their heads around.

The framework is (in its most general terms) arranged into these domains:

Concepts

• Argument
• Author / Authority
• Character
• Code and Convention
• Context
• Figurative Language
• Genre
• Intertextuality
• Literary Value
• Narrative
• Representation
• Perspective
• Point of View
• Style
• Theme

Processes

• Engaging personally
• Engaging critically
• Understanding
• Connecting
• Experimenting
• Reflecting 

The concepts lend themselves to choice - as the teacher, you can look at a text and figure out which 2 to 4 concepts you'd like to concentrate on. The processes then sit alongside these - they're the skills that need to be taught in order for students to come to grips with the concepts. You could perhaps think of it in terms of the syllabus outcomes, with the concepts as your learn about outcomes and the processes as your learn to outcomes. But maybe that's oversimplifying a paradigm that has been constructed on its own terms as an entirely separate but complimentary framework. I guess there's a whole other blog in that discussion!

Here's a brief example of how the concepts can be used, with the poem She by Pedro Xisto:

That's the poem above. Neat, huh?

Anyway, today I attended some Professional Learning on the English Textual Concepts and this concrete poem by Pedro Xisto was used as an example by Ann Small of a potential text for Year 9 poetry. It's a poem that works quite well with looking at the concept of Code and Convention.

"Codes and conventions are prisms through which we interpret the world and ascertain our place in it". Well, yes, of course - but getting more specific, Code and Convention is about structure. At a Kindergarten level you start out looking at morphemes and letters, then as the students develop through primary school to secondary they look at:

• Verbal, visual and digital signs.
• Sentences and pictures
• Paragraphs, conversations, films, novels, genres... (whole texts, and whole meta-texts)

It's grammar. If you've been following this blog you'll know how truly fond I am of grammar. I feel very pleased that the concept of Code and Convention allows us to focus on this in an English context. 

 

Looking at this odd three-letter poem, we can address it in terms of Code and Convention quite easily. What interpretations can students come up with while looking at this poem? What do the letters represent? What conventions of layout are used and how does this influence meaning? Is there repetition of a letter? Is contrast used? What about the relative size of letters? Where are they placed?

In other words:

- At the letter level, what is being said? 

- As a picture, what does it represent?

- As a text, what is the message, and how do you interpret what the composer is saying?

I had never seen this poem before today but I can tell you now, I think it would be really fun to do with a class. Firstly, as analysis using the concept of Code and Convention, and then, secondly (as suggested by presenter Ann Small), a creative activity where students come up with their own concrete poem in the same style - followed by a written explanation of what they're trying to say in their poem.

It's fabulous. 

The Close Up (Teaching Film through Mini-Lessons)

Recently at my school we began working with Professor Wayne Sawyer, the Director of Research in the School of Education at Western Sydney University. The goal of this collaboration has been to improve student writing by incorporating the 'mini-lesson' approach that was pioneered and refined by prize-winning American educator Nancie Atwell. 

Something Wayne Sawyer said to our faculty in our last meeting with him was that it's sometimes helpful to get students to think about creative writing in terms of how films are cut together, and it sparked an idea in me that was only, at best, tangentially related to our mini-lessons project. 

Teachers reading this might be familiar with that gap towards the end of Term 4 where all the junior assessments have been finished, and reports are written, and students are ready to move on to their next grade. At my school, we're often left with about 5 weeks. For some classes, we just continue with their current topic and explore a few areas that might be of interest to the students, or could help set them up for the following year. For Year 10 in particular, we have a space where it's teacher's choice to do a whole topic just for fun. 

As I've mentioned previously on this blog, I had a great Year 10 class last year who were fairly focused, so in their case I decided to do some stuff on the History of Cinema. This is a personal interest area for me as I used to write quite extensively about film before I was a teacher, so I took my students all the way back to the early days of silent cinema. This provided me with an opportunity to take a grass roots approach to teaching the actual mechanics of filmmaking. 

Here's where the mini-lesson stuff comes in. I've never used iPads in the classroom before and I discussed with the class how they felt about giving them a go (with the caveat that the technology might need to be troubleshooted a bit as we went [and it did]). I applied the mini-lesson approach to teach some film techniques, making use of the absolutely brilliant and excellent documentary series The Story of Film, by Irish film critic Mark Cousins. 

(SIDE BAR: I can't recommend Mark Cousins' The Story of Film enough. If you want to know anything about film, this should be your non-negotiable first stop.)

So the first thing thing I did was show the students a short clip from the documentary (included below, though I'm happy to take it down if anyone considers it a flagrant infringement of copyright). 

This clip concerns the point in film history where the concept of a 'Close Up' was first invented. We take the visual language of cinema for granted now, so it can be eye-opening and quite illustrative to get inside the process of how these techniques first came about, and what they really meant. The clip shows one of the very first known close-ups, a sequence where the camera cuts from a mid-shot of a little girl feeding a cat to a close-up of the cat itself and then back again to the little girl. This very short instructive lesson has one simple goal: teach the students about the function of the close-up and show them what a close-up looks like.

After showing this to the students, we then got the school's set of iPads and started filming. I gave them a sheet of instructions that outlined some options for creating some shots. The goal was to create a short mini-narrative with a sequence of shots that incorporated a close-up that would build story. The results were fantastic, and I hope to show some here on the blog after securing permission.

It was a very rewarding experience for both myself and the students. Here are the resources:

Clip: The Invention of Close Ups
Sheet: Close-Up Instructions

The Rise of China: Lesson 7

Well, here we are, at the end of a metaphorical silk road with the final lesson in my unit on 20th century China. At the beginning of the unit we looked at China circa 1900 in order to get a baseline before looking at how Mao impacted on the country between the 1950s and 1976. Over the last few lessons the students had a selected tour of the Cultural Revolution to get an idea of how Chinese society changed under the Chairman's influence, so now it makes sense to look at what came afterwards and how China reacted to Mao's passing. This final lesson looks at his successor, Deng Xiaoping, and how he assessed Mao's time and instigated various reforms.

The focus question here is Who is Deng Xiaoping and What Did He Do for China?

Step 1

Students are given a prediction activity on a slip of paper (Resource 7-1) that features a list of modal statements suggesting possible evaluations of China. On this paper they are asked to tick the things that they agree with. It should help them focus on the lesson at hand; they're required to think about what they're going to read and what they've already read. And once the students have read the text (featured in the next step) they then go back and tick which of the statements the author of the text agreed with.

Step 2

Students read Resource 7-2, an information sheet about Deng Xiaoping, which asks them to unpack (or decode) some of the trickier noun groups. It's another kind of vocabulary / comprehension activity that will help students achieve confidence when reading. It also gets them to think about what they're reading a little more - building up their concept of connotation and how noun groups can construct specific meanings that supersede the meanings of the individual words. 

Afterwards, there's some more traditional questions about source reliability that should hopefully be a bit easier for the students now that they've worked through the grammar of the text in a bit of detail. 

Step 3

If there's time left over at the end, ask the students to identify text chains in the text. They should already be able to do this from the earlier lesson on text chains, but it could also be done as a whole class activity with teacher modelling of examples on the board. This is always a useful activity because it explicitly shows students how to create a 'whole text' level of meaning rather than just word or sentence-level meaning.

Links to resources:
Resource 7-1: Prediction
Resource 7-2: Deng Xiaoping

And that brings us to the end of the unit. 

You'll note the absence of an assessment task from this program. I have one, it's a source analysis examination with an extended question on Mao's impact, but I'm not going to put it up on the blog because... well, that's probably just asking for trouble. Imagine if students found this blog and downloaded the assessment task before they had to sit it? I mean, it would show initiative and great organisational skills, but those aren't the things I want to assess.

The Rise of China: Lesson 5

As this unit focuses on China's modernisation during the 20th Century, it makes sense for the Cultural Revolution to be viewed as the linchpin of this era. It therefore felt worthwhile to spend another lesson on this time period, one that was partially reliant on the previous lesson's content.

The main purpose of this lesson was that I wanted to try my hand at a 'floorstorm' activity, something that I picked up from Joanne Rossbridge and the Grammar and Teaching Course she conducts with Kathy Rushton. At first glance, a floorstorm is a slightly complicated-looking series of steps that students undertake with an array of resources. On the plus side though, it should roughly take an entire 1 hour lesson, and works as a scaffold to assist students in constructing their own paragraphs about a subject they are currently immersed in.

Step 1

Verbally prime the students for the lesson by asking them what they can tell you about the Cultural Revolution from the previous lesson. Ask them how they know this. This could be done as a discussion or a mind map.

Step 2

Use Resource 5-1 (or copies of the pictures at the bottom of this blog) to create several 7-picture photo sets. Students are to work in groups of 3-5 with a set of photos for each group, and come up with a list of words that could be associated with the pictures. Give each group some post-it notes to write these words on.

Step 3

Groups classify words into a table using Resource 5-2. They choose/create the categories they want to use to classify the words. It's important that the students come up with these categories themselves as taxonomy-building is an important literacy skill that links with student grammar development. It forces the students to think about the purpose of the words they've just come up with - whether they separate them by function (verbs, nouns, adjectives), or by content (people, places, events) or some other way of their own making.    

Step 4

Reveal the title of the photo set to the students as 'Public Struggle Sessions'. Using this clue, students are to then tick the words that they think will be in an unseen text about these photos. This incorporation of a prediction activity fits in with the Super 6 Comprehension Strategies and also directs the students in further building a lexicon to work with in regards to the subject of 20th Century China.

Make a list on the board from the class' suggestions (this may help students who have been struggling up until this point - it's important to have these checkpoints where these students can 'opt in' to the lesson so that you avoid a full hour's worth of disengagement)

Step 5

Teacher reads Resource 5-3 to students (they are not given a copy). Students are to listen and highlight/circle the words from their list that show up. After this, read the sheet again and have students make notes using the scaffold found in Resource 5-4.

Step 6 

Hand students Resource 5-5. This is an annotated version of Resource 5-3 that asks a variety of grammar-related questions surrounding the text. Teacher also projects this version onto the board to facilitate discussion and instruction as students work through the sheet.

Step 7

Almost there! Students now use Resource 5-6 to pull the text apart into some pre-set categories. Specifically, students identify clauses / sentence noun groups (the teacher can help here, after all - that's what we do!) and examine them for modality and emotive language. Using this scaffolding they can then draw some conclusions from the source. 

Step 8

And now that your students have done all of this, get them to use any and all of the information to construct their own paragraph with the heading 'Public Struggle Sessions'.

I know it's a lot of steps so you will need to work at a brisk pace, moving around the room from group to group to keep students on task. A big visible timer might be helpful too! The important thing is that the students collect together all these new terms while engaging with a text and are then able to write about it.

Links to resources
Resource 5-1: Photo Set
Resource 5-2: Table
Resource 5-3: Struggle Sessions
Resource 5-4: Note Taking
Resource 5-5: Struggle Sessions Annotated
Resource 5-6: Graphic Organiser

For printing purposes, here are the pictures from the photo sets as .jpgs

 

 

Obviously I don't have copyright for these pictures but they should be okay for educational usage. If anyone thinks otherwise please let know and I'll take them down.

The Rise of China: Lesson 4

By this point in the sequence the students should (hopefully!) have some background knowledge about 20th century China and Chairman Mao, so it's time to drill down into one of the big grey areas of history - the Cultural Revolution.

Euphemistically-named, the Cultural Revolution is one of the great largely-unacknowledged tragedies of the 20th century. Many historians have plainly said that they still don't fully understand what happened during this time; that the motivation for an entire society to systematically and brutally destroy its own culture is beyond understanding. With that in mind, how should we approach teaching it to 15 year olds?

In short; we avoid taking a comprehensive approach.

When given such a limited amount of time (my school's Year 10 History classes are spread out as 4 lessons a fortnight) it's nigh impossible to examine this event in enough detail. This is doubly relevant when we consider that most historians find it impossible to do it across an entire career, so it would have been foolish for me to even try (not that I'm always above such folly!)

Therefore, the main purpose of this lesson is to examine Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution, which should focus our attention somewhat.

Step 1

Teacher hands out sheet (Resource 4-1), which contains a five paragraph summary of the Cultural Revolution. Read through as a class (teacher either reads while class reads along, or you can have students take turns reading aloud). Students then have a go at answering the question at the end of the sheet, which asks them to begin making judgments about Mao's role in the way China's society changed in the 20th century. It also implicitly introduces the idea of a 'Cult of Personality' - something which will become more relevant and significant should students choose to do Modern History (especially if they study Russia and Stalin).

Step 2

Here's the grammar bit. Project Resource 4-2 onto your board and ask your students to examine the word bank to the side. Note the use of the phrase "some of these words". Tell the students that this is a hidden text and that they have to guess which words from the word bank would fit in a description of the Cultural Revolution. They should be able to do since they've just come hot off of Resource 4-1. As they tell you words, pick a few random but workable spots for these to go. The trick is that there is no actual hidden text, you are actually getting your students to engage in a joint text construction exercise. Once you have a few big content words up on the board tell the students to fill in the rest of the blanks to turn it into a paragraph. 

This open-ended variation on the tried-and-true cloze passage activity is a good way to build student confidence in composing paragraphs. By telling them that it is a 'hidden' text, and by doing it as a class activity, you take the risk factor out of the equation for the students. They don't have to risk looking like they don't know how to write a paragraph as this exercise scaffolds them in both a practical and a psychological way. 

Afterwards, if the majority do it successfully, you're welcome to tell them that there was no original text and that they all just wrote their own paragraph about the Cultural Revolution.

Step 3

No study of 1960s/70s China would be complete without a look at Chairman Mao's infamous book of quotations, the Little Red Book. Students should be familiar with this text from Step 1 of this lesson (it's mentioned in Resource 4-1) . Get students to work in groups examining the text, I've abbreviated it somewhat as Resource 4-3. 

Students are to choose 3-5 quotes from the Little Red Book and explain their meaning in their books. The teacher should pick a quote first and put it up on the board, demonstrating some methods to decode the meaning. This may include using text chains (which students should remember from Lesson 1), or the teacher modelling other techniques for inferring the meaning of previously unknown words (EG. Getting the gist by looking at the sentence around the word, swapping the word for other words that might fit, looking up the definition, etc). 

\

Students aren't expected to read the whole text but it's important that they're given the booklet to look at rather than just one page-long extract as this places a larger degree of choice into their hands. This harks back to the Focus on Reading stuff I mentioned in the Lesson 3 breakdown - students are more likely to engage with reading if they are given some choice in the matter. With that in mind, several sections of the Little Red Book have been presented so students can pick an area that may be of more interest to them than others.

Step 4

If you have time, or have students that you want to extend, pose the discussion question, "Is The Little Red Book good or bad?" This would work well as a class evaluation and can be done on the board as a table if you have enough opinionated students. Critical engagement with historical sources like this can lead to some interesting debates within the class room.

Links to resources:
Resource 4-1: Recap of the Cultural Revolution
Resource 4-2: Cultural Revolution 
Resource 4-3: Little Red Book

The Rise of China: Lesson 3

Hello there! Now that the students have been introduced to a few historical terms and gathered some background information about 20th century China it's time for them to start learning about the colossal keystone of modern Chinese history: Mao Tse-Tung. Lesson 3 of this Rise of China unit asks the question 'Who is Chairman Mao?'

I think, predominantly, it's helpful to remember that today's student knows little to nothing about Chairman Mao. You might think that this should go without saying but, heck, I said it because when I was a student (in the 1990s) the spectre of Chairman Mao still hung over pop culture in a big way. I remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre being all over the TV, and I grew up knowing that Mao was one of the 'big guys' in terms of recent history and current world events.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers today is increasing the contextual knowledge held by students. With so many cat videos and songified news stories demanding our attention on Youtube, today's kid isn't as au fait with the 'canon' of world events that were common knowledge to previous Australian generations. Newspapers aren't a thing anymore, and the aspects of history that once permeated our curriculum have become decentered due to the continuing influence of postmodernism. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

So - whereas we once considered certain Western historical narratives (EG. Britain's colonisation of Australia, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of JFK) to be of the highest significance (the aforementioned 'canon' of world events) - our view of history is now a lot more cosmopolitan and egalitarian. This is great in terms of addressing Anglo-Saxon bias, but it's also a challenge because the sheer dearth of information makes it next to impossible for today's generation to know which historical facts are worth remembering.

This means that it's necessary to get the context stuff in before we expect students to start analysing sources and perspectives.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to gather some biographical information on Chairman Mao before reading an appropriate source and unpacking information from it in order to further build their contextual knowledge. It might take two lessons rather than one.

Step 1

Teacher shows students PowerPoint presentation (Resource 3-1) about Chairman Mao while students collect information onto sheets (Resources 3-2, 3-2A, 3-2E). 

These sheets have been differentiated to cater for varied levels of student ability within the classroom. The core/standard group (the majority of the class) are given a range of comprehension questions to read through (3-2) that will facilitate engagement with the text in the PPT. For the lower ability students, a separate version of the sheet (3-2A) has been adjusted to allow for more direct gathering of information - students fill in cloze passage answers and are not required to decode questions before transferring information from the PPT onto the sheet. Meanwhile, higher ability students are given a sheet (3-2E) that asks more open-ended questions that require students to formulate their own opinions - incorporating higher order skills such as assessing the impact of Mao's leadership and independent summarising of information.

Step 2

The second part of the lesson involves students engaging with a wide reading text set (this idea is lifted from the research contained in the Focus on Reading 2 modules). 

The purpose of a wide reading set is to allow students to pick a text to read. Putting the choice of text into the hands of students encourages independent thought and a higher level of engagement, and the range of texts provided here (3-3, 3-4, 3-5) also works as a form of differentiation. Each text is an extract of a larger text about Chairman Mao, and they range in terms of reading difficulty. 

The Focus on Reading 2 modules support the theory that students should be engaging with texts that are 'just right', these being historical sources that are easy enough for the students to read without stopping too frequently (and hence allowing a suitable level of fluency), but also difficult enough to challenge them occasionally in regards to learning new vocabulary.

Step 3

After the students pick and read one of the texts from the wide reading set (the origins of which are cited within the resources), they then use a table (3-7) to sort words into three categories.

These categories are: words that students can understand and use, words that students are familiar with but are not sure they can use, and words that are unfamiliar. This taxonomising of terms is an important part of increasing vocabulary and understanding of context, and through the use of the table students are scaffolded into using this skill on their own. It's never too late for students to learn this!

Take note, if students have not collected enough unfamiliar words from their text then they have chosen a text that is too easy and they should therefore be pushed towards a more difficult text next time.

Step 4

Teacher collects some of the unfamiliar terms that students have identified and puts them up on the board as a glossary. The teacher can then use the teacher notes (Resource 3-8) to define some of these words.

As probably mentioned previously on this blog, students should not copy new word definitions into their books. Whilst it's important for students to be able to work from or learn a glossary,  this kind of old-school 'rote' learning has been proven by research (Focus on Reading 2) to be relatively ineffective for the majority of learners. What is more effective is for students to observe these new words and their definitions on the board (or, preferably, discuss them as a class) and then place the new terms into sentences. In this case, ask the students to pick 5-10 new terms and use them in sentences about Chairman Mao and/or China. By using the terms in a proper context, students are far more likely to learn their purpose and remember them in the future. The key is taking new words and using them appropriately - a student can copy a new word down but they also need to be able to use it. That's the real bit.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I haven't included Resource 3-6. This was an extra text for use in the wide reading set, an extract from the excellent graphic novel Little White Duck. I haven't included it here for two reasons - the first is that I haven't got an electronic version of it, and the second is that I don't want to infringe on copyright too overtly. The other texts I've included are extracts that are out of print and small enough, or sourced from elsewhere on the internet.

Links to resources:
Resource 3-1: Who is Chairman Mao PPT
Resource 3-2: Who is Chairman Mao sheet
Resource 3-2A: Who is Chairman Mao adjusted sheet
Resource 3-2E: Who is Chairman Mao extension sheet
Resource 3-3: Mao Tse-Tung and I Were Beggars text
Resource 3-4: Mao and the Chinese Revolution text
Resource 3-5: Chairman Mao the Deadly Dictator text
Resource 3-7: Mao Texts Vocabulary
Resource 3-8: Vocabulary Teacher Notes 

The Rise of China: Lesson 2

Lesson 2 of this Rise of China unit is designed to get students to start engaging with source work within the context of the historical period. As with the previous lesson there is still an emphasis on literacy and vocabulary usage, and this therefore means that I've taken a 'bottom-up' approach to teaching the requisite Stage 5 source skills - the idea being that students learn to look at sources from a literacy-based standpoint before we even start thinking about higher order History skills like reliability and usefulness.

Step 1

Project Resource 2-1 onto the board. This document contains three photographs of Shanghai - from 1900, 1950, and 2014. The majority of students in the class (your core or standard group in terms of ability) are to approach these images by writing a paragraph that describes the differences between the three time periods.

Meanwhile, lower ability students (the adjusted group) are given Resource 2-1A, a scaffold that helps them differentiate and table-ise their thoughts before assembling a few sentences in a more formal paragraph. Higher ability students (the extension group) can be given Resource 2-1E, a slip of paper with a higher order question that prompts them to argue from a firm and explicit position.

Step 2

Following on from the previous lesson (especially if they didn't get up to the last step of said lesson), the students are to conduct their own lexical density test on the paragraph that they've just written. The teacher should collect student lexical density percentages as a diagnostic score to assist with further identifying (or confirming) streams of ability within the class, and also as a tool for measuring writing ability for purposes of later comparison. 

If you feel, however, like your students are not conducive to the lexical density testing (or you've already had the chance to collect this information) then you can just skip forward to Step 3. It won't be a big deal.

Step 3

Building a bit further on the idea of analysing visual sources, the students are now given Resource 2-2, a written text about early 20th century cultural relations between China and the West that has two accompanying cartoons (one from a Chinese perspective and one from a Western perspective). Students are to read this text whilst collecting information in a 'Making Sense of Visual Representations' table (Resource 2-3, adapted from the Focus on Reading 2 modules).

Students can either pick one cartoon to examine or do a separate sheet for each one. The main goal here is to build an understanding of the relationship between text and image, specifically the way in which both work together to enhance meaning. This is typically a literacy/English-based skill but in History it becomes really useful because it helps to build context - allowing students to decode unfamiliar visual texts and start accessing meaning in a more fluent way that will allow for higher order analysis. 

As much as students find historical cartoons and propaganda quite visually striking, I've found that they still often lack the context to really appreciate what's being said. A lot of Year 11 Modern History students are quite unwilling to draw connections between their own experiences and the commentary contained in early 20th century satirical cartoons, so I think it's important that they learn at this Year 10 level to independently create contextual knowledge in the way demonstrated by Resource 2-3. It'll build confidence and make these sorts of texts a bit less intimidating for them.

Some teacher notes on Step 3 are also included in Resource 2-4.

Links to each of the resources can be found here: 
Resource 2-1: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1A: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1E: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-2: Comparing Perspectives
Resource 2-3: Making Sense of Visual Representations
Resource 2-4: Teacher Notes for Visual Representations

Disclaimer: The photography used here is strictly for educational use. If these pictures are yours and you would like credit (or for me to take them down) please just let me know. 

The Rise of China: Lesson 1

For me, getting stuck into the first lesson is always the hardest part of writing a History unit. The reason for this is one of those questions that historians have argued over for a considerable amount of time: where do historical events start?

So - how far back should I go in giving students background for the era of Chinese history that we'll be examining? The sequence of cause and effect in history can run on and on and on if you look hard enough. And that's if you're a believer in cause and effect - some historians look at history and just see it as a series of random events, or thing that correlate with (rather than cause) each other.

For the sake of student and teacher sanity, I decided to cut my background off around the year 1900, and I took the approach of implying causation between certain events rather then directly stating such things. It's not really the teacher's place to get all hardline about which events caused which, that's something that should be left open for Year 10 students to deduce - especially since there are no real right or wrong answers about cause and effect. Having said that, relevant information still needs to be presented so students can draw some conclusions with relative ease.  

Before I go on with justifying my choices, I'll start with the lesson plan,

Lesson 1: Background to Modern China

1. Students read passage on screen (Resource 1-1) and answer questions in their books.

2. Explain lexical density to students using text on screen, hand students their own version of the text (Resource 1-2). Lexical density refers to the amount of 'content' words in a text - these are any verbs, nouns, adverbs or adjectives. Work with students to identify all of these words in the paragraph. Students then divide these words by the total amount of words to determine a percentage. This is the lexical density of the text. A well-written text should be between 55% and 70%. If it's too high then it's overwritten, and if it's too low then it's too much like conversation/spoken language.

3. Students work on linking sections of the text together - IE. Different words that refer to the same thing. See teacher notes (Resource 1-3)

4. Students write sentences about China that use the following terms from the text:

• Dominate/dominated
• Shanghai
• Dynasty
• Modernise/modernisation
• Longyu

5. If time, students/teacher use lexical density test to examine student writing after sentences have been composed.

I've left the last step optional for time reasons. Without seeing the lesson in a live classroom it's hard to gauge how it will all play out. But that's one of the magical things about teaching, right? Here's a more detailed break down of each step with some accompanying theory...

Step 1

Resource 1-1 is a short paragraph that has been designed to give students an overview of CHina between 1900 and the modern day. It's a difficult thing to squeeze that much history into such a small word count but it's important that this text is kept relatively short so that we have time to do all the teacherly things with it, and so that students don't become disengaged while reading. It's been written as something that will also fit nicely onto the whiteboard as a projection. Anyway, here's the text:

The Beginning of Modern China (1900-1912)

In 1900, China's glory days were behind her. China was a nation in a decline. In 1900, China was heavily controlled by foreign nations such as England, Germany and France, who tended to dominate the ports such as Shanghai. China was ruled by the royal Qing dynasty, who were from Manchuria (now known as Korea). After losing a series of small wars to Britain and France, China had to hand over the strategically important port of Hong Kong to Britain. Many in China blamed the Qing family for their humiliation at the hands of European powers. The Chinese Empress Dowager refused to modernise China, leading to many Chinese states rebelling and 'breaking away' from her rule. In 1912, after much negotiations, Longyu gave up her power so that Chinese politicians could form their own government to save China. This brought an end to 2000 years of Imperial China. 

I've followed this with four relatively straightforward comprehension questions to get the students talking around the text and writing straight away about the new topic. These questions are:

1. Who controlled China during this time?
2. Why do you think this is?
3. What does the word 'modern' mean?
4. Why were the Qing Dynasty forced to step down from their throne?

Despite their simplicity, the purpose of these questions are manifold. The first and second questions are designed to get the students thinking about China's relationship with other countries - something that underpins Chinese justification for their foreign policy during much of the 20th and 21st centuries. The third question starts the students thinking about their vocabulary (something that forms a large part of this unit) and the fourth question brings the students to their starting point - the disruption and collapse of China's traditional past. Each question gets the student to engage with the text on a surface level whilst also pushing them (hopefully) to a level of comprehension that goes beyond word-level recognition. When students are able to push past getting bogged down on understanding singular words they can then move to whole-sentence and, better yet, whole-text levels of comprehension. Each of these questions asks for engagement at one or more of these different levels.

Step 2

Resource 1-2 is much the same as Resource 1-1, only spaced-out to allow for the lexical density test and the cohesion analysis that comes in Step 3 of the lesson. Step 1 of the lesson focuses on a document projected onto a screen/whiteboard rather than a student copy of the text because I don't want the kids to get hung up on the new term 'lexical density' before they even read the source and engage with the actual content. 

Step 2 allows the students to have a sheet (Resource 2-1) so that they can now move beyond the content to look at how the text has been constructed. It's easy to think of text construction as an English domain but by examining grammar in History students can build up their own contextual knowledge and drill down into the intentions of the source's writer - things that are very pertinent when it comes to source analysis. I find the idea of using grammar to analyse sources quite exciting because it's a very grounded way for students to engage with source work, and any History teacher knows how unenthused students can get when faced with the higher order skills that accompany source analysis!

After students have been introduced to both the concept of lexical density and how this reveals the difference between written vs. spoke-like text, well, then it's time for the class to get stuck into looking at how the text works at a grammatical level. 

Step 3

Resource 1-3 provides some notes for teachers to use in assisting students to find text chains in the source. A 'text chain' is simply a series of arrows/lines drawn between highlighted words in a text. These chains show words that refer to the same idea, and demonstrate how extended vocabulary can be beneficial to making a text more cohesive. This explicit engagement with the grammar also allows students to get a more in-depth contextual understanding of the text - for example, realising that 'Dynasty' and 'royal family' refer to the same thing, or that the Chinese Empress Dowager's name is Longyu. 

Once students have begun acknowledging the lexical density of the source and decoding some of these previously unfamiliar words it's then necessary that we get them to actually use at least a few of these new terms in context, hence Step 4 of the lesson plan. The decoding that accompanies the process of building text chains is also a useful skill for students to learn as it helps them build fluency when reading. 

Step 4

The Focus on Reading research shows that simply defining new terms and getting students to write these definitions down is a fairly ineffective way of broadening vocabulary and has very little impact on student learning. What's much more meaningful is getting students to talk about the meanings of these new terms and then wrestle with the words directly by placing them into new sentences. Using the terms is what makes those synapses fire! If we're ever to get students to write well then we need them to build up their toolkit of lexical knowledge... that means increasing their vocabulary by getting them to actually use new words.

Step 5

Then, if the teacher gets through all of this and has some time left over in the lesson, students can examine the lexical density of their new sentences from Step 4. This information won't really be for them by the teacher can collect it as a form of diagnostic pre-testing and compare it to student samples taken from the assessment task at the end of the unit.

Links to each of the resources can be found here:
Resource 1-1: The Beginning of Modern China
Resource 1-2: Student Copy
Resource 1-3: Teacher Notes