Sixth Grade Social Studies

Two days ago I met with our Sixth Grade Social Studies Teacher, Mark. Mark’s themes of the class are Bias and Perspective and his essential Questions are:
1. What is bias?
2. How do bias and perspective affect history?
There are two major units in the class, one on the Romans and another on Medieval Times. Additionally, Mark covers smaller units on the Mongols and the Vikings. Skills Mark emphasizes in class include note taking and how to conduct research. Mark has two areas that he wants to work on this year:
• A more intentional integration of current events that he can parallel with the units he studies.
• An online space the students can use to keep gathered information and changing ideas as they grow throughout the year.
There were two resources that seemed to fit into the need to emphasize current events as well as begin to give students a more global perspective. This is exciting for me because it is authentic use for the technology as well as emphasizing a skill we are hearing is more of a necessity everyday – global perspective. Also, I love the idea of paralleling some of the events happening around the world today with what the students are studying in history. Global Voices is a blog space developed by Ethan Zuckerman. He explained his reasoning for creating this blog on TED. There is also a journal from England that was recommended, Understanding Global Issues. I have read in other online communities that this journal is written in accessible and easy to understand language and is unbiased. There is a free copy that can be reviewed on line and it seems inexpensive.
We reviewed WackWall, a social networking environment that doesn’t (yet) have an age limit listed in the terms of service. This is a ning like environment that is still in beta. Like most freeware in beta the user should expect some glitches, but normally when testing a beta tool there is also a high degree of technical support-at least that has been my experience.
The actual use of the online environment is still being worked out. Since Mark doesn’t use a textbook, he does want the space to be a place students can reference notes. His vision is to have a student responsible for recapping important points discussed in class. It could also be a place to post resources for the students. We also discussed using the space to have students converse about central topics in the class including perspective and bias. Since this is going to be an exceptionally busy year for Mark professionally, he needs to have a way to keep up with the conversations without having the discourse become overwhelming. Online group work could help him manage the student posts more easily. Essentially the way this works is to break the students in to small groups and have them form smaller online communities. One student is responsible for monitoring the conversation and posting a summary reflection of the points discussed. This would have to be modeled in class and may take a while for students to get down the process. The skills the students develop in this process, reading for understanding, picking out main points and synthesizing information as well as communicating the information to a larger audience are valuable. Grouping also relieves students of the burden of having to follow all of the online discussion.
Mark’s responsibility becomes one of mostly reading, picking out points that he wants to either emphasize or clarify in class face to face. As long as Mark brings back topics discussed on line in the class, the students will be aware that he is reading the discussion and considers it to be valuable.
Assessment was the piece touched on in the meeting. How does Mark evaluate the online discussions? How does he grade the process of the work done by the students? I’m not sure what other modes of assessment are employed in this class; so that is something I need to ascertain. For students I think a short punch list will help them structure their work and may change dependent on the nature of the work. However it may include something like this:

• Did I fully answer the question?
• Did I support my answer with examples from the class or text?
• Did I spell check my work?
• Does my work make sense?

Another punch list would need to be developed for responses and could include the following:

• Did I explain my agreement or disagreement?
• Did I support my reasoning?
• Did I spell check my work?

For these lists short and direct works best. As I reflect on the above post/response model I am thinking about a recent post by Alfie Kohn. He writes about transitioning our teaching practice from having students take an “adversarial” position on a topic and transform that to one of evolving thinking and understanding. It is something to think about.
Mark’s assessment can take several tacks and will depend on what he is actually evaluating. If he wants to make sure all salient points from class are understood he can evaluate the weekly scribe from that perspective and can create a rubric to support this process. He can also have group grades based on the summary posts of the group. The person summarizing group response would change every week. It will be harder for him to determine how students understand the impact of perspective and bias from summary posts of information, however if he lurks on the blog he will glean some of this information. The digital recording of the information will give him a place to go to check student understanding. A component of posting in a timely manner would also be reflected in the grade. Online learning environments work through different topics throughout the year. This necessitates having a starting and ending date for discussions where students are not expected to revisit conversations once they have come to an end. This frees students from having to keep up on too many conversations at one time.