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April 13, 2012
Revisiting Westward Expansion
In recent years, scholars have worked to reexamine the history of the West by focusing on Native American groups. With limited sources, they have pieced together histories that do not generalize the experiences of Native Americans, and that accurately portray the complicated interactions that occurred in the West.
A new curriculum resource from the Choices Program, Westward Expansion: A New History looks at this reexamined history from two historical perspectives. First, students explore U.S. expansion from a broad perspective by considering the major events and policies that accompanied U.S. westward growth in the nineteenth century. Then students explore this history on a local level using the research of Brown University Professor Karl Jacoby on the effects of U.S. expansion on groups in southern Arizona. This case study is not emblematic of the entire West; rather, it allows students to understand the complicated and violent ways in which U.S. expansion affected specific individuals and communities. Students are challenged to consider the ways in which we remember history, and efforts to re-envision the past.
Choices recently produced videos of Colin Calloway of Dartmouth College and Karl Jacoby of Brown University for use with these materials.
February 7, 2012
The U.S. in Afghanistan unit in a Comparative Philosophy of War Class
By Guest Blogger Lisa Carter
Choices Teaching Fellow, Housatonic Valley Regional High School, NY
We have just completed the Afghanistan unit in an honors level seniors course, “The Comparative Philosophy of War”. We spent the semester studying attitudes about fighting wars throughout history and ended the course with an in-depth look at the war in Afghanistan. My students LOVED the unit. We began our study with a field trip to NYC where we visited the 9/11 memorial and then the United Nations where we had a special briefing on Afghanistan by Kieran Dwyer, a member of the Peacekeeping staff.
We followed the unit as is written and used the supplemental materials as well as the Scholars Online videos. The “Looking at Afghanistan” lesson was extremely successful in terms of identifying students’ impressions about Afghanistan. There was a lot of great discussion and they realized just how much they had to learn about the details of the country before they could begin to really understand the situation there. My students did not have any difficulty with the reading materials and there was much animated class discussion throughout the unit.
We watched the films Human Terrain, Restrepo and clips of Charlie Wilson’s War. I plan to include Afghan Star next year. The films, along with the Scholars Online videos, were extremely important in helping students understand different aspects of the war as well as the Afghan culture.
I took about three weeks to complete the unit in a modified block schedule. This is a ten-day rotation where I see the students for seven meetings. Four meetings are 48 minutes long and three are 72 minutes long. The 72-minute blocks were the most interesting as we could combine film and discussion in a comfortable amount of time.
The role play was excellent. The students were so well prepared and had become so curious about the details of the war and life in Afghanistan that many began to follow the war more closely in the media and they conducted some of their own research about Afghanistan and the war. They could speak to the complexity of the political, geopolitical, cultural and economic aspects of each option. Those students who were the Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked great questions as well.
I give a survey to students at the end of this course and nearly every student cited the Choices units as the best part of the class. (We also used Responding to Terrorism in September). I look forward to teaching this unit again next year!
January 5, 2012
Using Choices in the Middle School Classroom
By guest blogger Caitlin Moore, Excel Academy Charter School
I just finished teaching a unit on foreign policy for an 8th grade government class at a high performing urban charter school in East Boston, Massachusetts. It serves 210 middle school students from primarily East Boston and Chelsea. Approximately 72% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and approximately 55% speak a language other than English at home.
My students and I had a fantastic time learning about the tools of foreign policy and how U.S. foreign policy has changed over time. One major benefits of this unit was that it provided middle school students with a memorable broad overview of U.S. history that should provide a better foundation for the many details in their high school classes. In addition this provided a fantastic introduction to key vocabulary that will help in any future social studies class as well as in understanding current events in the world today (isolate, neutral, deterrence, terrorism, aid, sanction, treaty, negotiation, compromise).
At the core of this three-week unit were modified Choices materials. We completed two modified options role plays – one on the Challenge to the New Republic: the War of 1812 and one on The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons. Below is a description of few ways that I used ideas, texts and activities provided by Choices to create this experience. I hope that some of them are useful to other middle school teachers.
1. Teaching about Values and Interests: I spent two class periods at the beginning of the government course exploring the idea and interest. The pay off was huge – students would refer to this idea throughout the course and it provided an easy yet rich framework for them to analyze political decisions. Below are a few middle school specific tricks.
a. Explicitly teach the concept of Values and Interests and their characteristics. While the values themselves have multiple meanings, I found it helpful to define the difference between values and interests. I used the short definitions below as well as listed explicitly the characteristics of values and interests (for example, people sometimes believe opposing values; interests are often easier to identify; people often justify their actions using values).
Values – What is important to a group of people
Interests - What will benefit a group of people (you can attach a price tag to interests)
Laws – The rules of a country, what is allowed and forbidden.
Morals - What a group of people considers to be right
In addition to providing explicit notes I also created a mini-scenario in which a person has to choose between spending $5 dollars at Burger King or donating the money to save the environment. We played around with this idea using different values and practicing the vocabulary.
b. Play with the concept of values often. My students really enjoyed using their value cards to play the simple card game ‘War.’ One student would place a Values card down. They would then try to convince each other which value was more important. Whoever ‘won’ each round got to keep the cards. Whoever had the most cards at the end of time — 2 -8 min seemed to work– won the game. In their desire to win, students practiced using the language of values in a context free environment. This made it easier to evaluate the same values when discussing subjects like the War of 1812 or nuclear weapons. When disagreements got heated it was fun to have a pair present their argument and have the whole class vote on which was more convincing).
2. Using the Options Role Play. The options role play is what makes Choices so fantastic – especially with middle school students who love to discuss and perform. The assigned role-play positions are extremely helpful because it makes middle schoolers feel like they are engaged in a doable challenge. Instead of trying to develop their own position, they can devote their energy to finding specific evidence, making their argument understandable to their peers, and building on each others’ points (three major middle school skills). Below are a few tricks that worked for me:
a. Making positions accessible. The language in the positions is challenging and does require small modifications so that all students can access it. At the 8th grade level, I photocopied the ‘options in brief’ for students and had them analyze this small piece of text in terms of values, interests, key points, and summary of position. I found sentence starters/frames such as the following to be very helpful:
A person who believes this position values _____________________ because____.
A person who believes this position would be willing to sacrifice that value of _______________ for ____________.
A person who believes this position would never allow____________________.
A person who believes this position is afraid of/that___________________________.
A person who believes this position would be will to negotiate or compromise on the topic of __________________________.
A person who believes this position thinks it is necessary for ________________________ to happen or else __________.
Then for homework I gave students the full option summary as well as the beliefs and arguments. The accompanying questions required students to do a fair amount of summarizing in their own words as well as evaluate their strongest arguments by circling them and reading them out loud (signature required) in a convincing way. The time investment to help students understand, articulate, and ‘own’ their positions definitely paid off in the role play.
b. Setting students up with background knowledge. For me, this was the most intimidating step of using Choices. There was so much fantastic information in the units, but I felt overwhelmed (at first) in trying to figure out what I needed to communicate with students so they would have a successful options role play. In addition, the text font size and layout is geared to high school students. Below are some strategies that allowed my students to access the ideas in the text:
- Read the options roles first, and then backwards plan the important information. After reading the options in brief I summarized the discussion for myself in 1 to 2 sentences. Then I went back through the information and only used sections that most directly related to the discussion.
- Use the primary source quotations throughout the text. These were so well chosen that I was always able to create mini-synthesis activities around them. They are so easy to find in the text (bold, large, italics) that I could easily find and then recopy them into my own worksheet. In addition, students were able to weave them into the debate which helped reinforce the need for high quality quotations in all types of discussion/writing (not just for English class).
- Use the Scholars Online. These short videos were well organized and students felt so smart listening to experts talk about each topic. We enjoyed watching them together as a class. There was a huge added benefit in the fact that we could re-watch the most complicated ones and work together to take notes. It allowed me to coach their listening and note taking skills much more easily than when I am delivering notes at the front of the room.
c. The Options Role Play itself. I think that any format that you use for the role play (Socratic Seminar, Harkness Discussion, Model Congress/Model United Nations, Debate) will work. I chose to use the parliamentary procedure of Model UN because that is what I felt most comfortable with. One of my colleagues always uses debates when doing a modified options role play with her 6th grade students. With clear positions and an arsenal of high quality evidence and quotations, it’s hard to go wrong. I think that any format that your students are already used to will work.
December 14, 2011
Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empiricism
There’s a good read at Foreign Policy about the misperceptions that contribute to the debate about Afghanistan. It has a list of the limited number of Afghanistan experts in the United States. Several of these scholars helped Choices with its curriculum unit The United States in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan will continue to be a topic of debate in U.S. foreign policy, and will likely garner extra attention because of the presidential election. Our curriculum materials are a good way to bring the expertise of those few scholars of Afghanistan into classrooms and then on into the hands of students. Watch the video clip to get a sense of what they have to offer and some the issues raised in the unit.
December 12, 2011
YouTube for Schools
Google has just launched YouTube for Schools, a network setting that school administrators can turn on to grant access only to the educational content from YouTube EDU. Teachers can choose from the hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube EDU created by more than 600 partners like the Smithsonian, TED, Steve Spangler Science, Khan Academy and Numberphile.
They’ve also worked with teachers to put together more than 300 playlists broken out by subject and by grade level. You can find them listed out at youtube.com/teachers.
December 2, 2011
Events in Syria Bear Watching
The situation in Syria continues to worsen. A UN sponsored commission, led by Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, has just issued a report on the deteriorating conditions there and the suffering of civilians. Pinheiro, who collaborated with Choices on its human rights curriculum, testified today (12.2.11) in an emergency meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, “The extreme suffering of the population inside and outside Syria must be addressed as a matter of urgency. Victims expect nothing less from the United Nations and its member states.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has called for urgent measures by the international community.
In this video Pinheiro describes the role of UN in protecting human rights.
We at Choices plan to release a Teaching with the News on the latest developments on the Arab Spring in about ten days. An updated version of Shifting Sands: Balancing U.S. Interests in the Middle East is schedule for release in late 2011.
Here are a few interesting sources on current events in Syria:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/09/2011923115735281764.html
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/12/142270039/arab-league-suspends-syria-other-options-unclear
November 15, 2011
Digital Tools for Active Learning
The Choices Program is midway through a multiyear initiative to increase our use of digital media as a teaching tool. While we are enthusiastic about the potential of digital curriculum, we want to make sure that any new materials we produce enhance, not obstruct, the most important part of the student experience—what happens inside the classroom. In terms of student engagement and active learning, we believe there is no substitute for the face-to-face interaction that happens between teachers and students during class. At Choices we are committed to active learning. We focus on developing materials that foster a participatory, student-centered experience because we want students to engage actively with history and think critically about its relevance to the world they live in. With this in mind, the Choices Program has been looking at ways to use new media (including video and audio content) to make the process of reading a digital student text more active than the traditional print format. We have a lot of ideas, and I am excited about the prospect of making the text come alive for students in new ways. We have also had conversations about digital lessons, and our videographer Tanya has developed some amazing digital tools to go with some of our new units.
We know that technology can sometimes be distracting. We do not want to isolate students on devices that detract from group activity. Whatever digital tools we develop, we want them to help teachers foster analytic discussion and productive classroom work. Digital curriculum materials have a lot of potential, but they cannot and should not replace the absolutely essential role that teachers play in student learning. They need to be designed in service to an active and participatory classroom experience.
These are some of the things that we are thinking about as we begin discussions about digital curriculum. What do you think about how digital materials can be used effectively in the classroom?
October 20, 2011
New in Scholars Online: Benjamin Hopkins
“[Afghanistan] turns from being this…central player in a regional order into being this…land of endemic chaos that doesn’t really fit any place.”
How did Afghanistan become the country it is today? Professor Benjamin Hopkins takes a look back at the history of Central Asia and how British imperialism shaped the future of Afghanistan.
This video is part of the Scholars Online collection for The United States in Afghanistan. You can see more videos from this interview here.
September 20, 2011
Afghanistan Curriculum Materials
Today we released our new curriculum materials on the U.S. role in Afghanistan. We’re excited! All of us have been working hard on this for parts of the last year. The video gives you a sense of the ideas and themes in the printed curriculum as well as the content of the Scholars Online videos. Information about the curriculum, The United States in Afghanistan, is available on our website.