This year, my go to response to "How are you going to summatively assess your students?" was "They can make something!"-- a product seemed like an infinitely cool assignment that a test or paper. They were infinitely cooler! This year my students wrote Spoken Word pieces about oppression and advocacy, developed a collection of stamps about the New Deal Programs that was submitted to the US Postal Service, made audio recordings to answer questions about WWII, made an Instagram account for Abe Lincoln, and wrote children's book about the Cold War. After seeing students respond so well to the assignment in my Oppression/Advocacy unit, I wanted to repeat that success and keep student interest high, and so I focused on creative, personal assignments. Students responded with excitement and zeal--for a while, and then they began to relax thinking they did not need to work as hard to get the same results. They were right. In an effort to keep the streak of "personal" assignments going, I started slipping in the academic rigor. Students no longer had to relate their lives back to historical text we were studying. I sacrificed deeply intellectual work for my students for assignments that would win me brownie points. As the year progressed I noticed students getting comfortable. The Thompson letter came at just the right time-- right when comfort was slipping into apathy. That assignment, that I did not create, woke me up to the sort of work students could and should be doing, critical thinking and analysis.
For future practice in teaching cyclical history, I need to develop assignments that ask student to analyse or compare historical information to modern connections. I will do that by creating assignments that require students to start with the historical information and build towards modern connections. This is very vague, so for example currently my students are finishing up their unit on the Civil Rights Movement. Originally, I was going to have them write a reflective essay about the impact of the Civil Rights Movement on their lives, which is not a bad essay, however keeping the things I learn from my inquiry I would ammend that assignment. Now instead the assignment would ask students to analyse the steps that lead from the Civil Rights Movement to the current racial tensions around police brutality, and the impact that has had on their lives as teenagers in Philadelphia or I would ask students to write an essay about the change of a Civil Rights group, such as NAACP or SCLC, from the Civil Rights Movement to modern day and have students explore the the social justice that these groups are working towards.
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In order to have students write that type of essay, I would need to scaffold the work to get students to dig into the history and bring it to modern day. I would need to provide information and articles about both the historical background and the modern connection. Additionally, students would need help to get to the place where they could write an analytical essay.