Creating a Structured Academic Controversy

There is the content.

There is what students "need to know."

There is what students are interested in themselves...

And if you are lesson planning as a new teacher, how do you connect all these dots? I often look at a lesson plan or a list of bulletpoints that students need to know and all I think of is "Oh crap, kids are going to be booooooored with this!"

Marzano (2007) speaks of a number of ways that teachers can "engage the learner" including what he calls "mild controversy" or competition. This approach jives really nicely with another push that I've been trying to make in my classroom, which is a move towards historical thinking. 

As I remember it in the history classes that I sat in through high school, history was but a list of dates and facts. Remember them and you'll ace the quiz on Friday. The problem is, that's not what Historians do. By teaching history that way we're not only boring kids to tears, we're not teaching what history really is - a discussion or debate in the present about the past. 

The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) has recently helped me with this approach - they have fantastic, really adaptable posts that are actually designed as Structured Academic Controversy (SAC).  I tried one of their lessons recently during a unit on Ancient Greece.

The lesson asks students to examine primary and secondary documents and to arrive at a historical claim on the question: How many soldiers were at the battle of Thermopylae?

The battle of Thermopylae is historically a controversial topic. It's the battle that inspired the horrifically terrible and historically inaccurate film 300.  According to legend a small group of Spartan soldiers held off a large army of Persian soldiers for seven days, an event that inspired the Greeks into victory in the Greco-Persian war.

But just how many Persian soldiers were at Thermopylae? Getting a 14 year old to care about this was a long shot -  BUT by giving students multiple accounts of the battle and allowing them to debate it - it actually got kids to a thinking place where suddenly it didn't matter how mundane the question was. The point is, kids are thinking. Their minds turn on - and when it comes to creating engaging lessons, that's really the point. I've begun to preach this to kids openly. The Battle of Thermoyplae? Sure, if you really care - then by all means become a history major and do history - and I hope  you find real passion for this. But the real point here - is that we become critical thinkers. I'm not expecting you to jump for you joy over the number of Persian soldiers in this battle - but if students are learning how to question what they read in the process, then I think a lesson like this does its job. I hope to do more in the weeks to come.

Break it Down!

I wrestled with the process for a long time of how to implement the Common Core State Standards into a lesson, feeling like the standards severely limited my creativity. Finally I met with my professor and it clicked for me:

Let lessons be driven by standards.

That doesn't limit creativity. In fact, it liberates creativity! The standard creates purpose and direction for content. In this post, we'll break down how to create a lesson driven by a Common Core State Standard.

For example, here is a standard for 9th grade English Language Arts:

Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience.
(CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.WHST.9-10.5)

Say what?

Okay, let's break it down.

First of all, find the main verb and you find your objective. Good objectives, and in fact all the Common Core State Standards, are driven by verbs, about what you can DO if you achieve this learning goal.

In this standard, the main verb is "develop."

Next, find the stem, which is the main phrase. The stem is "Develop and strengthen writing as needed." This is your objective, which is much easier to swallow than the whole standard itself. Then naturally one may ask: how does one develop and strengthen writing as needed?

"Plan, revise, edit, rewrite, try a new approach, focus on addressing what is more significant for a specific purpose and audience."

Your lesson plan can focus specifically on several or even only one of these aims mentioned above. You can't expect students to be sailing away with every aspect of this standard within one lesson. But objectives can be revisited again and again.

I personally have found - surprisingly - a liberation in focusing on these standards. I don't feel so lost and adrift in planning a lesson, trying to invent interesting material that might be meaningful.
For example, for the standard mentioned above, the material could be to write an essay, a story, a novel, a research paper, a newspaper article.

Standards are a compass that allow me to actually focus in on where I'm going with my students, then let the journey to that destination be filled with adventure.

So break it down, then build it up.

(click on the image below for a zoomed in view of this diagram of Bloom's Taxonomy)