I brought back current events this year for a couple reasons.
1. Students struggle on state test questions that connect history to today. 
2. My experiences in Greece and Peru helped reignite my passion for global citizenship.

Igniting STUDENT excitement for current events, however, has been a struggle. My original goals were ambitious. Two days a month students would read an article in class and summarize. Then at the end of the semester, their best work would be added to a Global Mindset Portfolio. Unfortunately over 30% of students struggled to complete the first article summary. I adjusted the second article summary by curating light-hearted positive news with little improvement. For round three I addressed a gap in our curriculum. Wisconsin law requires that students learn about the native peoples of Wisconsin but I'll be the first to admit we do not do a thorough job with this content. 
Then I discovered Skawennati's TED talk. She is a First Nation's artist from Canada who uses new media to create space in her audience's minds to picture indigenous people in the future. One of her art projects is a digital paper doll who shares journal entries about events throughout history from 1400 to 2400. 

​Inspired by her vision, I found Newsela articles on a variety of topics that connected indigenous people solving problems today to the UN Sustainable Development Goals we are focusing on throughout the year. I streamlined the article summary to the bare minimum and asked students to create their own paper dolls and journal entries about their events.
At first a few groups struggled with the concept of regular people doing normal activities but through discussion I helped them understand that this was the exact point we were trying to understand.
Change agents are regular people who think of creative ways to improve their communities.
Furthermore, First Nations people are not just a part of history, they are part of our present and future.

The amount of nuance and balance required to engage middle schoolers so they learn and achieve is sometimes astonishing. Sometimes it's just a little thing that makes a difference. Today was our second day studying an overview of indigenous history in the United States. The subject is heavy and intense because we examine the ten stages of genocide and ask questions about the Mankato Massacre of 1862. 
I always strive to balance tragedy with triumph with my middle school students. I found a fantastic TED talk by visual artist Skawennati Imagining Indians in the 25th Century. She uses new media to make space in the viewer's imagination where often historic images of indigenous people take up space for modern and future Native Americans. Students are reading articles about ways that indigenous peoples are offering solutions to the worlds' problems as we continue to develop our global citizenship. 
It wasn't until my third hour class that I figured out that this photo could build a bridge between the challenging material of genocide and the uplift of resilient Native Americans. I told my students about my experience at Dachau. I felt overwhelmed with the weight of sadness and grief so I walked to the edge of the compound and visited the chapels and memorials there. This image is always in my mind when I have to face when sadness feels deep and darkness feels to great to bear. The light is there if we choose to see it or as Amanda Gorman said, "if we are brave enough to see it."

So often we attend engaging, interesting sessions at conferences but don't have time to process and put these innovations into action. Inspired by the game concierge we met at a board game cafe in Larisa, Greece, I'm going to share some insights I gained from professional learning this summer.
At the Play, Make, Learn Conference in Madison in August, I heard Jesse Schell, educational game designer, speak.
What is your goal?
Jesse said that the goal of educational games, which he, more appropriately, calls "transformational games," is to change a player.
He shared the three elements game designers use. They were great fodder for imagining transformation in our classrooms:
1. Describe the change desired in the player
2. Decide the action that will make that change happen. (Because humans only change through action)
3. Determine how you will engage the user in the experience

Change beyond "growth:" In planning our curriculum we should consider which changes we care most about: 

• Physiological: How students "are"
• Emotional: How they feel about things
• Knowledge-based: What students know
• Skill-based: What they can do
• Behavioral: How they act

Transformative Actions: In deciding on the activities that will drive this change, educators should consider the seven actions that Jesse said change a human being.

1. Receiving information by: 

• watching, reading, listening
• experiencing
• measuring and monitoring
• noticing so we can take info in differently
• understanding how something fits into the big picture

So much of our curriculum and pedagogy live in this space.
2. Remembering:

• repetition
• first thing we heard it and the last thing

We have to ask how long this kind of change will last and how meaningful it will be.
3. Surprise

• positive and negative outcomes
• emotional impact
• Play creates ownership (discoveries)

When do your students play in your content area or in your weekly plan?
4. Application

• connect, bridge, combine, synthesize
• relate and personalize

How do your students connect their thinking to the world beyond the classroom walls?
5. Reflect and think

• analyze and interpret
• prioritize
• reconsider

How do you cultivate curious, confident learners who think critically?
6. Imagine

• visualize
• plan
• predicting
• design

How do your projects help students visualize, plan and design? How do experiments or arguments help them to predict?
7. Communicate your ideas to others

Engagement through a gaming lens: Jesse describes six ways that games engage players. Can you rotate through these engagement strategies regularly? Reflect on ways that you've included these strategies and which kind of engagement is lacking?

• Sensory experience
• Exploration to find out something new
• Challenge
• Story
• Social 
• Creative

Learning is a game that we want all students to win. We want to support them as they change who they are, how they feel & act, and what they know & can do. Before you feel overwhelmed by initiatives and new requirements ask Jesse's three questions:

• How do I want to students to change as a result of this learning?
• How will plan for and facilitate that change in my pedagogy?
• How will students engage in our classroom learning space?

​Sometimes I get a wacky idea and it gets stuck in my head and I can't let it go.
This week I'm deeply immersed in my Belonging Ecosystem Framework, preparing to present a workshop at the NCTE Homecoming Conference in Louisville. 
One of my most powerful takeaways from my research in Greece is that being explicit about welcome and belonging helps create a sense of welcome and belonging. 
Don't assume that students make the connection between collaborating, being included and using their voice. Yes, these activities create belonging but when you take the time to talk about it and reflect on it, that feeling takes root and is deeper.
Enter- a belonging ecosystem t-shirt.
Just imagine that as your teacher writes on the board the words on their back remind you that you should be safe, supported, included, heard, comfortable, connected, understood and proud.
Now that's a powerful message.

In over ten years in the classroom, I've developed a practice of cultural competence and strive to apply cultural humility to everything I do. This is a practice and I don't always succeed.
You may its like riding a bicycle, although in my case that would mean I catastrophically fail from time to time. Back in 1998 I hopped back on a bicycle after probably five years and you know what? It was NOT all muscle memory nirvana. I crashed. Twice. I had trouble mastering stopping a bicycle.
In retrospect this was likely a manifestation of a complete lack of self-confidence but I choose to see it as a reminder that riding a bicycle, just like being cultural competent, requires practice and adjustment.
I recently attended a training for teachers focused on mental health and using digital tools. The presenters were scholars from the United States and I have to admit I started the day with skepticism. I love good professional development. I love new ideas and improving my craft as a teacher. Even in skepticism I keep my mind open that I will learn something new. What I learned was that without an equity lens we can tell a very skewed story.
Our presenter offered a framework for analyzing primary sources and reviewed some interesting ideas to use, but his examples were completely focused on his perspective to the point of promoting a biased view of history.
I walked away from the session not excited about new tools I could apply in my classroom but disappointed that I'd spent an hour of my life digging into the glorification of a confederate soldier and the confederate flag. 
Why, when the United States contains the history of many pioneers, innovators and change makers who overcame diversity did this ambassador of American history education choose these sources? Well, comfort and familiarity.
We must do better for our students. The lesson this day is that we have to ensure the next generation is comfortable learning about people who don't look like them and who have a different perspective. We have to equip students with curiosity and to do that the primary sources they study need to represent the vast diversity of our country and planet.
If I were presenting for 90 minutes about primary sources I would have an equity audit in my mind.
The sources we analyzed focused on: a southern university, a classroom of white students at the turn of the century in the South and the experience of a confederate soldier from a wealthy elite family in the Civil War.
Reflection may be our most powerful tool in education. Teachers are under an immense amount of pressure, including time constraints, but slowing down to think about the messages we are sending about which stories have value must be prioritized.
To stop crashing that bicycle years ago, I had to think about what I was doing wrong and do better. 
Should I have spoken up and called upon my fellow historian to do better. Probably. Next time, I will.

For years my favorite English teacher and I have schemed in secret about a devious plan to help our students learn deeper. Did you know devious means "wandering and roundabout?" It also means "moving without a fixed course." Most importantly here it means deviating from the common course, according to merriam-webster.com. 
Before the 2020-21 school year we proposed that our classes combine into a one-hour humanities block. We were not allowed to move forward, because we were deviating from the common course of siloed subjects.
We persevered, however, because we know that the connections between social studies and language arts are infinite. We imagined a learning experience without a fixed course that ebbed and flowed with the needs of our learners. As National Board Certified Teachers, we knew that deep, rich learning happens when connections are explicit and time is offered for ideas to germinate.
Most weeks our humanities block does not wander or follow a roundabout course. Our learners regularly give us feed-forward to guide us. This course is learner-centered but they are mastering both ELA and Social Studies standards by learning slow and digging deep.

Back in October, I pored over student feedforward surveys, trying to unlock the code to this unique group of students learning through a disjointed pandemic experience.

They wanted to play games, be with their friends and go outside. So we planned a Humanities Block that offered them a chance to play a game outside for the length of one class period and write in their civil war journals for the other half of the period. (We've created a block schedule once a week thanks to the flexibility of our science and math super-hero team.)

In social studies class the previous day students researched turning points in the Civil War and created a "choose-your-own-adventure" scenario based on what they learned.
The morning of Humanities Block I organized a winding path through our school woods and marked the course with helium balloons. Each student had a map and a log to track their experience.

It was fun and we learned about similarities and differences in experiences. We also learned a bit about how context and identity affect how we experience events. Most importantly, students felt their voice was heard. They worked together as a team to create this learning experience, then they found their way through the game by collaborating.
Few teams read their identity cards, which would have helped them with extra supplies and even money to pay for substitutes to fight in their place! Those who read their identity recognized that the Confederate and Union experiences were quite different in terms of supplies and survival rate.

Now that the students have created this framework and tested it out, I'll revise for next year.

Understanding history through the lens of many perspectives is our chief aim in middle school social studies. Our state standards require that students learn to understand how perspectives differ and why. 
These images from our Chopped: 1850 presentations makes one reason why perspectives and experiences differed very clear. It's structural. This week students researched 8 different real people from the antebellum era. They used primary and secondary sources to identify what obstacles and opportunities each person faced. Together we defined the ten elements in the Pantry of Democracy. The pantry on the Food Network show Chopped is filled with foods and tools anyone can access equally. Today students evaluated whether their person from history had full access to the pantry, as we imagine all Americans do.
Few eighth graders will realize this on first glance, but they've proven the importance of not white-washing history through the work they've done. The pantry on the bottom left belongs to Nathan Appleton, a wealthy industrialist from Boston. Top left is Angelina Grimke, an abolitionist who came from a wealthy white family. Top right is Caroline Quarrls an enslaved woman who liberated herself using the Underground Railroad and the bottom right is  Lucy Larcom, a white woman who worked in the Lowell cotton mills starting at age 11.
The other four people from history include Solomon Northup from 12 years a slave fame, a slaveowner from Louisiana, an Irish immigrant and a Cherokee woman. To model our work this week, I shared the profile of Juana Briones.

I can't wait to see what conclusions they draw when they compare next week.

We could read from the textbook and take a test on the differences between North and South but that leaves out the richness and complexity of America's reality.

It's no secret that every social studies teacher in America feels that extra scrutiny of any assignment, reading or activity lurks around every corner. 
I'm taking a proactive approach and being as transparent as possible about every source we read. On Friday we learned the ART of reading laterally.
The Civic Reasoning Online curriculum from the Stanford History Education Group has great materials but it assumes a deep dive into, well, civic reasoning. 
What we need in 8th grade - an honestly every user of the internet or consumer of any media needs - is a 3-step process to slow us down before we share, like or fail to question. 
The lesson plans from Common Sense Media: Flex Your Fact-Checking Muscles has many great tools and resources. On day seven of the school year, before we research the attacks of September 11, 2001, as history the graphic above is the bite-sized, 3-step process we need to proceed with some curiosity-driven research.
Credit for the visual is the Elk Grove Unified School District.