In the 2021-22 academic year, I had the opportunity to finally teach a section of Regents United States History and Government. It’s something I had looked forward to after teaching US History in grades seven and eight for nearly two decades. The students were awesome – I had taught them all since they were in eighth grade since I was working in such a small school. We worked together to devise a course that would be most suitable for them and in the process we discovered that classroom textbooks can be replaced by video lessons of a certain design. News to me!
I would like to term these “enhanced video lessons” to distinguish them from a lesson plan that merely asks students to watch a video. The enhanced video lesson includes embedded questions in order of appearance in the video …
My teaching practice for social studies always entailed a strong commitment to promoting reading. I am sold on the idea that middle school students, recently relieved of their elementary reading instruction, needed continued instruction in reading and that the content areas were a fine place to do that. I invite the reader to my other blog posts on reading in the content areas. The very idea that I would abandon this commitment was a little hard to swallow.
The school year began with lessons devised in my customary fashion. I selected textbook articles that gave good summaries of the US history my students needed to learn. I offered articles at a lower reading level for slightly reduced credit for those who do not yet read on grade level. My students were given a choice of either summarizing the selected text in a specific format or doing Cornell notes on the pages. This was my reading practice, developed over almost twenty years.
I should tell you about the class, warning you first of my bias about them since they stand as one of my favorites. The class was homogeneously grouped. Nearly all were enrolled half day in a vocational education program. Their path to earning a living was to be in the trades: heavy equipment operator, welder, mechanic, machinist, forestry management, etc. Those who were still pursuing a traditional educational program all shared a general distaste for traditional academic work. The textbook – summary or Cornell notes thing had never gone over well with them so when we began they were resigned to it at best.
Click here to Visit my TeachersPayTeachers store if you want to purchase access to my social studies enhanced videos.
In the system of my units of study, the reading days alternate with presentation days. On these days, I opened the class with a lecture I would classify as “semi-formal”. That is, I brought to it a list of ideas I wanted to discuss and a general plan of presentation which I put on the board in a few words, but which was not a “formal lecture” in the traditional sense. These lasted around 15 minutes, after which students would engage with a video lesson that was a more formal lesson. These ran about 15 minutes in length. The semi-formal presentation and the video lecture amplified what was in the text and zeroed in on important or interesting things that were not.
Click Here to Try one of the Enhanced Video Lessons for yourself. Go to TestDrive. Use the code 6MNU-9FBX-A11136Z-934-JON.
Presentation days were well received. I am known to be a good presenter and we often had good discussions. The video lessons also were well-received. It is this that actually came to replace the textbook.
I would like to term these “enhanced video lessons” to distinguish them from a lesson plan that merely asks students to watch a video. The enhanced video lesson includes embedded questions in order of the video which focus on what is important to remember or which ask students to reason out something important from the video. The videos themselves I made. They were simple voice-overs of slideshows. The embedded questions could be in both multiple-choice and short-answer formats. The multiple-choice was auto-corrected so students could see how they did right away. In addition, once the class had finished, I could open access to the answers so students could see the correct ones. This could be used as a study guide before tests later on.
The enhanced video lessons run here at InnovationAssessments.com. They are called “Etudes”. Thanks to the input of these students, an effective and elaborate learning tool evolved!
The test results were mostly consistent throughout the year and I was very satisfied with them. The class pretest average was 37 and it moved to 67 by the final exam. The class average on unit tests (numbered 11.1, 11.2, etc.) was mostly very good. I used only questions drawn from old New York State US History and Government Regents exams so that I would be sure the questions measured the standards and had been field-tested.
Click Here to check out the final exam. Use code: L5VC-JMM5-A11812Z-8452-JON
I do not recall how the suggestion came up to abandon the textbook assignments. Maybe I felt like giving up since so few actually did the work on time even though I did not assign homework in the class. The reading class periods were often punctuated by jokes or horsing around that I have no doubt was inspired by a collective willingness to procrastinate a task they did not like doing.
A younger version of myself would have clamped down on this misbehavior with stern reprimands and consequences. This older self takes a few progressive discipline steps first, one of which is to examine the lesson itself and the learners. There were reasons I could challenge the concept of the textbook assignment lesson plan. Firstly, these were not middle school students who needed continued reading support. These eleventh graders were nearly done with their program and it is well known that reading instruction has little impact on most older learners. Secondly, the tests showed they were learning the material despite not turning in the reading.
It could not have been the semi-formal lectures. Though popular and often entertaining, these did not provide the breadth of information on the test. So it must have been the video lessons.
So sometime in October of that year, I offered a deal: the class would take a pretest at the start of each unit and then a post-test. The test would have items from old New York State US History and Government Regents exams. I said that, as long as the class showed adequate progress from the pretest to the post-test and as long as the standard deviation was fairly small (showing the class mostly performing clustered together), then I would not require any textbook reading.
It worked! Throughout the rest of the year, the assessments showed that the enhanced video lessons were delivering the content that students had to retain to meet the New York State standards for social studies.
This is not to say that reading was abolished. The New York State Standards for social studies are very heavily document-based. My courses had been moving in this direction for years. Our reading experiences in the course now entailed excerpts from numerous primary source documents. This required more scaffolding for these students to be able to grasp, but they seemed willing to persevere through the difficulties with my assistance.
I used only test questions drawn from old New York State US History and Government Regents exams so that I would be sure the questions measured the standards and had been field-tested.
I would not advocate for a wholesale elimination of textbooks in secondary social studies classes. I know a strong case can be made that in middle school the kind of reading tasks described above serve a very important function. But in situations like this eleventh-grade class, it proves to be a viable alternative. Granted, I had some advantages: I had been making video lessons since 2011 and I had over 400 of them across US and global history subjects. I am also a programmer and so I could code apps that did exactly what I wanted. But I think teachers without these things can still adopt this strategy. YouTube has many good history lessons made by teachers. InnovationAssessments.com offers the Etude app that I wrote for a very reasonable annual fee.
Click Here to Visit my TeachersPayTeachers store if you want to purchase access to my social studies enhanced videos.