Innovation Blog

When I switched from teaching French to social studies in 2004, one of my first projects was to develop lesson plans for formal debate and mock trials for my classes. In time, these became a centerpiece of my units, second only to primary source work.

I value the critical discourse of debate in my middle and high school classes very highly, in the first place because it causes participating students to learn a greater quantity of history.

Maybe my interest in debate comes from my own youth. I was sent to parochial schools run by Franciscans who valued debate and the clash of ideas. While I was aware that I caused no end of irritation to my teachers by my willingness to play devil’s advocate in just about any discussion, my patient teachers helped me refine rhetorical practices in writing and speech. One of my religion teachers lent me a book on Aristotle to help me get my reasoning act together! Reasoned discourse was valued in our lessons and appealed to my innate rebel and, while I left high school without the belief system they sought to embed, I did leave well educated.

I value the critical discourse of debate in my middle and high school classes very highly, in the first place because it causes participating students to learn a greater quantity of history. In order to argue effectively, one needs facts and to understand the relationships between events such as cause-effect. Having to improvise arguments, or even plan and compose them for that matter, causes the student to develop schema of information that is long-lasting. In the second place, I hold rhetoric in high esteem because it develops the kind of critical thinking skills so necessary in a democracy. Citizens who are too easily swayed by propaganda or who consume social media without a critical eye are less citizens than they are pawns of powers seeking to use them. I think I left teaching French back in ’04 because I did not feel what I was doing was important enough somehow… but that’s for another post…

From my TeachersPayTeacher Store: Click here for a set of rubrics and training manual for teaching debate.

Discussion Style Debate

The most basic type of debate is the “discussion style”. Teams sit across from each other at a table with a moderator at the head. They give timed, prepared speeches in turn and then engage in improvised cross-examination. The rules are fairly simple and many students came to really look forward to the debate. I required everyone to do this at first, but I soon learned it was best left as an elective unit capstone task for the willing and to offer other things for students who do not like public speaking.

Students who were fearful of public speaking needed rhetorical training as well. The next development was the online discussion. I coded an app at InnovationAssessments.com that worked especially well for moderated class discussions and streamlined the grading and scoring process for me. In every unit, there was an online discussion topic students had to address. Their assignment was similar to one I was given in some online college classes I took. They were to post their response to the prompt, giving two grounds for their position (sometimes I assigned them a position even if they held the opposing view). In step two, they were to reply in the opposing view to the student above them in the feed on the app. Finally, they were to go back later and reply in defense to the student in the class who offered them an opposing view. Once trained, students completed this assignment as a matter of course in each unit. During working periods in class, discussions would often erupt as students wrote and this was marvelous.

I gave formal lessons in rhetoric and identifying logical fallacies and I built a logical fallacy tracking function into the forum app so students could flag posts that contained logical fallacies.

From my TeachersPayTeacher Store: Click Here for a PowerPoint slide show for teaching rhetoric and logical fallacies.

I hold rhetoric in high esteem because it develops the kind of critical thinking skills so necessary in a democracy.

An Elective Course in Rhetorical Strategies

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach “Debating Current Events”, an elective course in different rhetorical styles and skills. The course was assigned to me in response to a discussion at the Board of Education level about how the school can try to foster greater understanding and act as a block to rising polarization in society. The course syllabus opened with: “Debating Current Events gives students the chance to participate in the great clash of ideas of our democracy. But it’s not really just about clashing ideas: it’s about forming understanding of the opposing view that leads to appreciation of diverse opinions. Students will examine the historical and social context of emerging current events. They will become skillful consumers of information, learning to carefully examine sources and to read critically. They will understand persuasion not only as a strategy in their own discussions but as a tool to understand and evaluate media communication.” I had six brilliant and engaged students whose opinions fell across the political spectrum. It was a great way to start each day.

My course materials for Debating Current Events are available for sale at my store. Units of study are also sold separately. Unit 1: The political spectrum, tolerance and toleration, Robert’s Rules of Order (I give the class a great deal of control over our work using Robert’s Rules. Unit 2: Aristotelian rhetoric (does not include training in syllogisms) and Logical Fallacies. Unit 3: Toulmin’s Rhetorical Method. Unit 4: Rogerian Rhetoric

The Mock Trial

By far the most popular activity in my classes was the mock trial. In this simulation, students are placed in a historical context as actors in a murder mystery trial they write themselves. I do not know what first gave me the idea to do this, but it was one of the first units I designed when I started teaching social studies. The unit begins with the election of judges and attorneys. The rest of the participants are randomly assigned to teams to role play as witnesses for the defense and the prosecution. I would seed the development of the historical fiction story we were going to write as a class by giving a basic scenario. The murder was placed at some time in history we were just learning about. Over three days, a story emerged, as attorneys and witnesses imagined their side of the story and the means, motive and opportunity were fleshed out. Judges completed an online mini-course in courtroom procedure during these days. The trial commenced on day four, with opening statements and the prosecution putting on its case. It took six to seven days to do this, so we only did one a year (although one year I had the opportunity to teach a half year elective class just in historic mock trials). Embedded in history, the stories we composed really stuck with us. Students would come back a decade later and comment on one of the trials we did and maybe some striking event on the witness stand. I invite the reader to return to the blog in the near future for a detailed account of how to teach an unscripted mock trial unit. To the point of this post, the four attorneys and three judges needed to be models for the class in the kind of evidentiary reasoning that I think we would all agree every citizen would benefit to possess.

Click here to visit my store to purchase a Mock Trial Classroom Kit.

The Model House of Representatives

In the 2019-2020 academic year, I developed a Model House of Representatives unit for my US History classes. Like the mock trial, this unit plan was “modular”: able to be set in any historical time period. Students were trained in a basic version of one of the debate formats used by the United States House of Representatives after being assigned to political parties based on a survey of their personal political leanings. Parties elected their leaders and the majority was set in alignment with which party was in majority in the year in which the session was taking place. Members drafted bills, spoke on the house floor in debating a bill, etc. Crafting bills turned out to be an extremely useful activity in and of itself. Students were assigned a problem of the time period and to craft a law that would address it. I invite the reader now to return to this blog in the near future for a more detailed account of how one to use a Model House of Representatives activity.

Click Here to view Model House of Representatives unit materials in my TpT store.

I have often wondered whether an alternative career choice for me would have been as an attorney. I have an interest in law and justice that no doubt influenced me. But beyond that, these activities bring two important elements to the course in social studies: a deeper knowledge of historical context and the ability to reason well. A positive side benefit is in the ability to spot propaganda in social media, a lesson to be addressed in a future blog, so do stay tuned!

You can preview a set of lessons on consuming social media with a critical eye here and this lesson set is on sale at my TpT store here.

The first time I sat in on the regional scoring* for the new New York State Global History and Geography Regents, the other scorers and I had conversations about the difficulties teaching the enduring issue concept to students. Some waited until the end of the school year to practice these, since the essay prompt draws on documents across cultures and eras and calls on the student to observe some patterns. They argued that this could not be done during the year because it required many time periods. I think there’s a better method.

Learning to write the enduring issue essay calls upon the student to read sources, identify some common issue (as opposed to a theme), and then select three documents to combine with their own recollections of historical context to relate their conclusions. Frankly, I think it’s an outstanding task. I love that it calls upon students to draw conclusions from evidence — to synthesize for themselves. The class discussions we had while practicing these were interesting as students came to observe patterns I would not have thought of and to defend them admirably. Waiting until the end of the year during review sessions is a bad time to teach students how to do this. Most all students whose papers I scored from other districts scored 2 out of 5 on these essays.

Bringing most of my students’ scores to 3-4 out of 5 came from committing ourselves to write one of these essays every ten weeks in Global 9 and 10. For those of you not familiar, in New York State students take Global History and Geography I in grade nine and the second half, part II, in grade ten. The state Regents exam only now covers the tenth grade course. I mention this because there is a temptation for Global 9 teachers to skip the enduring issue essay and wait to grade ten just before the Regents. Permit me to suggest that this is a mistake and a missed opportunity.

Click here to visit my TeachersPayTeachers.com store where you can shop for enduring issue essay prompts for grades nine and ten.

The enduring issue essay was 45% of a student’s score on my ten week interim exams. The first few in grade nine were heavily supported, as I coached students to bring up historical context to connect with the documents they chose.

The first challenge for students was to learn to distinguish a “theme” from an “issue”. “Movement of People” is a theme. The violent conflicts caused by movement of people is an issue. Students who have a more narrowly defined issue that societies have to address now have a clear direction for their writing. When students merely notice a theme, such as “power”, they fall into the trap of just proving that this was something that was a “thing” because it’s in the three documents they chose. It may seem like splitting hairs here, but it is a very important distinction and it matters in the quality of their essay (and therefore their score). The essays we wrote at weeks ten and twenty both included a lot of coaching on my part on formulating an enduring issue that was focused enough to lay the groundwork for an excellent essay.

The problem mentioned by my colleagues from other districts, namely that they felt they could not teach this until they had covered a lot of history and therefore not until the end of the year, is resolved by composing essay prompts only on the topics we have already studied. So on the week ten essay in Global 9 an 10, the documents I selected were only from the civilizations / time periods we studied at the time. The reader is invited to browse my online store for essay prompts designed for different points in the course.

The next challenge to overcome for novice writers was to avoid the temptation to merely summarize what the document says. This pretty much goes against all their reading experience to date, where teachers demanded they say what they read or answer questions on it in order to prove they understood. Writing this essay well demands that students draw upon their recalled background knowledge. The tendency for students to just summarize the documents was a very difficult habit to break. I came to advise them to spend no more than a few sentences in a paragraph to summarize the document and to spend the rest of the words in that paragraph to bring in background history to the document and to state explicitly how it supports their issue.

My goal throughout the training is to get students to write a level 3 paper. I realize I am tempted to try to teach everyone to shoot for a 5, but that is not reasonable. A score of 5 represents above grade level. A score of 4 is reserved pretty much for those who recall a lot of history. Despite all our best efforts, our students do not really on average recall a lot of history. So in my training I shoot for polishing a level of writing that is still above what I was seeing in the compositions of neighboring schools and that was do-able given the typical memory of your average student. Those students capable of the 4’s and 5’s suffered no disadvantage from this because, once they perfected the method of identifying issues (as opposed to mere themes), selecting and interpreting documents, and then bringing in historical context then all they needed to do to impress the raters was to dump a ton of historical knowledge in there.

This essay assignment is a strong feature of the new New York State Global Regents examination. It gives evidence of critical thinking and it promotes a rich classroom experience. Training in this should not wait for the end of the year and is best done throughout both grades nine and ten. The effort pays off and students often come to like this task, the latter being a surprising result of this training program.

Click here to visit my TeachersPayTeachers.com store where you can shop for enduring issue essay prompts for grades nine and ten.

* For the reader not familiar with scoring high school Regents exams in New York State, about a decade ago the state instituted regional scoring. They felt there was some kind of funny business going on when teachers were scoring their own Regents exams, so they mandated that we could no longer grade our own students’ work. So since I worked in a tiny district, I had to schlepp off to another school where I would grade their exams and they would grade mine. The security was absurd: I could not even handle my students’ papers, lest I be accused of foul play. For the essays, each student’s essay was scored by two teachers trained on a rubric and sample papers from prior field testing. If the raters disagreed in score by more than 1 point, a third rater was called in. The system has some advantages but in hindsight it seems a little unnecessary.

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.

Check out this post “Teaching with Video: Three Paths to Engagement and Accountability” on research-based video teaching.

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.