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.
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.
* 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.
