Are you a dinosaur? And what to do if you are.
It’s been a few years.
Way back in 2011, as part of an every seven years legislative requirement, Kansas Department of Education Consultant Don Gifford started the process of reviewing the state social studies standards. But instead of simply updating some language, adding some new resources, and calling it good, Don led the writing committee down a completely different path.
Rather than asking the committee to create a list of required content items, Don pushed the committee to look at the research and come up with something that went beyond the simple memorizing of historical facts. The result? A set of standards that focused on creating a balance of content and critical thinking skills. A lot less memorizing and a whole lot more application and process.
As a co-chair of the writing committee, I can tell you, it freaked some people out.
Okay.
It freaked a lot of people out.
It was a different way of doing social studies. More student-centered. More skills-based. There was more problem-solving. More use of evidence to support claims. Less of a focus on specific content and the recall of basic facts. Heck . . . Don and the state department of education basically told districts and teachers, “within these rough scope and sequence parameters, teach whatever you want. You decide the content.” No check boxes of required test items. No multiple choice state assessment.
Since that initial shift in how we asked teachers to do social studies, there have been some additional tweaks here and there. But the format and concept of the standards are relatively unchanged. Yes, kids need content. But they need to be using that content, doing something with it besides simply memorizing it.
The biggest and most recent change has been in how the Department of Education is asking teachers to measure the learning that’s happening. Moving away from a state assessment made up of multiple choice questions, current KSDE consultant Nathan McAlister has led the shift to what we’re calling a Classroom-Based Assessment.
Instead of a state-wide test that looks the same for every kid, given to every kid at basically the same time, that simply measures at the lower levels of Bloom’s, the CBA provides a classroom teacher the flexibility to design their own product-based assessment using a relevant compelling question specific to their kids and their content. Using primary and secondary evidence, students develop a claim and create a product that addresses the question. Then using a state-wide common rubric, teachers score those student products.
This score is used as a classroom grade for that particular unit and is then sent to KSDE at the end of the school year. And because this summative assessment is based on what’s happening in their classroom, teachers can use the rubric multiple times throughout the year, providing feedback and practice. This helps ensure that kids have the opportunity to improve and earn the best possible score.
Seems like a great idea, right?
But it’s still freaking people out. And many teachers, while becoming more familiar with the idea of inquiry, making claims, and using evidence, haven’t shifted that much in their actual practice.
The situation reminds me of the Michael Lewis book & Brad Pitt movie Moneyball as an example of how a shift in thinking can impact actual practice. The full title of the book is Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and it focuses on the early 2000s Oakland Athletics major league baseball team and their general manager, Billy Beane. Burdened by a lack of funds, Beane was constantly struggling to win games against teams with way more money to pay their players than he did. But by 2002, during a season that saw his team set a century-old record for consecutive wins, Beane had found a way to beat those teams.
How’d he do it?
Sabermetrics.
Sabermetrics is the application of statistical analysis in order to evaluate and compare the performance of individual players. But not the traditional statistics. Beane and the A’s looked at a completely different set of statistics in ways that hadn’t been done before. This different way of thinking about baseball gave them a competitive advantage – they could now find solid players that had been ignored by everyone else. And because these players were being ignored by everyone else, the A’s could pay them less and win games while staying within their budget.
Win / win. A sweet team for less money.
The problem?
The traditional way of doing things – described as “The Book” by Lewis – said it wouldn’t work. Because using these new statistics and measurements was just not how “real” baseball people should manage, coach, and play the game.
But it did work. The A’s went on to become one of the most successful baseball teams of the decade, winning more games with less money. Beane and the A’s changed baseball.
But it wasn’t easy for Beane and those who believed in him. During a scene in the movie adaptation of the book starring Brad Pitt, Beane was told:
I know you’re taking it in the teeth out there. But the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloodied. Always. This is threatening, not just the way of doing business, but in their minds, it’s threatening the game.
Long story to get to social studies, I know. But I think a lot of social studies teachers right now are in the same place most baseball teams were 25 years ago. They’re still doing many of the same things in the same way they’ve always done them. And struggling.
Why are we doing the same things the same way?
Because “The Book” says we should. Because that’s how we were taught. Because we’ve always lectured. Because we have pretty textbooks that we feel obligated to use. Maybe because many higher ed pre-service classes seem to be still stuck in the past. Maybe it’s easier to just hand out activities that focus on low-level thinking skills. Because we don’t know anything different. Well . . just because.
In the same movie scene, Beane was told:
. . . anybody who’s not tearing their team down right now, and rebuilding it using your model – they’re dinosaurs.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years having conversations with all sorts of people about how the current standards and CBA support inquiry learning and are good for kids. And I’m not sure I could have come up with a better re-phrasing of that movie line to describe how some teachers and districts are still thinking:
. . . any teacher that’s not re-thinking their curriculum and instructional design right now, and rebuilding it based on historical thinking skills and the inquiry model – they’re dinosaurs.
I try to be polite when I encounter teachers and admin types who seem hesitant, when they say historical thinking process skills are one of those cyclical ed things, when they try to describe how effective their outdated strategies of 60-minute teacher-centered lectures and popcorn reading are with kids. These educators still see inquiry and evidence and reasoning and historical thinking as an attack on the game.
But it will be hard from now on to listen to teachers like that without hearing that Moneyball quote in my head.
. . . dinosaurs.
We are making progress. More and more teachers are shifting their instruction to include research-based, brain-based methods that support the doing of history and social studies rather than rote memorization. Across Kansas, more and more teachers are seeing the benefits of aligning their teaching practices to the standards and the CBA. And across the country, the C3 standards document and its Inquiry Arc are impacting other states.
While it’s not Billy Beans Sabermetrics, focusing on process rather than simply concentrating on the short-term acquisition of foundational knowledge is transformative. It’s a different way to think about how we manage, coach, and play the game of history and social studies.
The cool thing is that there has been an explosion of resources available to help teachers design instruction around the CBA, the C3 standards, and the use of primary sources / evidence, historical / critical thinking, inquiry strategies.
If you’re looking for some resources that support anti-dinosaur teaching, take a look at some of these tools. They’re some of my faves: