Category Archives: EDUprotocols

EDUprotocols, Historical Movies, Historical Writing

Smashing Eduprotocols

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What happens when you smash three EDUProtocols into one? You get an alternative assessment that gets your students talking about the book they are reading in your class. The Hero’s Journey and Jungian Archetypes are popular frameworks for analyzing books, films, and historical events. This activity merged them with a Sketch and Tell.

My students read this book and used the HJ & Archetype framework to take notes as they watched the movie. Then they worked in small groups to arrive at a consensus identifying people and events that represented the stages in the Hero’s Journey and archetypes commonly seen in historical narratives. You can see their attempts here.

While I was TWA — teaching (while) walking around — during first period, I observed many students struggling to use textual evidence and cite page numbers. I was able to reinforce that expectation with my second-period students and the quality got better. I have used the Hero’s Journey and Archetype Four Square EDUProtocols separately in the past and I was thrilled with how the addition of Sketch and Tell allowed students to collaborate and be creative while maintaining a focus on their reasoning skills.

In most classrooms, the students doing the talking are the students doing the learning, however post-pandemic, I have struggled to facilitate decent academic conversations in my classes. Too many students do not want to take chances on original ideas in front of their peers. Presentations are dreadful and small group discussions trail off, wither, and die before including any academic content. This trifecta of an EduProtocol smash built student confidence in applying historical knowledge within an academic framework. The requirement of creating consensus within a small group was the secret sauce or pièce de résistance that kept the conversations going.

It is important to teach students that it is okay to hold deep, contradictory, and complex thoughts in their heads. Real life is seldom black and white. Rewarding conversations teach us to appreciate the many shades of gray involved in historical interpretation. These three students each viewed Alfred differently. Despite this, they were each able to provide evidence and a line of reasoning to support their claim.

I’m happy to report that for their second rep, my students were able to identify the missing steps of the reward, road back, resurrection, and return with the elixir. Their analysis skills were tested and they passed. This was a low-stress, high-impact activity where students got to flex their critical thinking skills and practice using academic language in small group discussions. I will be smashing these EduProtocols again.

To learn more about using The Hero’s Journey, Archetype Four Square, and Sketch and Tell EduProtocols pick up our book The EduProtocol Field Guide: Social Studies Edition. If you are one of our 2,500+ happy customers, please consider posting a review on Amazon. Also, continue to share your student work with us on Twitter using the #EduProtocols hashtag. Lastly, don’t miss our Social Studies Show on the third Thursday of every month.

EDUprotocols

Number Mania Extension Activities

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This month on The Social Studies Show on EduProtocols Plus, Adam and I will be talking about one of our favorite EduProtocols — the Number Mania lesson frame. Our show takes place on the third Thursday of every month at 6 pm Pacific time. On March 16, 2023, we will be broadcasting live from Spring CUE (and Adam’s basement).

I see teachers sharing Number Mania on social media frequently. I worry that too many use it as a one-and-done lesson. Good infographics need an audience and some analysis. Two of my favorite extension activities with this EduProtocol are the self-assessment and the GIST statement. This student used the Panama Canal lesson I did for the CLIC project. The next day, they were given this debriefing document and asked to reflect on how they did. After they have completed a gallery walk, students are usually pretty critical of themselves. Asking them what they would do differently helps them prepare for the next project with confidence.

If your students are tired of debriefing and reflecting, then I suggest you teach them the GIST strategy. Simply ask them to select the five most important facts from their Number Mania and write one sentence for each fact. If the resulting paragraph tells the reader the five Ws and one H (who, what, when, where, why & how) — then they have created an infographic that captured the main idea of the reading. A more advanced synthesis task is pictured below.

We look forward to seeing you on EduProtocols Plus to learn how you have used Number Mania to replace boring lectures and give your students practice with numeracy and digital literacy.

If you need more examples of how to use Number Mania in the Social Studies classroom, rush on over to Amazon and put our book in your cart. It’s full of ideas for using Number Mania as formative or summative assessments.

EDUprotocols, French Revolution, Historical Writing, Marie Antoinette

Smashing Corroboration & Nacho Paragraph EduProtocols

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Corroboration is a discipline-specific skill in Social Studies, but it can be used in all subjects to teach students how to analyze or explain data from multiple sources. This post will smash a corroboration activity with Nacho Paragraph using an I do-We do-You-do format to improve student writing with EduProtocols.

For this activity, I asked my 10th-grade World History students to pull some facts from the movie Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola and compare them to the facts that are presented in their textbook. My students can typically make 5-10 corroborations in one class period. The more complicated next step is showing them how to select multiple facts to create a line of reasoning.

I selected the above as a mentor text and modeled a think-aloud strategy with it where I showed students how to elaborate on the fact pattern and add page numbers with in-text citations. There were two learning objectives: 1) Students will learn how to create in-text citations for authors & academic sources. 2) Students will strengthen their line of reasoning by using evidence from multiple sources.

Not bad, but you don’t want to say “they” in academic writing. You should clearly be citing your sources in MLA or APA format and it should be an academic source. Let’s try – try again. Instead of saying “source one” and “the movie”, let’s give them some more formal attribution.

Much better. Notice how the in-text citations position the writer as an expert. By creating a fact pattern about King Louis using multiple sources, this author has established themselves as ready for the academic writing demanded by AP or other college-level classes. If your students struggle to craft academic or even grade-level writing, EduProtocols can save those who suffer when paraphrasing, citing their sources, or completing a paragraph. Your students won’t rely on ChatGPT if you rotate ParaFLY, Nacho Paragraph, and 3XCER into your regular instruction. You can give your students more writing practice with less prep and grading time on your part.

EDUprotocols, Formative Assessment, Historical Writing

Assessing Retell in Rhyme

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One of my go-to EduProtocols this year has been Retell in Rhyme. The act of responding to a text in writing has a very large, positive ( .77) effect on reading comprehension. Sometimes it is not easy for teachers to tell if a student has selected historical details because they are important, or because they are easy to rhyme. Adding a self-assessment follow-up activity with a rubric and/or a success chart can give teachers more insight as to what students got out of the learning event.

This post will look at three samples of student work and examine their self-assessments. These tenth-grade students listened to a podcast from 15 Minute History and were allowed one class period (50 minutes) to listen, take notes, and create 10 rhyming couplets with a partner. The next day, they were given 10 minutes, this rubric, and a success chart to do a self-assessment. I asked them to write at least ten sentences.

Sample A

Self-Assessment 1

Self Assessment 2

Clearly, self-assessment 1 is effective at aligning their work with the language in the rubric. They identify four key terms that are on the success chart. They justify why they omitted important dates. They could be better at identifying how many events from the success chart they included. Is it 25%? 50%? 75%? In this case, a “good portion” is hard to measure. Self-assessment 2 only mentions that they met the 20-line requirement. They cite no evidence from the rubric or success chart. If I were to grade these reflections, assessment 1 would get an A, and assessment 2 would get a D.

Sample B

Self-Assessment 1

Self-Assessment 2

Both of these self-assessments would be in the B range. I like how #1 acknowledges that they needed more details. I like how #2 includes Napoleon & Gens de Couleur, but they could have been more specific when saying “Some lines had key summarized details.” This is your chance to convince your teacher you deserve an A. Don’t blow the opportunity with soft, non-specific language.

Sample C

Self-Assessment 1

Self-Assessment 2

Both of these assessments would be in the A category. Teachers can extend learning by asking students to compare their work to a success chart and/or a rubric. Andrade (2018) analyzed 76 empirical studies on self-assessment and concluded that “self-assessment is the act of monitoring one’s processes and products in order to make adjustments that deepen learning and enhance performance. Although it can be summative, the evidence… strongly suggests that self-assessment is most beneficial, in terms of both achievement and self-regulated learning, when it is used formatively and supported by training.” This means students self-assess to give themselves feedback and gain clarity on their performance guided by academic advisors. Students will improve their self-assessment abilities with coaching and reps over time.

I look forward to seeing your results with Retell in Rhyme. Please tag me on Twitter and use the #EduProtocols hashtag.

EDUprotocols

Claim – Evidence – Reasoning Data

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My students have been practicing their reasoning skills with CER. Every day at the end of their independent reading, they record their page numbers, summarize what they have learned, and identify one claim of fact, policy, or value. A student sample is pictured below.

This 10th grade World History student could improve their reasoning by explaining the value-laden terms in their evidence. The principal uses the word good, which makes me think this is an opinion. Therefore, it is not a claim of fact, which can be proven or disproven. Nor is it a claim of policy that has a recommendation or represents an institution. This claim of value requires an adjective, which the principal includes.

On average, students improved their CER proficiency rates according to the following table. You can see that progress wasn’t constant and results ebbed and flowed. I attribute this to my coaching style. The first rep was difficult and after direct instruction every class made progress. Then the next day I upped my expectations that students would be able to follow the quote-cite-explain format I asked for. Many didn’t and the results waned. After additional instruction using a think-aloud, glows and grows model and these examples, results went up again.

CERDay 1Day 2Day 3Day 4N=
P13588716017
P22154295414
P65060555522
10th gr AVG3267525653
P41836466428

I have learned that students need multiple reps in multiple classes if we are going to improve academic writing overall. My AP Lang teacher structures this differently, as does our AP Chemistry teacher, but the magic happens when the three of us get in the room and look at student work together. By making this a recursive assignment in all of our classes, we can improve student writing.

Leave a comment about the recursive assignments that happen at your school site. My students do an annotated bibliography twice per semester in each academic class. That, along with the consistent use of claims, evidence, and reasoning in multiple classes is helping our students build their confidence in college level work.