The Long Telegram dominated US foreign policy for decades after WWII. Today your task is to read the George F. Kennan text and summarize it in chunks in your small group. When you feel you have a thorough understanding of the memo, you may take this quiz.
Category Archives: Historical Writing
Courage to Care Essay Assignment
You are a judge for the Anti-Defamation League’s Courage to Care competition. You have reviewed the accomplishments of all four nominees. Now you must select the award winner. Provide some general information about the historical context of this time. Be sure to state your claims clearly and explain your reasoning with evidence from the readings.
Write a 400-500 word essay that selects one of five candidates for an ADL Courage To Care Award. Include background on the Holocaust and a thesis with at least three reasons why the candidate you chose deserves the award over the other three candidates. Be sure to make at least 7 claims with (6 explanations).
For example, John Doe deserves the Courage to Care award for saving x number of Jewish lives, putting his family at risk, and serving jail time to protect others.
D-Day Letter Home
For this task, you will write a letter home from the perspective of a soldier who experienced D-Day. You may use pp. 482-483 in your textbook and reading http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/dday.htm and http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/dday2.htm. When you have completed the letter, underline the number of historical details you have included from your readings, count them up and then count the number of words you have written. You have 30 minutes to complete this task.
Japanese Internment
Discuss how these two events influenced each other.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154
http://historythings.com/forgotten-history-japanese-submarine-opens-fire-on-santa-barbara/
Use your background knowledge from Farewell to Manzanar, Days of Waiting, & The Ralph Lazo Story to describe when and how a government should be allowed to detain people suspected of Sedition. How much latitude should we give our government to restrict individual freedoms during wartime?
Measures of Effective Listening
Thirty-two years ago, Donald E. Powers wrote Considerations for Developing Measures of Speaking & Listening. It was published by the College Board, which expresses how important these measures are to a student’s academic success, particularly in their Advanced Placement programs, yet has not validated any standardized tests to measure these skills. This synthesis on some of the research on listening offers advice to teachers enrolled in our MOOC Teaching Speaking & Listening Skills.
Research shows that students can listen 2-3 grade levels above what they can read. Listening while reading helps people have successful reading events, where they read with enjoyment and accuracy. Listening while reading has been shown to help with decoding, a fundamental part of reading. The average person talks at a rate of about 125 to 175 words per minute, while we listen and comprehend up to 450 words per minute (Carver, Johnson, & Friedman, 1970).
Listening has been identified as one of the top skills employers seek in entry-level employees as well as those being promoted. Even though most of us spend the majority of our day listening, it is the communication activity that receives the least instruction in school (Coakley & Wolvin, 1997). On average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news can only recall 17.2% of the content.
Listening is critical to academic success. Conaway (1982) examined an entire freshman class of over 400 students. They were given a listening test at the beginning of their first semester. After their first year of college, 49% of students scoring low on the listening test were on academic probation, while only 4.42% of those scoring high on the listening test were on academic probation. On the other hand, 68.5% of those scoring high on the listening test were considered Honors Students after the first year, while only 4.17% of those scoring low attained the same success.
Students do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process that they can control. Students find it easier to criticize the speaker as opposed to the speaker’s message (Imhof, 1998). Students report greater listening comprehension when they use the metacognitive strategies of asking pre-questions, interest management, and elaboration strategies (Imhof, 2001). Listening and nonverbal communication training significantly influences multicultural sensitivity (Timm & Schroeder, 2000).
Understanding is the goal of listening. Our friend Erik Palmer suggests before students engage in purposeful listening, their teachers should tell them what to attend to. We need to teach students what to respond to, how to respond, and when to respond. For example, today we are going to listen to five speeches. For each speech, we are only listening for LIFE. After each speaker finishes, clap, then take a minute to evaluate the level of passion they put into their speech. After that write down three suggestions on how they could improve the LIFE in their speech (i.e., instead of emphasizing: you stole my red hat, try stressing, you stole my red hat).
A classroom teacher who reads Powers (1984) College Board study will understand that speaking, listening, reading and writing are all tightly correlated. Empirically measuring oral communication skills requires many hours of assessment on small, controlled populations. It is the opposite of what we experience in public schools where it is not feasible for us to precisely measure each skill. The important takeaway here is that teachers need to prepare their students to actively listen, avoid distractions, and teach listening and speaking with core academic content by training students to evaluate how well various speaking functions are accomplished by their classmates. While there are reliability issues with classroom peer review models, the benefits of “learning by evaluation” far outweigh the negatives.
References
http://www.listen.org/WhitePaper
http://www.skillsyouneed.com/ips/listening-skills.html
http://d1025403.site.myhosting.com/files.listen.org/Facts.htm
PVLEGS Speech Lesson
World History students have been grouped and assigned an African country at random. Each student’s job is to give a two minute speech focusing on one of the effective speaking traits (Poise, Voice, Life, Eye Contact, Gestures, or Speed) while sharing information about their African country.
Speakers will be allowed to use a confidence monitor, which contains notes, or highlights of their speech. Speaker notes can be Google Docs or handwritten & displayed via doc cam. Note: this is not a teleprompter. The notes do not move.
Purpose: This speech will demonstrate: (P) – poise when describing the history of an African state.
Country: Liberia began in 1822.
Background: Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Issues/Problems: Authoritarian rule through the 1980s. Civil War in the 1990s.
Conclusion: I chose to focus on poise because…
Resources: PVLEGS.com & The CIA World Fact Book
View these videos at home and take their advice.
Poise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgryBn5QYjE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEXpNg8j_Fc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBwEVJGDkkY
Voice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX58HTFsplk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInNqqQpXLc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjocTqrKz-k
Life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXA-DQ2gNOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esuuJsl-KBg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b01_1Hhm-CA
Eye Contact
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSZfqCBUpOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i–CdKh_dHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44oel0peahU
Gestures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wDTRCIV4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFLjudWTuGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk_SMBIW1mg
Speed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idh6-E-1pyI
Adding Instructional Video
Thanks to the National Social Studies Supervisors Association for publishing this article. One picture was missing and should be inserted on p. 20, after the second paragraph.
This student’s fundamental lack of WWII knowledge was both horrifying and hilarious. Would instructional video have helped this student?
#NationalSpeakingWeek
In honor of National Speaking Week, (May 16-22), I am co-hosting this week’s #TeachWriting chat about the power of speaking assignments. The Twitter chat takes place on Tuesday, May 17, 2016 at 9pm EST/6pm PST. Speaking and listening standards have become the forgotten part of the Common Core. Despite the huge premium employers place on these skills, almost no testing consortia, states, districts, or schools are formally assessing them and too many teachers avoid speaking and listening assignments altogether.
Chat Questions:
:07 Q1 List some of your favorite orators and include links to speech(es)/TED Talks you use in your class.
:14 Q2 What do great speakers do? What are the essential elements for speaking well?
:21 Q3 How impressive are your students in speaking assignments? What are their weaknesses?
:28 Q4 @Erik_Palmer says We assign speaking, but we don’t teach speaking. What should Ts start with first?
:35 Q5 How do you approach discussion-based activities in your class? Include your grade & subject.
:42 Q6 What are your favorite student speaking assignments? Why were they successful?
:49 Q7 What are your favorite tech tools for recording, practicing & sharing speaking projects?
:55 Q8 How do you accommodate the introverts who would rather die than speak in front of their peers?
In June, Erik Palmer, Corbin Moore and I will launch a free MOOC on Teaching Speaking & Listening. The class is open to teachers of all K-12 subjects. Here are a few resources to get you started: Listening & Speaking Demystified. A framework for teachers including more speaking assignments in their instruction. Effective Speaking Pop Up Debates. Look what’s Number 1. Here’s the archive of the chat.
Vietnam War Narratives
To build interest in learning about the Vietnam War, my students conducted historical photo tableaus.
After reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, my students are writing their own short stories set in the Vietnam War era. They are allowed to choose the narrator and location of their narrative. The goals of this project are for students to demonstrate their research skills and abilities in synthesizing multiple sources on the subject to increase their understanding of the Vietnam War.
Students who would research the backstory of this picture would learn that there was no happy ending. Students will use the LAUSD Digital Library to find 6 sources (3 websites & 3 books) online encyclopedias count as books.
Deadlines
- Select narrator & topic 4-15 (77% of you turned this in on-time. Yay!)
- Find 6 sources (3 websites, 3 books) 4-20 (68% of you -110 students, turned this in on time. Thank you!)
- Check Note-taking/Annotation – Works Cited Page (MLA Format) 4-25 (The volume of hand-written notes from their sources ranged from 0.5 of a page to 13 pages with an average of 3.5 pages per student.)
Questions to consider when writing historical fiction. - Write 1st draft in class – 4/26-27 (These stories averaged 584 words with 8.13 Historical Details).
- Audio Recording – due 5-2 (106 of you made this deadline, 53 did not).
- Provide a link to your audio story on this spreadsheet by 5-11-2016 (You had difficulty with this technical challenge only 65 of you completed it.)
All research, notes, revision memos, typed papers and audio stories should be uploaded to your Google Docs/Drive and shared with scottmpetri(at)gmail.com. Each step is worth 50 points, this entire project is 300 points toward your final grade. Make deadlines, not excuses. When we listen to the audio stories in class, students will grade each one using a modified version of this rubric.
Here is one of their audio stories.
Kent State by Victor C.
Writing for Ears
I have been doing some research for a MOOC I will be teaching with Erik Palmer and Corbin Moore this summer. Teaching Speaking & Listening Skills will launch June 20th on the Canvas Network. Like most teachers, I assign speeches and presentations within my instructional program and I am almost always disappointed by how poorly my students listen to each other and how little they gain from their colleagues’ presentations. This is because I rarely give them directions on how I want them to listen and what I want them to listen for.
This post asks questions about how teachers can inspire their students to Write for Ears. Specifically, what writing tasks teach students to listen? TED speaker Julian Treasure has an excellent primer that explains why we are losing our listening.
Even though most of us spend the majority of our day listening, it is the communication activity that receives the least instruction in school (Coakley & Wolvin, 1997). Research suggests that listening while reading helps people have successful reading events, where they read with enjoyment and accuracy. This also helps with decoding, a fundamental part of reading. The average person talks at a rate of about 125 – 175 words per minute, while we listen at up to 450 words per minute (Carver, Johnson, & Friedman, 1970).
Imhof (1998) found students do not have a clear concept of listening as an active process and they often find it easier to criticize the speaker as opposed to the speaker’s message. Conaway (1982) demonstrated how listening skills are crucial to academic success by giving a listening test to a freshman class of over 400 students at the beginning of their first semester of college. After their first year of studies, 49% of students scoring low on the listening test were on academic probation. Conversely, 69% of those scoring high on the listening test were considered Honors students after the first year. Only 4% of those scoring high on the listening test were on academic probation.
Similar findings have been replicated in other studies, on average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news can only recall 17.2% of the content. Timm & Schroeder (2000) showed that listening and nonverbal communication training significantly influences multicultural sensitivity. Further, listening has been identified as one of the top skills employers seek. Despite this, schools, districts and assessment consortia have turned a deaf ear to this important skill. What strategies and techniques have you found helpful in improving listening comprehension?
Don’t miss our #TeachWriting chat on April 5, 2016 at 6pm PT. Where we chat about the following issues in increasing the listening comprehension of our students.
08: Q1 What prevents our students from becoming good listeners?
14: Q2 What are common misconceptions students have about listening?
20: Q3 How can you use audio to increase literacy skills in your classroom?
26: Q4 What listening objectives are most frequently used in your class/discipline?
Photo-Card w/ Mead (1978)
- to recall significant details;
- to comprehend main ideas;
- to draw inferences about information;
- to make judgments concerning the speaker (e.g.,attitude, intent, bias, credibility);
- to make judgments about the information (e.g., type, evidence, logic, arguments)
32: Q5 What types of listening activities can help students improve their writing skills?
38: Q6 What writing assignments do you use with songs & speeches?
45: Q7 What strategies/games can Ts use so that Ss actively listen to their peers’ presentations?
52: Q8 What writing assignments have you created that teach listening skills?
I look forward to hearing how you are teaching your students to listen. Dust off the lessons you have used to help students improve their listening skills with writing and get ready to share. Thanks to www.listen.org for a great collection of listening facts.
HistoryRewriter 