By Dan Yezbick, Humanities Faculty

I like to think about where my students will end up by the end of the year. What histories and new or revised understandings will they have? The eighth graders, as part of their survey of world religions, will visit a Sikh temple and get to ask questions. I want them to be ready to get the most out of this visit. My fifth graders will investigate the origins of religious tolerance and pluralism in the U.S. by first studying the printing press, the Reformation, and religious intolerance in Europe during the Age of Exploration. How will they most appropriately demonstrate their understanding? I might assess their mastery of the material with a terms quiz, ask them to design and edit a newspaper for their peers to read, or write and perform a play in groups, or I might give them an in-class writing assignment. All of these can show mastery and they all entail learning and developing different skills.

Considering forms of assessment leads to a different guiding question: what do I hope my students will be able to do better after a year? I hope it’ll be easier for them to think through and write a paragraph, study a primary source and make meaningful observations about it, and more confidently read a chart, graph, or map and make sense of it while talking it out with a peer. I hope that they’ll get better at working in a team and collaborating meaningfully to research, write up, and then present a project to their peers. They should also get to demonstrate mastery on more traditional quizzes and tests, too, and along the way we will develop study habits and methods to support this form of assessment.

Still, it’s not a course in test-taking, teamwork, or well-structured paragraphs. The passion, the interest, the wonder of what I think of as the heart of the discipline has to come first. It’s fun to engage in historical thinking. It’s fascinating to think about ways of being and previous constraints that are different from our own, and to hear stories about what people did with what they had at the time. Knowing things and having facts in your head matters. Primary sources can be tough nuts to crack, but with a little guidance, some tools, and a mess of questions: nut meat! I’m wary of putting too much emphasis on pedometer counts and the health benefits of the food we’re eating. What about the fresh air, the view, and the taste of the food? Skills are the necessary outgrowth of good teaching and learning, like mushrooms after a rain. They are not the rain. As Seymour Papert put it more broadly, “You can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something.”

In conversations with fellow Eastside Prep teachers like Ryan Winkelmann who co-teaches eighth-grade history with me, we talk often about how to make our courses more accessible, memorable, and meaningful to students. We talk, too, about big takeaways and what we will ask the students to do.

Meeting students where they’re at means getting to know them, and I’m a big fan of thinking in terms of developmental psychology. Fifth graders thrive on learning by doing, are ready to match your enthusiasm, and can seem like small grown-ups in bumper cars. They have great seriousness of purpose and fall easily into states of wonder and awe. They also require patience and can be squirrely at times. Elin Kuffner taught me that they can benefit from a “TMAC track” where you send them for a three-minute hustle around the TMAC building and back into class refreshed and ready to focus. Finding something juicy for their budding intellects to chew on is also important, and age matters with this: they still thrive on “story time on the rug” and think that toilets are funny. Given their stage in developmental psychology— they know in theory that other minds exist, but aren’t too worried about it yet, for instance—what gets them excited and engaged?

The past is like a foreign country, and humans by nature desire to know. With my fifths we have now just done early human ancestors, the land bridge, and native tribal nations of North America. We’re currently in the midst of the Age of Exploration. That’s four instructional units, or domains to explore, countries I’ve been to and am touring them through. It’s my job and sometime delight to plan a trip, get them hooked, make them feel and experience some of the oohs and aahs, and learn some of the unmissable shared stories that, sure, fine, they may be expected to know later on. Lucy, Beringia, the potlatch, scurvy. Whenever I can, I like to pretend they are my graduate students and send them off to answer research questions that I don’t myself yet know the answer to. “What exactly was the role of women in Iroquois politics? Here are three books: I want an answer from your group by the end of class today.” I also keep an eye out for their own original questions, questions experts don’t think to ask, such as “how many arrowheads are there?” Voilá, a student takes the reins and leads us on a side quest, along the way peeking into domains we might visit while trying to answer that question, such as paleontology, geology, and anthropology. It’s like we’re touring down the streets of Orvieto and there’s a plan for the day, sure, but then someone asks “hey, what’s down that way?” pointing down a leafy path I hadn’t noticed on last year’s trip.

I get to talk about my classes and what I’m thinking about them with all kinds of people. History students I had last year come up and ask me what this year’s history class is doing right now. “We’re doing culture boxes, but it’s taking a little longer this time around,” I might answer in a scene that has happened three or four times this year. The other week Teddy (Class of 2030) was the sixth grader asking about fifth grade goings-on and I gave him an earful: I reviewed the four themed units we’d covered so far, and that we were starting the Age of Exploration and I was considering making tweaks to the “Columbus Log” activity. “I think you should drop that. It was too stressful: there was too much writing, and it took forever,” Teddy offered. “But it’s an amazing primary source, chockfull of all kinds of great details.” “Yeah, but you don’t end up really thinking about any of it because you’re in such a mad rush the whole time.” Okay, hmm, I thought as we went to lunch. That’s pretty compelling feedback—further revision may be called for. Thanks, Teddy!

In mid-November I subbed for a ninth-grade humanities class during a work period for their final project. Of the students in the room, I’d had roughly half the class the previous year. Toward the end of the period, they asked about what religion the current eighth graders were on. Sabina and Ana (both Class of 2027) were seated at a desk cluster near the front of the room and it was they who were asking, though some other students wandered in and out of the conversation. Me: “We just started Buddhism, and we’ll be researching and debating Tibet in early January. We’re planning on doing the field trip to the Tibetan and Zen temples in spring again.” We talked about the field trips and what they remembered, and whether they’d felt prepared to ask questions of our various temple hosts. “Definitely,” Sabina said. “I actually really liked the model of groups presenting sections of the book [to the class] followed by the key terms quizzes.” She said they’d learned a lot that way and it had stuck enough so that they could indeed ask more interesting questions at the temples. They also had praise that day for the week or two we spent reading and discussing the book of Exodus and making a wall-sized “Mosaic Mosaic” of key events in the story’s timeline. After all, “Exodus is so important to all three of the Abrahamic religions,” Ana told me. “Great! That was one of the big takeaways Mr. Winkelmann and I had been thinking of when we designed the activity. That was the first year we tried it, and we’ll probably do it again.”

Flash forward to a meeting with Sam Uzwack a week or so later where I’m talking about how it’s my second year teaching (after many years as a full-time substitute teacher at EPS) and I had hoped planning and prep would be much easier this time around but it still takes a surprising amount of work—waah, waah, waah. Sam’s remembering teaching Middle School history, in particular a seventh-grade course he co-taught with Paul Hagen, and shares some of the highlights and struggles they had with planning. Toward the end he says: “Divide the course into three buckets: went well, went okay, didn’t go well. Then leave the first two intact and rework what didn’t go well.” This was a relief to hear and helped lighten the load, so thanks, Sam.

I like the three buckets idea for honing the big arc of a yearlong course. Like focusing on and thinking through what skills students will gain and develop, it is something primarily for me as the teacher, creator of designed experiences, to contemplate and implement. The students may not even notice these aspects of the course, and that’s okay with me: I want them to remember first the stories, ideas, and new connections they made.