Top 5 Teaching Strategies + Simple Classroom Examples

ELENA MAKER: Identity charts is infinite. There's so many things, and we're always adding things. And I like the flexible nature of the identity charts, and that it feels more organic, and it's inclusive of all parts of our identity. And so as we're talking, we can throw all these different things on the board. And then we can start to draw lines and connect them. And so I think for conceptualization and idea-generating, identity charts can be really helpful.

So we actually started in September. And it started off as an identity unit, which was inspired by "Facing History" and the identity readings that they have. Just to streamline the process was to make the "My Part of the Story" stories about the civil rights leaders. So we chose excerpts from-- each one of them had some sort of biography or autobiography. And we used those in class, and looked at these key words around labels, assumptions, voice, legacy, and identity, which are the key words in that identity unit.

Our essential question for the day-- Ernie, will you read it for us, please?

STUDENT 1: How do our personal stories influence how we choose to fight for justice?

ELENA MAKER: Excellent. So that is our essential question for the next three days. So we're beginning to put all this learning together to think about how different individuals' personal stories influence their fight for justice.

So the first thing we're going to do, and I know you all know how to do this, but we're going to make it a little more complicated today. So we're doing an identity chart. But in this identity chart, we are comparing and contrasting the experiences and beliefs of both Yuri and Angela.

So in your journal section-- so we're flipping to our journal section-- we're going to put Angela on one side of the page. And on the other, put Yuri. And leave plenty of space. So you want a whole journal page for this. So I'm going to challenge you. Before we talk about it together, I want you to think and write one thing about Angela's background.

All right. So what's one thing people wrote for Angela Davis, in terms of her experiences?

STUDENT 2: I said that when she was younger, she experienced a lot of bombings in her neighborhood.

ELENA MAKER: All right. Excellent.

STUDENT 3: Do we write that?

ELENA MAKER: Yep.

STUDENT 4: [INAUDIBLE]

ELENA MAKER: Great. So let's add to that. Where was her neighborhood?

STUDENTS: (IN UNISON) Alabama.

ELENA MAKER: Yes. Birmingham, Alabama.

All right. Arisela?

ARISELA: I said she grew into political activism when she was 12 or 11 years old.

ELENA MAKER: Yes. She was a young activist.

Carmen?

CARMEN: Wasn't her mom, like, an activist too?

ELENA MAKER: Yes, perfect. So we can add off of there.

So she said she doesn't even really remember when she started to become an activist, because she just grew up in this household where activism was part of their belief system. Yeah.

OK. Should we start with Yuri? Angie, and then Alex?

ANGIE: She grew up in a concentration camp.

STUDENT 5: Or internment.

ELENA MAKER: Internment camp. Did she grow up there?

STUDENTS: No.

(INTERPOSING VOICES)

She was 15.

ELENA MAKER: She went as a teenager, right? So intern--

All right. Olivia, you had your hand up?

STUDENT 6: She didn't start active-- like, she didn't become an activist until, like, she was 40.

STUDENT 7: Yeah.

ELENA MAKER: Anyone know-- remember why that was?

STUDENT 8: That's when she moved to Harlem?

ELENA MAKER: Yes. And why do you think Harlem made that change-- helped her make that change into an activist? What was going on in Harlem?

STUDENT 9: Was it because of the rules and stuff like that?

ELENA MAKER: She saw some inequality, right? She saw some segregation.

We do identity charts in their freshman year, and at the beginning of the year. They're very used to talking about issues around identity at Blackstone our social studies curriculum in general really focuses on that.

They have some vocabulary and some structure by the time they get to me sophomore year. And I also hope that in the Socratic seminar, as they're discussing, X person had this experience as a young person, and it led them to take this action, maybe they'll say something similar. And so I'm hoping that they're starting to make those connections in their own lives. And that's something we can discuss after this once I have the content down.

I really like identity charts. They're very useful for literature, but also to start the year, like we are thinking about ourselves and kind of the labels that other people give us and the labels we give ourselves.

In an identity chart, a student would put their name in the middle and then they would identify themselves in all different ways. They would think about their family relations, their relations to their community, their interests, their groups of people they hang out with.

This is a class of seniors. And it's just the first two weeks of school. They're going to be writing their narrative about their lives for their college essay. They've already had a little bit of experience with identity charts. We had them do an identity chart for an author about a story they read.

So now they're going to take all of those skills they learned in the last class and apply them to themselves and really start thinking about who they are and the labels that they are given and the categories they would put themselves in, and also think about the categories and the labels that other people would give them and that they would get from somebody else.

So today we will be creating identity charts for ourselves. So last class, you created an identity chart for your author of your story that you were assigned to. So today you're going to be making an identity chart for yourself. For some people, it'll be a little bit more difficult to create an identity chart for yourself. And for other people, it'll be easy. But we'll see.

So the very first thing I want you to do is-- I'm going to give you paper, I'm going to give you markers, and just like we did-- and you can see the examples around the room-- just like we did for your character, or your author in the story, you're going to put your name in the middle and make an identity chart for yourself.

This identity chart is not going to be hung up around the room. It's not something that I'll share with other people. But you are going to share with your neighbors or someone near you. So just keep that in mind when you're making your chart.

So for about 15 minutes, I'm going to let you just sit by yourself make your identity chart. And then you'll be ready to share out next. OK?

[SIDE CONVERSATIONS]

All right. About one more minute to finish up.

Did you have any inspirations for what you want to do that you wanted to write down?

I mean, I love math. That's pretty much like why I want to pursue the future.

Is there anybody who comes to mind when you think about who you want to be like?

My brother.

Yeah, write down your brother.

Yeah, write your brother.

Is your brother an engineer?

I mean, no. But he's like my motivation, I guess.

Oh, he's like the person you look up to.

Yeah.

My brother is too.

OK. So now that you've completed your beautiful, colorful identity charts, some of you really went all out and I really appreciate that. I'm going to have you work together. Make sure when you work together on these questions, you work with somebody that you feel comfortable with. You're going to be sharing some personal information. You're going to be sharing your identity charts. So make sure you just feel comfortable. And if you have to get up and move to someone else, you can do that.

So three questions you're going to look at, discuss, talk to each other. And then, I'll give you probably about 12 minutes to do this. It's a good number. Twelve minutes to talk about all three of these questions. And then we'll come back together and I'll ask some people to share out their thoughts. Sound good? OK.

I put involved and political. Because you know-- you guys know I care a lot about politics.

All politics, all my knowledge comes from you.

She doesn't watch the news. It's all from me.

[INAUDIBLE] all the news.

Yeah, for school, I'm considering being a lawyer. I'm debating on it. I'm really not sure if I want to--

What type of lawyer, though?

I don't know. That's what it is. I don't know. There are so many things I want to do. But I know my baseline for a career, like my career path is to help people.

Wrap up your conversations please. Sorry to do that.

All right. So let's just go through the questions together. Like I said, you had the opportunity to share with people that you feel comfortable with or the most comfortable with in the room. And I'd just like to hear from some people if they feel comfortable sharing with everybody.

First question, are there elements of yourself that you consciously chose not to put on your identity chart and why? Yeah?

So the reason why is because, admittedly, I do have a lot of issues. I do have a lot of self-confidence issues. So I feel like some of the stuff that I put on there, I would get-- I'm not sure how people would view me if I put it on there.

OK. And I think that-- raise your hand if you feel-- have ever felt that way about something. I have, too. So we all feel that way. So from time to time, we all feel like something about our identity is not acceptable in an environment. Or we feel uncomfortable. So you're definitely not alone in feeling that way. Thank you.

I think the lesson went really well. I think that they were very self-aware. And I think that more people spoke up than I expected and different students than have spoken up this year so far. So I think it went really well.

I think students are walking away with a stronger sense of how they define themselves. And I think they're also, which I didn't expect, coming away with an idea of what makes them who they are as known by their friends and people they were sitting with.

There were quite a few students that we're talking about how their partner told them, oh, you like this or you're funny or you're smart, and they said, oh, I didn't even think of that.

So it was nice for them to take a look at how they define themselves using the labels that they either create or learn from society, and then also to figure out what their peers thought of them and then discover that, oh yeah, I didn't even remember that about myself. So that was a nice moment.

[JAKE MONTWIELER] I love Socratic seminars because it's giving students a chance to work together to really create knowledge. That's the joy of it. It's really an example of authentic learning. They are practicing the skill of seeing multiple perspectives by engaging with their classmates, who may see things a little bit differently. They're also practicing making a position with evidence. Because it's text-based, I'm hoping that they'll refer to that, refer to the text that we're using. It's challenging for eighth graders to do that. That's why we practice it a lot. Because I'm trying mostly to step out of the conversation, it's sometimes easy for students to not have a conversation so much as multiple monologues that are going on at the same time. One of my colleagues refers to this as parallel play. It's like kids in a sandbox who aren't really engaging with each other, but are doing their own task. What I've done, hopefully, to encourage a more authentic discussion is to encourage students to respond to each other with follow-up questions before they ask another question of the classmates. That's hard. Normally, as teachers, I think at our best teaching, we're always asking follow-up questions. Kids haven't practiced that, so even with reminders, sometimes that's hard to do. Through our Socratic seminar, I'm also hoping that students will reflect on a more general experience in human nature. When we are protected by darkness, when there is anonymity, it is easier for expressions of hatred and intolerance to come out. That's the experience of Henry Buxbaum in this lesson. And I think what students will connect to is to experiences online, right, where there's a similar darkness because you can post things anonymously and we can't see the effect of our actions. That's what happened on this train in 1923. And I'm hoping our students will see, oh, that's a similar experience to what I face when I'm texting today. As always with Socratic seminars, I want to give you a little bit of time to prepare. I have the reading here. It's just what I read, but I would like you to reread it. What is maybe helpful here is to find one or two phrases to just do a little box around. That's going to help us stay anchored in the text. So as you read it, just one or two phrases and you think, oh, that line is important. Just box it or star it or underline it. And then you're going to be writing your reactions, and then some open-ended questions. The best Socratic seminar questions do two things. First of all, they have multiple answers, right? They've got multiple different ways to answer. And then also, they're really anchored in the history and anchored in the text. So I want to encourage you not to do a lot of hypothetical questions. If you have one hypothetical question, one what if question, you know, what if the lights had been on, would things have changed, one is great. But then I really want to see if you can ask an open-ended question about that moment, about Henry's experience, about what this teaches us about Germany in the 1920s. I want to remind you that you are talking with each other, right? I'm really going to step out. I will start us with a question. You're running the show. Something that we've been working on this spring which is really important is building off of each other's answers. If someone offers an answer, I'd like the next couple comments to be comments about that answer or a follow-up question. OK? So we want to stick with one person's answer for a little bit. That's going to help us really get deep into this text. At the end of our seminar, as we often do, we're going to have a chance to give some shout outs. My first question is this. What does this story teach us about Germany in the early 1920s? [SPEAKER 1] They were using the Jewish people as an excuse for what was going wrong. They were trying to blame them for what happened in Germany. [JAKE MONTWIELER] Yeah. [SPEAKER 2] It could also show how unstable and divided the country-- the public was after World War I, because they're all torn on what happened, and all had mixed feelings about the new government and the old government, the monarchy. [SPEAKER 3] And it also says, that night there were seven or eight people in the dark fourth class compartment. It might show their social standing and their economic power. [SPEAKER 4] But I think part of the reason why they might have been blaming the Jews for all their problems was because the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to accept all of the blame for World War I. So they didn't want that kind of guilt, so they probably might have turned to the Jews to kind of pass it on. [SPEAKER 5] I boxed probably more encouraged by the darkness than his own valor, suggested, let's throw the Jew out of the train. This really reminds me of current age, cyberbullying, like how everyone feels much more confident because nobody can see them or say anything against them. And I feel like that's directly related to that quote there. And I was asking, how would it change if the lights were on? I mean, I think he probably would've said something, but much less severe. [SPEAKER 6] If you say something directly to someone's face, you can't say something that harsh because you can see a person, you can see humanity in front of what you're saying it to. But if you say it like you can't see anything. In this, it was dark. If I say something to whoever, and I can't see them, I could say whatever. But if they're in front of me, and I can see them, then it would be really hard for me to say exactly what I would say if it was dark straight up to their face, looking them in the eye. [SPEAKER 7] In the text, it says "quickly, some of the others joined in." It seems almost as if they were kind of like, oh, well, yeah, I agree with you. But do you think they really agreed with the person who started off the conversation? [SPEAKER 8] I think it could have gone two ways, one being they wanted to get something out and say something, but since that one person went up and said, oh yeah, blah, blah, blah about the Jews, they're like, oh yeah, I want to say that, too. So then they jumped in, feeling like-- it's kind of like having bystanders and the bully perpetrator. [JAKE MONTWIELER] How so? Tell us a little bit-- [SPEAKER 8] Oh, like they feel more powerful that there are more people that agree with them and behind them, standing up to the point that they're saying. [JAKE MONTWIELER] So the crowd is significant here. [SPEAKER 9] Well, soccer is a very team sport, so normally, Henry and the person that were saying the vicious things would be working together. And then when the person was against him, it felt like he had no one there and he was isolated by himself. [JAKE MONTWIELER] Unfortunately, I want to move. And what I want to ask here is if we can offer some shout outs to people. That is, a comment that you thought was really thoughtful, a question that moved your thinking. And this one, if you can raise your hand, and then I will call on you for this. So Kiki, a shout out. [SPEAKER 10] I thought, Alex, when you did the connection of cyberbullying and the lights off, I thought that was really good. [SPEAKER 11] [INAUDIBLE] for raising that question, because I felt that it was a very important point to add soccer club to it. [JAKE MONTWIELER] Beautiful. Nice. Good snaps for everyone there. [SNAPPING FINGERS] I want to say something that you did really well during this Socratic seminar that I was particularly pleased about was using the text, that you guys really stayed rooted in the text, and a lot of you were quoting the text and then making inferences based on that. That's a great skill, right? We've been practicing it all year, but I was really pleased with how you did that today. This year, I've really focused on Socratic seminars. I've told kids this is a strategy that we're going to work on, so we've named them explicitly and named some expectations for them. Because it's a relatively small class, I'm still able to hear from most students during the seminar. I think you do miss what you would get from an inside/outside circle. You miss students who are doing a little bit more metacognition about the actual learning experience. I think that's OK because we have this experience of giving shout outs at the end, where they can reflect as a group and give some specific positive feedback to an individual. So I felt good about this lesson. I think that our seminar was pretty successful. Kids were able to build on each other's ideas. I was pleased with that. That was one of my goals. I was also happy about the way they were using the text, that they stayed pretty grounded in what Henry Buxbaum had written, that they were able to reference it sometimes directly, and make some inferences on it. So that felt pretty successful.

In this section, students will study the aftermath of the guilty verdict in the trial of Tom Robinson, the struggle of Scout and Jem to understand it, and the reflections on democracy and citizenship by the adults who try to help them. The resources in this section have been included to help students consider the legacy of racial violence and justice in Southern communities, and learn about the ways that some communities have attempted to come to grips with their histories, in order to seek justice and healing.

A typical gallery walk, the students will have silent time to view a series of documents at stations around the classroom, or maybe down a hallway, if there's a hallway available. But I modified it slightly, just so that we could get a little bit more in-depth with the five documents about apologies and reconciliations. So instead of doing a gallery walk, I'm going to do a jigsaw style. As the students come in, I'm going to hand them a random number. And it's going to assign them to one of the five documents.

So that group of three or four students will be charged to be the expert, if you will, on that document. They'll read it together. They'll come up with the most important points. Each document has one to three connection questions that the group will discuss and provide a quick answer to. Once everyone's had 12 to 15 minutes to work on that part, they'll all have a seat. And then each document will be called up one at a time for the group to give us the recap. And that's going to be a little bit better than having the kids just spend a minute or two on each document, because as the group explains, they'll be able to fill the other groups in a little bit more in depth.

OK. Who has a good memory? Everybody? Nolan? Erica? Could either of you just give a short-- just real quick recap of the gist of the five documents that you all looked at the Friday before spring break. Yes, ma'am.

So, a few of the documents had more specific cases. Like, I remember one of the documents had the Scottsboro Boys on there. And it had the different effects of their-- some people's version of justice. And it talked about the definition of justice itself, and the difference between justice and closure. And it talked about how the people in the community were affected, and the effect on injustice as a whole.

Good. Excellent. So, if you would, take your paper, that you just got back, and head to your document.

Then it states that the Scottsboro Boys have finally received justice, figure 3.

No. I disagree.

Yeah, I said-- I said I agree and disagree, because although we know the truth today, they were still harshly punished, and it does not matter how long ago it was. There was still pain.

I said I disagree. I think the boys that were released didn't even have justice, because there's still hatred throughout the community that could really affect them, and drive them to do things they would never do, like suicides would be a factor in that. And definitely the boys-- I think there are a few that they killed. I think. So I think there were a few that they killed, and they definitely don't receive justice because--

They're dead.

Their life ended early because of a false accusation.

I checked on most groups and kind of already asked you all some of the questions that you're going to answer for the class. And everybody seems to be on track with good responses. So go back to your seats, unless you're 6.2. 6.2 stay over here. All right. Document 6-2 is on truth and reconciliation commissions. They're going to tell us all about that. They had one question. I know some of you had two or three questions. But they had a long document. Their one question: According to the Greensboro Project's mandate, what actions can help provide healing and hope to their community? What actions might impede healing and hope? And do you agree?

So according to the Greensboro Project mandate, healing and providing healing and hope would be brought by coming together, just acknowledging people's feelings, also discovering and disseminating the truth.

Then they clarified all the confusion that was in the community and what actually happened, instead of people just like, oh, it was an accident, or whatever.

Yeah.

Class, just a quick show of hands, do you all-- raise your hand if you think that the town, Greensboro, and the mandate did enough. That's kind of what I figured. I didn't think you guys would think that's enough, and I agree. Anyone just want to give a quick reason why you don't think that was quite enough? Erica?

Well, it would definitely have helped if they had done it much earlier. Like, closer to when the situation actually occurred. Because that would have started-- that might have started some conflict but it might have also settled some down, because most people realize that racism isn't the way to go. And it would have been nice to realize that sooner than we have already.

Good. Good. I like that. 6.5, reparations.

Reparations, they can gave some type of financial help or it can give compensation, but it doesn't make it right. They failed to accomplish to erase the memory of what happened or take the pain away. They're trying to give you things, so you won't be as angry as you were before. It causes closure, but it does not fully erase the pain.

So it's essentially-- some people may look at it as trying to bribe people to get over something.

Or pay you off.

Pay you off. Right? So a lot of times, reparations are looked at as a negative thing.

Basically-- that means that sometimes they're just a symbol. You know, it's like saying, hey, you know, we're wrong. We know we're wrong. This is what we-- we're trying. This is what we can do to try and help you.

Thank you. And then how would you guys answer that last question? Again, that says, how long do we have to pay for the sins of our forefathers?

I would answer that question by saying that until people feel like it has stopped being an issue, like, those acts stop happening, there can be-- you can heal, once those acts stop happening, because if there is more actions, like they're happening, the healing will never start. And you will still have a scar, and still with a scar. Like a lot of times you have a bad scar that hurts on your arm, you can't forget it's there.

Right.

But, if it heals, and it's still there, you won't notice it as much. And this is how you forgive the forefathers.

I think that in-- almost restating what they had said to me, and asking more probing questions, I was able to get a good bit of them to understand the difference between justice and healing. Some still had, kind of, this up-in-the-air thinking it was the same thing. But as we got to each document station, I think that the students had a little bit better understanding that there is a true difference.

And that it's in the eye of the person who the injustice was done against. If reparations were that person's way of having their closure and feeling that justice was done, that may be different from the way that someone else took it. And I think that they did start to realize that it's in the eye of the beholder, whoever needs to have these feelings, is the one that's going to make that decision.