For years, Eleanor Duckworth described her Harvard course on critical exploration this way: “Rather than conceiving of teaching as explaining, and learning as listening, this course looks at situations where teachers listen and learners do the explaining. [Critical exploration] starts from the premise that there are endless numbers of adequate pathways for people to come to understand subject matters. Curriculum and assessment must build on this diversity.”

Teachers listen and learners do the explaining. In critical exploration, the teacher serves less as an instructor and more as a researcher, concerned not with how clearly the teacher is explaining a concept but rather with how deeply the learners are grappling with the concept in all its complexity. The teacher serves less as a question-answerer and more as a question-asker, following up on learners’ ideas by posing questions that get at the root of the learners’ emerging understandings and potential misunderstandings.

There are endless numbers of adequate pathways for people to come to understand subject matters. This is why the Khan approach remains shortsighted. Its one-lecture-fits-all assumption requires the selection of one pathway—likely the pathway most apparent to the teacher—and then expects the teacher to do whatever is necessary to help the learners understand the subject through that pathway. (This is when “practice” happens, though practice typically leads to competency in reproducing a procedure rather than to expanded understanding.) In contrast, critical exploration acknowledges that it is important for the teacher to encourage each learner’s pathway to emerge—and to put these different pathways in contact with each other so they can build on each other and, when appropriate, challenge each other.

Teachers listening to learners explain. For those who are eager to “flip” something to make learning and teaching more powerful, this is a much more promising way forward.

Mike Fishback earned his Ed. M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006 and currently teaches seventh grade history and English at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia.

I teach at a school that requires letter grades. At the close of this past semester, while reading my seventh-grade students’ reflections, I was struck by this paragraph from a girl who was discussing her “improvement over time”:

I really hate getting letter grades. The letter grade might have been who I was at the beginning of the year, but now I have improved. When I mess one little thing up, though, it messes up my improvement over time. I think that our learning capabilities should not be based off of what letter grades we get because sometimes people make mistakes, which we learn from. Isn’t learning why we came to this school? I think my improvement over time is overall very good, but sometimes it’s hard to go steadily uphill.

I wish to use my student’s reflection not to critique the enterprise of grading (for which the literature is vast; see one recent example here) but rather to critique the conventional response to “messing up” by contrasting it with the values of critical exploration.

What my student recognizes about grading is that it relies on averaging. There is a “who I was at the beginning of the year,” and each graded task is an opportunity for a student either to “go steadily uphill” or to regress backward. “Messing up” negatively affects a student’s grade average and, in turn, the ultimate measure of how “capable” a student is perceived to be at learning.

Indeed, in a conventional classroom, a mistake is typically corrected by the teacher, who then turns that student’s mistakes into numbers for the purpose of figuring out how well the student is doing overall. This practice promotes a number of treasured values: accuracy, efficiency, and timeliness of learning chief among them.

Contrast this with an exploratory classroom, where a “mistake” is instead an opportunity for that student to realize something is wrong, to question her assumptions, and then to figure out a new approach that might make more sense, basing her newly constructed knowledge in part on her understanding of why her earlier idea didn’t work. Add collaboration to the mix, and a mistake becomes even more valuable, as it provides the group with an opportunity to assess a number of approaches in pursuit of an understanding.

My student is right that we learn from our mistakes. Yet mistakes are not simply temporary barriers to academic success. They are not simply detours interrupting a steady uphill path of knowledge acquisition. Mistakes are in fact the very things that help us learn best. By working through them, we develop a deeper understanding of a concept than if we simply accept what others think they understand about that concept. And the “light bulb moment” that occurs when we realize why and how we need to alter an idea cements that understanding more clearly and durably in our minds than if we simply are exposed to a pre-existing explanation.

Why, then, do we routinely “take points off” or “grade students down” for making mistakes, to the point where too many mistakes can sink a student’s final grade?

One way of solving the problem would be to abandon grades, scores, and rubrics altogether, but in most schools, this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. So how can teachers who believe in the values of critical exploration embrace students’ mistakes while still giving grades?

One possibility is to sever the link between individual assignment grades and overall semester grades, so that the latter is no longer the average of the former. This approach would take the pressure off students who worry about making mistakes or expressing inaccurate or incomplete understandings for fear of the impact on their final grade. And it would alleviate the concern of the student I quote above, who writes about earlier mistakes dragging down her grade. Yet it would also beg the question of how that final grade would be “calculated.”

An answer to that question might be found in a second possible approach: making the process of taking advantage of mistakes part of the grade itself. This would force students’ mistakes and misunderstandings “out of the closet,” so to speak, and lay them bare as an essential part of the learning and reflection process. Depending on the subject area, this could take the form of annotated “re-do’s,” written analyses, collaborative notes, or conferences with the teacher, all completed prior to the grading. This way, grades would be as much a reflection of how students arrived at their understandings as they would be a report on how much material they have mastered.

Yet neither of these approaches addresses the issue at the core of my student’s reflection, which is that our expectation of achievement—“going steadily uphill”—can get in the way of the experience of learning. Whether we average students’ grades together or not, whether we grade how students use their mistakes or not, we are still rating them on a scale of achievement. And one thing critical exploration demonstrates is that learning is not a series of scalable achievements but rather a continuous, never-ending process of discovery that can branch out in numerous directions based on the students’ own observations and questions.

Critical exploration also honors the inquisitive potential of each learner. My student’s assertion that a grade might be “who I was at the beginning of the year” feels so disturbing to me because no letter, not an A and not an F, can reflect who a human being is. Our job as teachers, therefore, is not only to facilitate learning but also to show our learners, through their own observations of their own explorations, that they are more than just a letter.

Otherwise, we’re messing up.

Mike Fishback earned his Ed. M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006 and currently teaches seventh grade history and English at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia.

Much curriculum tends to be static:  It prescribes what students should notice and what they should think.  How can educators create curriculum that changes as students and teachers engage it — curriculum that engages students and all their varied observations and ideas? In critical exploration, students encounter materials the teacher has chosen, but they develop their own observations of and thoughts about the materials, free from the influence of the teacher’s ideas.  One important benefit of this approach is that the students’ observations can help direct the teacher’s attention, illuminating aspects of the sources the teacher might not otherwise have fully appreciated, helping her to create a responsive curriculum by deepening her understanding of the themes she is teaching and of the ways learners at all levels can discover them.  In this post, I’ll share a specific example to show how this movement in critical exploration works.  Though the example comes from history/social studies, the pattern of interaction among the materials, the students’ observations, and the teachers’ thinking and planning holds beyond it.  By looking closely at this example, we can better understand how teaching and learning can inform and enliven curriculum in any subject matter.

Wall panel from the palace of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria, c. 640 B. C. © Trustees of the British Museum.

In Watertown, we’ve been studying Mesopotamia.  One of the primary sources our collaborating teachers and I have worked with is a relief (above) that once decorated the walls of the palace of Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria.  The relief dates to 645 – 635 B. C.  I had suggested this image to the teachers primarily because it shows streams of water scholars have understood to be irrigation canals, and I knew agriculture and irrigation were two themes the teachers wanted the students to think about.  When I first chose the image, I don’t think I appreciated the potential of the figure I understood (after consulting scholarly articles) to be a king in his tower surveying his carefully cultivated property. If I had found another ancient depiction of irrigation canals — one that showed farmers and crops in place of a king and trees — I very likely would have chosen that one instead.

Then one of the teachers studied the image with her class, and sent me a list of her students’ first observations.  I noticed that many students mentioned the figure I thought of as the king or the space I thought of as the castle garden.  But for every observation that referred to a king, castle, or garden, it seemed that there was another calling the same elements a religious figure, a temple or church, a sacred place. These observations, in numbers almost equalling the kinds of observations I had expected, surprised me.  I read the list again and took some notes, collecting the two kinds of observations together:

forest and a temple or church

looks like a garden — plants or layout of a garden

castle in the background

sacred place — hidden place hidden by trees

in the middle a statue — tall structure

castle on right walled with towers

little man on top looks like a king

looks like Jesus at the top of the middle pillar

looks like a church at the top

With the students’ observations in front of me, I looked closely at the image again.  As I tried to see the place as the students did — as sacred or hidden, as a temple or church — I became aware of its stillness. The garden became a refuge, a sanctuary, and the lone figure in its dramatic, even ritualistic pose only accentuated these qualities.  I had noticed the tower and figure before, of course, but as I experimented with more of the students’ observations — a statue, a tall structure, looks like Jesus — I became more aware of the height of these features. I had understood this height to create a convenient vantage point for the observer and possessor of the landscape.  Now I saw it as steep and dramatic, lending the figure monumental, even god-like qualities.

If the idea that the panel depicts a palace garden were unquestioningly accepted, I realized, many of its details and much of its significance would be obscured. A temple or a church, a sacred space, a figure that looks like Jesus — through these observations that at first seemed so out of place, the students were calling out details of the piece, revealing aspects of its mood — in short, beginning to describe for themselves, and to help clarify for all of us, the complexity of this work of art.

As observations of a tall statue and temple emerged alongside those of a king and garden, the students were also describing and gathering evidence of themes central to the study of Mesopotamia — themes that, before thinking through the students’ observations, I hadn’t realized this particular image could support.  One of these themes is hierarchy.  A closely related theme is the connection between hierarchy and religion — the way those in elevated positions were treated like gods, and considered to be close to and even descended from the gods.  As some students pointed out evidence of political hierarchy, then listened as other students described evidence that the hierarchy is religious, the work of the class was setting the stage for further student discussion of these themes.

In a much earlier source also from Mesopotamia — a letter from a Middle Babylonian tablet (1531 – 1155 B. C.) — Kalbu addresses his “guenna-official” or provincial governor about a water supply problem.  The substance of the message is prefaced by this long opening:

“Tell my lord, the perfect, the gorgeous, the offspring of heaven, our protective angel, the expert and effective warrior, the light among his brothers, the shining gem, the trust of all important persons, endowed with nobility, the provider for scholars, the table laden for all people, outstanding among his peers, to whom the gods Anu, Enlil, and Ea, and also the goddess Belet-ili, have granted a treasure of graces and riches — tell my lord: Kalbu, who is dust and but your favorite slave, sends the following message.”

The elevated and god-like position of the official — “the offspring of heaven, our protective angel” — and the great distance between him and Kalbu, “who is dust and but your favorite slave,” resonate with elements the students’ observations highlight in the image:  the sheer height of the tower and the silent figure in its noble pose framed in the archway at the top, positioned as if to illuminate or focus the attention of the countryside.  Each of these sources can help students develop and test their ideas about the other.  And together, these two sources from different periods can help students reconstruct and understand enduring characteristics of Mesopotamian civilization.

Before thinking through the students’ observations, I hadn’t realized that the Ashurbanipal relief could support student thinking about these themes in addition to the theme of irrigation.  Now that the students have encountered the image, and now that I have thought through the students’ observations, I have a deeper understanding of the image and how it works — and of its potential to work with other sources, such as Kalbu’s letter, to help students think further.

In critical exploration, teaching, learning, and curriculum development are interdependent.  The teacher chooses materials because of what she has noticed about them.  Then she allows her students to encounter the materials and make their own observations — and she allows her students’ observations to help her perceive new possibilities in the materials and to envision new ways to use them in her teaching.  The teacher becomes actively involved in ongoing curriculum development.  And the curriculum changes and grows as students respond to the new combinations of materials and activities with more observations and ideas, and as the teacher and her colleagues understand the sources still more deeply and — again and again, year after year — imagine more things to try.

References:

A. Leo Oppenheim. Letters from Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967, pp. 116 – 117.

Alythea McKinney is the director of Critical Explorers.

In this school year, “the having of wonderful ideas” is unfolding in a growing number of classrooms. I’m very proud to list all that our organization has accomplished in 2011.

Beginning with the Launch Party in February, Critical Explorers…

• Introduced the new website, criticalexplorers.org, the online teacher resources for our first investigation, Slavery and Reconstruction, and the blog
• Engaged and energized almost 200 educators, supporters, and friends in simultaneous critical explorations of materials from our first investigation, Slavery and Reconstruction
• Raised over $32,500 in individual donations, our major source of funding for this year
• Created a mailing list of over 600 — and growing — educators and supporters who have actively expressed interest in Critical Explorers
• Received a grant of $5,000 from the Anita L. Mishler Education Fund to support the creation of more online teacher resources for classroom investigations
• Developed a Critical Explorers teacher workshop model and conducted our first, three-day workshop, “Critical Exploration in the Grade 4 – 12 Humanities Classroom:  An Introduction,” receiving excellent reviews from the participants
• Conducted several professional development sessions focused on Mesopotamia
• Beginning in spring 2011, sustained a collaboration with four classroom teachers at Watertown Middle School, where Critical Explorers is written into the 2011 – 2012 School Improvement Plan and is preparing for a classroom residency focused on ancient Greece in spring 2012.

The Board of Directors is extremely grateful to every donor and volunteer for the support that has made this work possible. We look forward to accomplishing even more in 2012!

Eleanor Duckworth is President of the Critical Explorers Board of Directors.

Conventional wisdom holds that effective teachers write the objective of each lesson on the board before class so that the students are aware of what the teacher intends them to accomplish. This premise seems like common sense, yet if we view it through the lens of critical exploration, we can see several ways it is flawed.

First, communicating objectives to students sends a strong message about who is driving the learning. In a conventional classroom, the teacher has the unquestioned authority to make decisions about student learning. Yet in an exploratory classroom, learning is driven by the students themselves, with the teacher facilitating the learning by listening carefully to the students’ observations and questions and helping them uncover new paths of inquiry. Stated objectives work against the aim of critical exploration by implying that the teacher will control not just the topic of the lesson but also the outcome of the students’ thinking.

Second, communicating objectives to students gives away the ending before the uncovering even begins. In a conventional classroom, the teacher reveals the point of the lesson ahead of time in order to motivate the students to work toward mastery of a predetermined skill or concept. Yet in an exploratory classroom, motivation arises instead from the students’ curiosity about the materials and about where their ideas might take them. Stated objectives work against the aim of critical exploration by focusing on the work required for students to achieve a goal rather than on the mindset required for students to immerse themselves in details, reconsider their assumptions, and construct theories that might help them make better sense of a topic.

Third, communicating objectives to students discourages students and teachers from pursuing potentially constructive lines of inquiry that appear tangential to the objectives. In a conventional classroom, where the priority is getting through the required material, students’ questions are valued to the extent that they allow the teacher to clarify concepts or instructions. Yet in an exploratory classroom, where the priority is constructing understanding, students’ questions create the pathways through which they are able to explore a topic deeply, leading to more meaningful learning. A question that seems misguided, silly, or off-topic when posed in a conventional classroom might, when posed in an exploratory classroom, provide the spark that lights an intellectual fire and helps it spread throughout the room. Stated objectives work against the aim of critical exploration by limiting the breadth and depth of questions and, consequently, of learning.

None of this is to suggest that teachers should not prepare their lessons ahead of time, have ideas about what they would like their students to understand, or conduct lessons in an efficient and time-conscious way. Indeed, anyone who has practiced critical exploration knows how important these responsibilities are to effective teaching. Yet in critical exploration, the most important responsibility is to help learners learn. The three reasons discussed above for abandoning the practice of writing lesson objectives on the board all prioritize student inquiry over teacher control. And when teachers are more attuned to the observations and questions of their students, those teachers are better positioned to enhance the quality of both the teaching and the learning in their classrooms.

Mike Fishback earned his Ed. M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006 and currently teaches seventh grade history and English at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia.

Our first, three-day teacher workshop, “Critical Exploration in the Grade 4 – 12 Humanities Classroom:  An Introduction,” held in August, was focused on poetry as well as on history.  In addition to engaging in large group critical explorations, participants worked in small content groups with others interested in the same topics — ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, for example, or slavery and the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Movement.  For this pilot workshop, we developed several key features, including opportunities  for participants to choose texts and then images from collections of possibilities provided for their topic, to engage a partner from another group in a critical exploration of the chosen text or image, and to work on extending that initial exploration by creating a critical exploration activity or assignment.  Through three days of these activities, the participants were able simultaneously to experience and think about critical exploration more generally and to experience and think about the more specific project of helping students explore the content they actually teach.

For this blog post, we requested participants’ permission to reproduce excerpts from journal entries they wrote during the workshop.  We know these excerpts document the thoughtfulness of this wonderful group of educators.  We hope they also suggest how the shared experience of choosing and exploring particular texts and images gives rise to experimenting with and rethinking not only single activities and assignments, but also larger classroom structures and units of study.

The workshop was conceived as a seminar and limited to seminar size in order to support intensive thinking and learning.  We wanted to ensure that, in every session, each participant could speak and interact both with other participants and with the facilitators.  Thirteen educators attended — six Massachusetts public school teachers, four independent school teachers from Massachusetts and Virginia, and several education researchers and teacher educators, including one from the Library of Congress.

Here are the excerpts from the participants’ writing:

“One aspect of today’s work that I thought was interesting was continuously pushing my learner to make meaning out of the poem even when she thought that she was unable to do so.  Carefully constructing questions was key.”

Jenny Janovitz, Holland Elementary School, Boston, MA

“I was most struck by how much I can learn from others’ observations in a critical exploration setting.  Frequently throughout today I was surprised by another’s idea or observation, which caused me to shift my view.”

Katharine Millet, St. Mark’s School, Southborough, MA

“My partner and I had two extremes in the texts we each had chosen.  I read a brief, four-line poem in simple language, whereas my partner read and compared two lengthy, dense pieces.  It was a wonderful opportunity to see how this protocol plays out in different contexts.”

Lisa McDonagh, Watertown Middle School, Watertown, MA

“I love the time spent today working with our images and texts and thinking about how we might actually use these with our students.  It was extremely helpful to me to get the feedback and even more important, I am truly excited right now to try out my ideas!”

Ellen Fitanides, Watertown Middle School, Watertown, MA

“Working with two other people in creating my assignment really reminds me of how valuable it is to spend the time together developing the work, to articulate thoughts, purposes, and goals.”

Lynette Goulet, Watertown Middle School, Watertown, MA

“Working with other teachers to design activities in the spirit of critical exploration has empowered me to incorporate this work into any unit or lesson.”

Mike Fishback, The Potomac School, McLean, VA

“I think that the most important thing I’m leaving with is that learning is a journey — it morphs along the way and giving students the opportunity to explore and veer off the ‘track’ is part of that journey.  The destination (which is so often the ‘right answer’ for some educators) is not as all important as the process one experiences in getting there.”

Gail Petri, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

“My looking at the piece [in Steve Seidel's session on looking at classroom work] felt like an ‘opening up’ process as opposed to the ‘narrowing’ feeling or process I sense when ‘correcting’ or typically ‘commenting’ on a student’s work.  The order of the steps encouraged wondering and, in the process — awe.”

Holly Turner, The Common School, Amherst, MA

“In ‘Unprescribing the Curriculum,’ the author wrote how problems to be investigated in class need to be problematic.  How can we make ancient history reflect that?  How can we turn our dull unit question on Mesopotamia, ‘What are the characteristics of a civilization?’ quite a bit more juicy?!”

Kerri Lorigan, Watertown Middle School, Watertown, MA

“I’m feeling much more confident about how to set up structures in the classroom to promote student thinking and dialogue.  …  These past 3 days have given me a sense of ease and trust that the materials and students themselves will instruct. … What I want is honest student thinking and to know they are thinking is celebratory itself.”

Amy Gonzalez, Maria L. Baldwin School, Cambridge, MA

“I wish other aspects of the education ‘system’ could engage / talk to this process of critical exploration.”

Kajal Sinha, Curriculum Development and Pedagogy, King of Prussia, PA

Becoming a Researcher

What does it really mean to be a researcher? When we assign students a research project, how can we make the experience as authentic and engaging as possible?

Critical exploration encourages learners to use their own observations and questions to construct new understandings. This is central to what researchers do. Yet in most conventional “research projects” assigned to middle school students, the focus is on cobbling together what other people have observed and organizing that information into an essay or display. Simply collecting facts and then presenting them in a different form is not the same thing as research.

Harvard professor David Perkins writes of crafting curricula for which students are “playing the real game.”

Thomas Nast, "Union Soldiers in Andersonville Prison," 1865.

The real game of a researcher involves digging up artifacts, observing them closely, and, as a result, arriving at new ideas and questions about the topic.

Most middle schools expect students to practice gathering information about a topic on their own and organizing ideas into paragraphs. These skills lie at the heart of most research projects and are in fact valuable for students and historians alike, yet these skills alone do not constitute research. What would a research project look like if it involved actual research—if the ideas being organized had been constructed by the students themselves, rather than by editors of textbooks or encyclopedias?

This is the question my colleague Lucia Krul and I set out to answer as we designed a research project this spring for seventh graders studying the American Civil War. Our aim was to infuse the habits and values of critical exploration, which encourages students to “play the real game” of research, into what was otherwise a fairly standard, traditional project for middle school. What follows are some thoughts about how I approached this project in my classroom and what I can imagine doing more effectively the next time around.

Setting the Expectations

As student-centered as critical exploration is, the teacher has important responsibilities: jumping in to see if he or she understands what the learners are thinking; encouraging them to grapple with inconsistencies in their ideas; and providing new artifacts or challenges based on where they seem to be headed. Yet in a traditional research project setting, in which each student follows a unique path, the teacher is not able to be present to fulfill these responsibilities throughout every step of every learner’s journey. Consequently, much of the questioning and seeking out of new artifacts must be done by the individual students themselves.

To prepare my students for this, I first had to engage them in the process. I facilitated a number of critical exploration sessions in the weeks preceding the research project. For example, with only a sparsely labeled map related to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (the eventual unraveling of which helped precipitate the Civil War), the class built on each others’ noticings and wonderings to figure out the complex terms of the compromise—terms that, when read about in a reference book, are often difficult to conceptualize. Subsequently, the students identified what they might have overlooked or not really understood had they received the information from others rather than constructed the understandings themselves.

Later, as a Civil War unit review, small groups of students encountered various photographs, political cartoons, newspaper clippings, and other images that I had compiled from the era. The students took turns sharing noticings and wonderings about them, calling upon their existing knowledge of the Civil War to help them make better sense of the images and the topic itself. Through this process, they began to develop the mindset they would need for the upcoming research project.

Introducing the Project

For the project, Lucia and I asked each student to research a Civil War-related topic of his or her choice and produce a digital “exhibit” using Adobe’s PDF Portfolio application. After a brief overview of the topic, a student’s exhibit would feature three artifacts, each accompanied by an analysis of how it might enhance our understanding of the topic.

Fortuitously, my school’s librarians, Cathy Farrell and Brian Parry, had spent many years teaching these students the practice of “previewing” resources prior to selecting a research topic. Consequently, the students began this project not by choosing a topic but rather by exploring a variety of Civil War artifacts, generating keywords and questions in order to find additional topic possibilities. The students did consult reference materials such as encyclopedias, but they did so typically as an outgrowth of their initial explorations.

An “artifact” could be any primary source: a photograph or cartoon, newspaper article, speech or letter, map, poem or song, and so on. I allowed for artifacts that were not strictly primary as long as they contained minimal text and had rich exploratory potential; this left room for maps and paintings created long after the war. The students enjoyed learning how to use the library’s subscription databases, Google Advanced Search, specialized websites, and books to find artifacts. The Civil War was a fantastic topic for this type of project because of the wealth of diverse resources.

The analysis accompanying each artifact had to identify some things the student noticed about the artifact, how these noticings led to new understandings through further research, and unanswered questions or “mysteries” arising from the exploration. These requirements served to maintain a focus on discovery, theorizing, and questioning, as opposed to “reporting,” which is often a middle school student’s first instinct in a research project.

The emphasis on further research deriving from an initial exploration helped to establish another important principle of the “real game” of research: the idea that it’s a continuous process that builds over time, rather than a finite period of gathering sufficient information and then reporting it. By requiring students not only to notice and question but then to use their noticings and questions to jump back into the research, I hoped to have the students become, in a sense, their own teachers.

Lucia and I also incorporated the concept of thesis-based argument into the project. After compiling a half-dozen or more promising artifacts, the students were to include only three of them in their exhibits. How were they to choose? Our answer was to ask them to select three that, together, could enhance our understanding of some specific “theme” related to their topic. At the end of each analysis, the students were to explain how the artifact communicated their chosen theme—similar to using evidence to support a thesis. The students’ eventual themes ranged from the general (“The risks of being a spy”) to the particular (“General Sherman’s dislike of the press” or “Doubts about the Anaconda Plan”).

Some students leapt into the challenge enthusiastically, emboldened by their freedom to explore. For those who began more grudgingly, my aim was to steer them to artifacts (and, from there, topics) that might engage them. Once some of the more reluctant students found topics that truly interested them, they emerged as some of the most committed, thoughtful researchers in the class.

For much of the research time, Cathy, Brian, and I circulated around the library, supporting students in their inquiry but trying to avoid the temptation to “push” them in directions in which they were not already headed. Accordingly, my responsibility was similar to that of a teacher during a formal critical exploration session: figuring out which ideas and questions were likely to be the most generative and helping the learners find paths they could explore further.

Assessing Students’ Exhibits

Although I do not subscribe to the common belief that the sole measure of an activity’s value is the extent to which it meets predetermined objectives, this project did indeed have objectives, and they were indeed met. The project’s first objective was for students to develop the mindset of an authentic researcher, and the second was for them to construct new understandings of the Civil War era—whatever those specific understandings may be. The students’ exhibits closely matched these objectives, as demonstrated by these excerpts from their analyses:

Robert E. Lee's letter to General Winfield Scott explaining his resignation, April 20, 1861.

Jack uncovered a hand-edited draft of Robert E. Lee’s 1861 resignation from the U.S. army and wondered about Lee’s commitment to the approaching war: “[The sentence] ‘Save in the defense of my native state, I never desire again to draw my sword,’ strongly suggesting that Lee would fight against the Union, [is] added almost as an afterthought… Had Lee hesitated at first to state his intentions? It’s unclear, but odd to see the words added afterward and in the margin of the letter.”

Ellie, upon discovering a virulently antiwar statement by Clara Barton, researched further and found that Barton’s own father had served in the military: “This makes me wonder how this hatred of fighting came about, or if her father [had been] scared by his time on the battlefield. Did he praise the ‘glory’ of war? Or did he tell his children the truth about fighting?”

Alex, who had critically explored poetry the previous month in my English class, approached an engraving of Andersonville Prison with an eye for symbolism: “The leaves on the trees in the background are gone. Leaves die and fall off trees in the winter. The death of the leaves in the engraving is a symbol of the soldiers dying. Another important thing to notice is that the sky is barren… like the surroundings of the prison.”

Matt, who aspires to be a surgeon one day, fit a number of pieces together once he dug up a letter from a battlefield surgeon recommending shockingly unsanitary practices: “If you combine this fact [that surgeons did not wash their hands] with the fact that surgeons performed surgery with their bare, uncovered hands, then we can deduce that surgeons operated with filthy hands. This is one of the reasons that infection spread so quickly in hospitals, and one of the reasons that soldiers would refuse surgery and medical treatment.”

I included a range of assessment criteria, from timeliness and organization to the relevance of the artifacts to the chosen theme. Yet the central objective of the project—constructing knowledge through research—meant the exhibits succeeded as long as they stayed true to that spirit. I did not evaluate the exhibits on the breadth of their content, keeping in mind David Hawkins’s assertion: “You don’t want to cover a subject; you want to uncover it.” I had to remind myself to care less about which pieces of information a student covered than about which questions a student posed, and how the student went about addressing them.

Developing the Project Further

Unfortunately, the deadlines for this project ran up against the end of the school year, so I did not have time to do justice to what should be its final stage: full-class critical explorations of each other’s artifacts. As I imagine it, the teacher would begin by facilitating an exploration of the most generative artifact and then strategically add more artifacts to the exploration in response to the noticings and wonderings of the group. The student whose artifact is being explored might observe silently at first and later write a reflection comparing his or her own analysis to that of others. I look forward to timing the project more wisely in the future so that my students can reap its full benefits.

Another challenge that emerged for me during the exhibit drafting stage was helping my students to recognize the difference between using artifacts to illustrate newly obtained knowledge and using artifacts to show how new knowledge had been constructed. This project, of course, asked students to do the latter, yet in more than a few cases, analysis drafts essentially started with, “This is a photograph of George McClellan. Now let me tell you all about him…” As I worked with students to revise their drafts, I often encouraged them to focus more intently on using the images, text, and other aspects of their artifacts as anchors of their analysis rather than simply as accompanying illustrations. Next year, if I create opportunities for students to practice this type of analysis more regularly throughout the school year—not just in the weeks prior to the project—they might be more uniformly successful at demonstrating it in their own writing.

This brings me to my last point, which is that we must not expect perfection. We must not expect it of ourselves, the teachers, as we can always identify a time when we offered too much or too little direction. We must not expect it of our students, who necessarily demonstrate varying degrees of sophistication as we ask them to experiment with a method that many adults spend years of higher education attempting to master. And we must not expect it of any assignment or activity, given the expectations and constraints of most schools and curricula. As I wrote at the outset, the aim of this project was not to remake the curriculum but rather to infuse the habits and values of critical exploration into activities that otherwise would not benefit from them. Next year, I will try to align this project even more closely with Eleanor Duckworth’s vision of teaching and learning. And the next year, even more.

And I will learn a lot about the Civil War in the process!

References:

Duckworth, Eleanor. “The Having of Wonderful Ideas.”  In “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning. 3rd ed. New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.

Hawkins, David. The Roots of Literacy. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2000. p.79.

Perkins, David. Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009. p. 9.

Mike Fishback earned his Ed. M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2006 and currently teaches seventh grade history and English at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia.

In addition to finding interesting materials, Critical Explorers and the people who have inspired it have developed ways of asking questions, listening to and responding to students, and looking at students’ work.  Some of these approaches are different from the ones teachers are usually expected to use.  Yet they are also very effective at helping teachers accomplish things they are expected to accomplish—for example, helping students think critically and independently.

We created this workshop because we would like to have a chance to share these strategies with you, and to look together at what they can accomplish, so that they are available for you to draw on not only when you are using or adapting the investigations that appear on this website, but also anytime you want to use them in your teaching.

Describing these strategies and their impact in words that are isolated from experience generally doesn’t work very well.  Because they are different from more familiar protocols, the best way to get a clear view of them—and to prepare to use them well in a familiar context—is to step away from the familiar ones for a short time and to allow yourself to see these from the inside.

So we plan to spend some time actually experiencing these approaches through several different kinds of humanities activities.  After each experience, we plan to move into small working groups to plan, write, and test out specific activities and assignments, for your own units, that integrate these strategies.

A central focus of the workshop will be thinking about what can come next after looking at something with students.  For example, after we’ve asked what they  notice and/or used the “What Do You Notice?”  sheet, what are some options for keeping the exploration going, and for deepening it—and even for moving toward articulating themes, for example—while the ideas and even the themes are still coming from the kids?  And at the same time, how can we find out what the students are learning and understanding, and use what we discover to help us plan next steps that will support them in thinking still further?  We expect that these will be some of the key questions.

Alythea McKinney is the director of Critical Explorers.

This is the second in a series of three posts. Click here for Part I, Developing Characters.

The primary texts of ancient history, even in translation, can be difficult for students to read and comprehend. When writing styles, vocabularies, or cultural references have changed, primary documents only a few centuries or decades old can seem almost as inaccessible. How can we help students make sense of these sources? The themes we hope students will consider through their encounters with these texts may remain out of reach unless we get students’ minds actively involved—both in close examination of the language and in bringing back to life not only the characters, but also the settings and events these documents record. In this second post in this series, I will discuss a strategy our collaborating teachers and I have come to rely on to engage students in this way.

Creating Reconstructions

We choose a section of text that describes something physical or material or visual—a setting, an object, or even an event—and we ask students to draw it. For our industrial revolution project, for example, we chose Marshall Strode’s butter transporter, a specially designed container that protected his high-quality butter on its lengthening trips to market. For Ancient Greece, we chose the bridges Xerxes’ engineers built to allow his army to cross the Hellespont and to march from Asia into Europe.

The challenge to represent a difficult description through drawing helps students enter into closer relationships—working relationships—with a text. As students work to understand the text fully enough to reconstruct in another medium what is described, and as their drawings begin to take shape, the task itself encourages them to talk with one another. Comparing each other’s drawings—and, even before that, comparing questions about what is described and how to represent it—leads them to compare different interpretations of puzzling phrases and sentences, and ultimately to better understand them.

Sometimes we structure opportunities for these comparisons more formally, by arranging gallery walks. Students lay their work on their desks, or we hang it on the wall, and people are free to walk around the room to view and discuss the works-in-progress and, eventually, the finished drawings. We ask the students what they notice about the work, encourage them to say more about the similarities and differences they observe, and invite them to talk with each other about how one or more drawings (or details within them) relate to the text, and about how they decided what to draw to represent particular words and phrases.

Both the drawing task and these informal or more formal comparisons help reveal to us as teachers the students’ evolving understandings of the text. The drawings elicit their observations and even permanently record them in visual form. Often, we can trace changes in their thinking through erasures in the drawing itself, as well as through small group or gallery walk conversations.

The drawing task, along with the working relationships with the text it encourages the students to develop, also serves two key purposes for the students’ learning. First, it places the text in its proper position as a source rather than an authority. It puts the students in the positions of scholars, where they are allowed and expected to create from their interaction with the text something useful and interesting to other readers. It assigns responsibility to the students’ minds and imaginations to interpret the text and to bring its static record to life in their artwork and their conversation.

Second, the task helps the students develop familiarity with the text, and with the setting or object or event it describes. And it helps them reach a deeper level of familiarity than simply reading or discussing the text could support. When they encounter related settings, objects, or events, in other texts or other kinds of sources, this deep familiarity prepares students to recognize the resonance (and dissonance) among them, and to begin to articulate the parallels (and conflicts) they notice. And that resonance and those parallels (and that dissonance and those conflicts) give rise to the important themes of the unit—the overarching themes that we as teachers so want students to be able to discuss and understand.

In our investigation of ancient Greece, for example, we read ancient accounts of Xerxes the Great, King of Persia, and of the almost impossible assignment he gave his engineers: to build bridges across the Hellespont so that the huge army he had assembled—an army far too large to be rowed across the strait a few boatloads at a time—could cross on foot from Asia to Europe and invade Greece. The Hellespont looks like a thread of water on today’s maps of Greece and the Persian Empire, but in a passage we read, Herodotus gives the distance from shore to shore as 1,350 yards, and he describes the strait as the major obstacle to Xerxes’ progress. Xerxes himself reacts as if it is. When a first attempt at building the bridges is destroyed by a storm, Xerxes “ordered that the Hellespont was to receive 300 lashes … and that a pair of shackles was to be dropped in to the sea.” He also had the supervisors of the first attempt beheaded. Then more engineers were ordered to set to work; they built two bridges supported by ships joined together, “360 as support for one bridge, and 314 for the other….”

Intertwined with the massive and inventive project of Xerxes’ engineers are the cruelty and coercion of their single-minded dictator, and his angry intention to dominate both the waterway and the land he is about to enter. As Aeschylus (another ancient writer, in another passage we read) puts it: “They’ve crossed the strait / that honors Helle / by binding their ships / and clamping a bolt-studded road— / a yoke / hard on the Sea’s neck!” Entering a land where rivers are worshipped as gods, Xerxes requires even the Hellespont to submit to him. “A yoke / hard on the Sea’s neck!” The bridges are a productive focus for the drawing task in part because—in a sense—the bridges are Xerxes’ requirement that all submit to him, crystallized in material form.

As the students’ efforts to reconstruct the bridges help them focus on and better understand the texts, then, those same efforts also help them think about Xerxes’ obsessive determination and apparently invincible power to bridge the geographical gap between Asia and Europe and to bring Greece under his rule. They set the stage for understanding the deep cultural and political differences between Xerxes and his vast army of subject peoples and the small, independent Greek city-states planning the defense of their homeland.

Concentrating on the construction project at the Hellespont helps the students develop familiarity not only with the bridges themselves, but also with the tangible separateness of Asia and Europe and with the form of leadership—and the style of the individual ruler—that spurred the engineers to their all but impossible achievement. By the time we reach the Battle of Thermopylae, this familiarity has prepared the students to consider (through activities like those discussed in part III of this series, Comparing Representations) the differences between the Persian form of leadership and that of the Spartans—and how Xerxes’ position, and his attitudes and assumptions (for example, “If the Spartans were under the rule of one man, as my soldiers are under my rule, the Spartans would fear that man and be better able to go out and confront larger armies”), predispose him vastly to underestimate the danger the three hundred Spartans can pose to his army. Just as these specific understandings support and are supported by one another, they and others like them will also help build overarching understandings of the further unfolding, the outcome, and the significance of the Persian Wars.

In the third post in this series: Comparing Representations

Alythea McKinney is the director of Critical Explorers.

Here at Critical Explorers, we’ve temporarily paused work on publishing to the website the remaining sections of the Slavery and Reconstruction resources in order to take advantage of an opportunity further to develop our soon-to-be-published Ancient Greece investigation. Some of the materials and activities for Ancient Greece were originally selected and created in conversation with a 7th-grade teacher and his students in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Now, we are expanding and refining them through our work with four teachers and their 7th-graders in Watertown.

Ancient history — especially the ancient history of far-away places — at first seemed to me an area that is particularly difficult to help students explore. The primary sources that still exist are usually scarcer than those from more recent times, and they also tend to be prohibitively expensive, or secured in distant museums, or written in dead languages. Even including those available as digital images or in translation, the pool of primary sources is relatively small. This can make it necessary (even for historians) to draw on the same authors over and over. While studying the Persian Wars (one section of the Ancient Greece unit), for example, we read a number of passages from Herodotus — but for middle school students, large doses of Herodotus, unmixed with anything else, can seem repetitive.

When primary materials are so scarce, what other kinds of materials can we productively bring to students’ attention? And what can we ask students to do, in order to help them make sense of the materials we choose? This series of three posts will focus on three strategies our collaborating teachers and I have come to trust as we work to engage students with ancient times: Developing Characters, Creating Reconstructions, and Comparing Representations. In this first post, I’ll discuss the first of these strategies.

Developing Characters

We choose a historical person represented in the existing primary sources — for the Persian Wars, for example, Darius the Great, King of Persia; or his son and successor, Xerxes the Great; or Leonidas, a king of Sparta. These are all splendid, legendary figures, and for ancient times such people are usually the best choices, because their words and deeds (unlike those of ordinary ancients) tend to have been preserved in surviving written and visual records, so that the students have relevant material to work with. But the strategy of developing characters has also worked in the Industrial Revolution project, where we focused on an obscure dairy farmer named Marshall Strode, whose butter transporter is described in the 1867 Report of the Secretary for Agriculture; and Matilda Howard, a woman who sent a detailed floor plan for a farm house to an agricultural journal in 1843, is another excellent candidate.  As forgotten books and magazines from recent centuries are digitized and their full text becomes searchable, it is easier than ever to discover people like these.

Whether the individuals are famous or unknown, we look for people who have multi-faceted and preferably conflicted personalities and priorities, and who, in their complexity, can help students think about the complexities of the cultures, or political systems, or economies in which they lived. For example, Darius the Great was a supreme ruler who tortured and killed; at the same time, his empire grew so large in part because he allowed subject nations to speak their own languages and to keep their own religions and customs. These aspects of Darius underscore both the unchecked power of the Persian Empire and its intricate diversity. Marshall Strode was a small-scale dairy farmer who represented a tradition of farm- and home-based production, yet he emphasized efficiency and profit and invested in innovative equipment as he worked to compete with the emerging cheese and butter factories. Marshall Strode personifies, and so helps make visible to the students, the tensions at work in the larger shift to an industrial economy. Of the transition he and his contemporaries faced, one sixth-grade student wrote, “A farmer only milks the cows and sends the milk to a factory. Before, they had to do all the work to make cheese.” Imagining how farmers felt about this transition, another student wrote, “Is that good or bad? Although they don’t have to do as much work, are they paid the same amount? And it isn’t really their cheese anymore. Also, they cannot make it just how they want it, and they cannot choose a price.”

To encourage this kind of thinking and discussion, we ask students to talk and write. The process of building historical understanding involves much more than the gathering of facts and observations. For students, as for historians, it is a process of selection and synthesis. In order to understand historical people and settings, students need to envision and even to recreate them in their own minds and imaginations. Through our activities, then, we try to support the development of increasingly rich characterization and context from the raw historical record of an individual and of his or her place and time.

In our current work on Ancient Greece, students begin by collecting observations of the person — for example, clues to his inner thoughts, values, and priorities — in an “open mind portrait.” Students record their own thoughts, and can also include whatever they choose from small group or all class sharing. As they develop their characters, we try to provide more than one source for the students to draw on. For ancient people, we sometimes include (and, together, think critically about) not only ancient sources, but portrayals of the ancient figures in the literature, art, or popular media of other centuries (more on this in the third post in this series, Comparing Representations). For lesser-known individuals, we may include other sources on people of the same type — for example, for Marshall Strode, sources on other dairy farmers operating at a similar scale.

As we work with more materials, the portraits become more detailed. We then invite students to write about their characters, or to write from their characters’ perspectives. We also try to give students as many opportunities as possible to consider what their classmates choose to include and emphasize, and to explore whether they agree or disagree with each other. Just as historians differ in their interpretations, one student’s character may not match another’s, even though the historical person at their centers is the same. Was Xerxes the Great merely cruel and demanding, or was the massive assignment he gave his engineers — to build a bridge of boats that would allow his army to march across the strait between Asia and Europe — evidence of a creative side? As they raise and debate questions like these — questions that may never be answered conclusively, but that lead us back to the sources to find evidence to support one vision, or another, or both — the differences among the students’ characterizations build, strengthen, and complicate our individual and collective understandings of the historical person and of his place and time.

In the next post in this series: Creating Reconstructions

Alythea McKinney is the director of Critical Explorers.