How to Create a Good Simulation I

Start with a model. A model is a simplified version of reality. The word model may sometimes be difficult to conceptualize but you must realize that much of our thinking and our experiences are based on models. Mario Brothers is a model. As I said in earlier posts, Cowboys and Indians is a model. Playing House is a model. Any novel you read is a model. Any TV show you watch is a model. Most any lesson is a model.

All a model is is a stripped down version of something more complex. Our brain has to strip down what it perceives and what it considers to distill down to the important essences. If it can’t I’d posit that the learner / thinker will not be able to truly grasp the concepts or skills associated with what you are trying to teach.

If I want to teach the causes of the American Revolution through a simulation I need to identify these and then to simplify them for the learners’ level of thinking capacity. Then I need to re-coalesce them into a narrative, textual and / or visual in which the learners begin to interact.

Now I’d argue, especially for younger or middle school learners that you are often better off by NOT using the actual content area. Rather you’d be more effective to take the elements you mean to teach and weave them into a simpler narrative.

I’d be better off for example creating a colony on the moon and using the UN as the colonial power who begins to impose restrictions and expectations on the space colony that PARALLEL those same issues that the British imposed on the American colonies.

Why not just use the actual events you ask? Well you can, but remember that the purpose of any lesson is enable the learner to practice and master the skills and content the teacher has targeted. I’d contend that using moon scenario frees you up of “content-clutter” and enables you to concentrate on the concepts and themes that were of prime importance in the first place.

But what about the “facts”? Don’t worry about that! I’ll show you how to do that later.

“What Gets Measured Gets Done”. How Do I Evaluate Experiential Activities?

On the one hand it is troublesome to me that this question needs to be answered. But on another I understand the need. We can rail against the tide about this age of accountability all we want but isn’t it the truth that the good teacher can always gauge how or to what extent their teaching, whatever strategies they use, work on  two levels; i.e. on the whole class and on the individual?

And on that same one hand again, assessing the effectiveness of experiential strategies, of simulation and role play activities, etc., can be troublesome to a teacher or to school leaders if their paradigm of measurement is superficial and / or quick fix.

And on that other same hand it falls to curriculum and lesson designers to align the goals of such strategies to blunt the naysayers’ criticisms by schooling THEM on how to assess experiential teaching for their true worth.

Use the Common Core Standards as your baseline for analysis. Perhaps the most noteworthy positive of adopting these is that the expectation on teachers and by extension, on students, is that the focus of “coverage” shifts from wide and shallow to more narrow and a lot deeper. By that I mean, teachers, lesson and unit designers, activities and strategies developers, will not be or should not be anyway, centered on  a sprint to the finish tape in a headlong rush to cover material for the sake of covering material.

Rather, there will be more opportunities for teachers to get deeper into the process skills, aka Thinking Skills, necessary to truly equip each child with the twenty first century skills to be thinkers, decision makers, creators, that this new century will demand.

And so when you use a simulation for example you have guidelines that will enable you to effectively meet the Common Core.

I do think it’s fair to say that the experiential does not lend itself easily to multiple choice, true or false, short answer assessment strategies. If the simulation for example is dropping students in the Great Depression, its dynamics are designed to have participants “solve” or “prevent” another one. For sure students can create the kinds of agencies that the “initials” as in CCC and WPA and TVA represent but such an activity probably fares poorly when compared against the read-the-text-and answer the questions on the handout approach.

However if and when the yardstick changes then these strategies gain super powers! Ask students to cite AND to explain the causes of the Great Depression! Ask the students to identify strategies that would alleviate the effects of a Great Depression. Money back guarantee that students will succeed very successfully on that kind of deeper, more thoughtful assessment expectation.

If instructional – doubt still clouds your educator’s mind I will offer you a win-win.

Still working with a simulation of the Great Depression as an archetype, you can use this in two ways. You can use it as a follow up to a text book -traditional approach to teaching about it. Doing so, students will hopefully reflect what they have learned from this approach to guide their dynamics and decision making in the activity.

The other, and more effective approach, would be to use it BEFORE the traditional approach. Let the students engage the model and the actions and move through the sequences so that they DISCOVER likely solutions or unlikely ones. THEN refer to the text and other resources to plug up content holes. Doing so will allow you to refer to the simulation for examples of their thinking to show how their decisions aligned or did not align with what “really happened.”

And how to evaluate? Start with essay questions if you must but also be brave enough to offer up other possible strategies related to the experiential strategy like debates, case study analysis and the liken.

Choose and Choose Wisely IV

We can get to all the good reasons why but this post will crown off the cautionary red flags to weigh before coming over to “our side”.

Teachers need to be comfortable in their new role.

Wiser words were never spoken!

In this case I am secure in saying that this is true for any new strategy that a teacher may be willing to include in her arsenal. Here are some reasons for this

1. It takes about seven applications before a change can become part of a teacher’s comfort zone.

- We have all seen this happen. Administration trots in the latest innovation du jour. They tout it as the Holy Grail. They bring in a prophet from another land who demonstrates the innovation and then jumps on her horse and all too often rides out of town. Some teachers, the Early Adopters, are eager to give it a try and unfortunately all too often, the effort flops or sputters. The teachers become discouraged and goes back to their old tried-and-not-so-true- but- at-least-comfortable strategy. The potential Late Adopters and the nay sayers smirk into their hands and say “Better you than me!”

Of course, this is mitigated if the administrators understand change well -enough to recognize that the Lone Ranger approach to Professional Development always leaves room for the bad guys to come back to town after he leaves. So wise Professional Development always includes recurrent support systems and coaching to embed the change.

2. Simulations especially, and experiential teaching strategies have to be aligned with your own teaching values and philosophy.

- If the teacher perceives herself as the sage on the stage and does not believe that  children can learn any other way except at the feet of the wise and all-knowing content giving teacher she will be hard pressed to give over her class to a set of methodologies that lessen her grip on the class dynamics. The only way a teacher or anyone can change their paradigms is by continuously being exposed to and invited into a professional dialogue about the values of the proposed change.

This never comes easily and the change-leader is well advised to work hard to assemble evidence, show research, offer modeling opportunities and continuous conversation to move the teacher from point A to point Z.

And with this, saved for the next post, is the issue of showing how these strategies can be properly and validly evaluated for meaningful learning against the Core Content standards.

3. Your students have to be comfortable in both their role and in your role. I have learned this the hard way: I had a teacher whose chalk and talk; guide on the side; read from the text book teacher methods were deadly for his class. After a particularly troublesome observation of one of his lessons I began to offer him experiential strategies to consider. He feigned interest and asked if I could model these for him. Anxious always to teach students I enthusiastically agreed to come back the following week with a role-play strategy based on a novel he was reading in class. I set up a debate between the protagonists. I showed the students how to debate, gave them time to prepare and set them loose.

The lesson didn’t flop but it certainly was no Broadway boffo success. The teacher, I think to this day, “smirked” and said something like “Oh well….”

What had gone wrong among other things was that I had forgotten my audience. These kids had been deadened, not only by this teacher, but by many perpetrators of lecture-based drone on lessons. They were conditioned to it. That I now was going to reverse their own learning habits in one or two lessons simply was not going to happen overnight.

The lesson for me was the realization that as with any set of students, they need to be acclimated to their learning expectations, whether the strategies are state of the art of less than that.

The next post will speak to the biggest issue of all. “Can I really expect students to  learn and to show that they have learned?”

Choose and Choose Wisely III

Oh I promise that I will give you more reasons TO use simulations and experiential experience than not to use them, let’s continue get the yes-buts out of the way.

The next two were:

• Some things just are not worthy of or do not lend themselves to simulation and role play strategies
• In order for an experiential strategy to be worthy for a content area or skills domain the teacher must carefully reduce the area’s content of skill to a simple but comprehensive model.

Some things just are not worthy of or do not lend themselves to simulation and role play strategies. How could a social studies teacher simulate The Rape of the Sabine women? I apologize for the distasteful example. I took the example from a movie I have long forgotten. Yet the caution flag is valid. Simply put, there are some situations, experiences, events, ideas that are meant for instruction but are not meant for simulation. I’ll give you some unpleasant examples.

- the Holocaust, in my opinion, and in my experience is simply too intense a topic to “simulate”. One year, I tried to simulate the sequences in A Diary of Anne Frank with the intention of having eighth graders identify guilt or innocence of those who may have turned the Franks over to the Gestapo. In almost all instances the class decided that those who contributed even indirectly to their deaths were NOT guilty. I never did the lesson again and that is because of the next cautionary below.

In order for an experiential strategy to be worthy for a content area or skills domain the teacher must carefully reduce the area’s content of skill to a simple but comprehensive model. Some situations, events, ideas, are simply too complex to simplify, or too inflammatory to replicate under the constraints of teaching time, student maturity, and the teachers’ ability to work with the sometimes unexpected dynamics of simulation’s momentum.

A teacher who I respected very much once tried to simulate a U. N. session of the Security Council about the Arab – Israeli conflict. She spent hours upon hours identifying specific historical roles and events, including very minor “players” in the continuing conflict.

I warned her that she had to tried to capture too many elements and that she would lose the students. She insisted that the lesson had to be historically authentic. I was right.

Afterwards she told me that she would never try something like this again. I replied that she shouldn’t, that she could have captured all of the essential elements by removing them from the historical context, setting in motion a far simpler exercise, and THEN using the simulation to provide structure to an actual review of the actual historical contexts.

Subsequent posts will show the reader how to do this.

Choose and Choose Wisely II

I am always mindful that when I am seriously zealous of any position I advocate that I am probably giving pause to a critical reader who has to wonder if I wave the flag too quickly!

That was why I put up some caution flags in the last post and will  speak to two more today so that when you do jump in you will know both the plusses and the minuses .

Experiential teaching strategies typically take longer instructional time than chalk and talk strategies – They just do. For several reasons; one being that since students typically have not had the chance to experience experiential learning on any regular basis, it takes them a long time to acclimate to the expectations of these kinds of strategies. Then too, as you will learn when we get to designing such strategies, the thoughtful teacher – designer – creator is usually obliged to create simplified models of whatever you intend to teach. For example, if you mean to “simulate” the Middle East crises, it’s darn hard to simplify that to a few short paragraphs!

The pace of the experiential sequence then has to be carefully drawn and most importantly structured for periodic reflection to extract the process thinking for your students. This isn’t done with two snaps of the fingers.

Naturally the objection rises that teachers simply don’t have “all day” or all year to bog down on a given unit or topic. I’d like to argue that point and could if we began to think about the VALUE of the time spent on such strategies and how the skillful teacher could leverage these strategies’ effectiveness in light of the perception of the infernal expectations of paper and pencil examination assessments. But I’ll save that for a rainy blog day and affirm that teachers nonetheless must watch the clock so to speak.

So to use my “Choose and choose wisely” mantra I am advising particularly as you get used to these kinds of strategies to choose and or design such instructional strategies when you know that you can extract the skills and content you need your students to practice and master as you professionally deem appropriate.

You’ve got to know your audience and your audience! That is not a typo. By your audience AND your audience I am speaking to at least two sets of folks who are involved directly  or indirectly when you use strategies that THEY aren’t used to.

The first is your students.

The second is administrators and parents / community.

Not every student is well suited to successfully engage simulation / experiential learning strategies JUST as not every student is well suited to benefit from your conventional chalk and talk teaching strategies to which they are all too often unfortunately submitted. If your class on whole is immature, cannot focus, has not learned how to think collaboratively and / or critically do not jump in with both feet. Instead build in more simple lesson activities so that students begin to acclimate to the pace of and the expectations of constructivist learning. It will come, don’t worry, but you need to think it through.

By taking students’ pulses by the way I don’t necessarily mean that students whom we may shy from challenging because of their learning styles or disabilities are not good candidates for experiential learning. To the contrary! Often, very often, these are exactly the kinds of students who shine in such activities! Money back promise.

Administrators and community can sometimes be obstructionists to experiential learning. Starting with parents who may not have ever had the opportunity to learn in this fashion and who think that all students must or should learn as passive actors, it becomes important for you as teacher to be mindful of this sensibility and to communicate to them how you teach and why this teaching is in their child’s best interest.

Unfortunately, there are administrators like this too. Add in that they may be uncomfortable with classrooms that are student-chatter and may have extra student movement, etc.

The best way(s) to do this begin with your being able to provide a strong instructional rationale about why you are using this strategy; provide expertise in how you will put it in place; AND how you will effectively evaluate the students’ achievement in content and / or skills mastery.

We will keep going down the list in the next blog. By the way, I am running a Serious Games webinar on School Leadership 2.0 next Thursday, January 5th. Google the site for information.

Happy New Year.

When, Where to Use and Not to Use Experiential Teaching and Why Teachers May Choose NOT to Use Them.

Where do you use experiential strategies? How often?

If say “I use them every day!” I am not sure I’d believe you. And if it were true I’d not be sure how effective a teacher you would be and also would be wondering if you weren’t on intravenous when you got home.

These strategies will take a lot out of you!

So before we get all that much more deep into things experiential and particularly into simulation and role play let’s be sure of a couple of obvious and not so obvious tenets:

• Using ANY teaching mode every day is probably not good instructional practice
• Experiential strategies are often difficult to assess using conventional measures
• Experiential teaching strategies typically take longer instructional time than chalk and talk strategies
• You’ve got to know your audience and your audience!
• Some things just are not worthy of or do not lend themselves to simulation and role play strategies
• In order for an experiential strategy to be worthy for a content area or skills domain the teacher must carefully reduce the area’s content of skill to a simple but comprehensive model.
• Teachers need to be comfortable in their new role.

This post will examine the first two points.

• Using ANY teaching method …. Here I confess to some uncertainty. Why not use a method if it works? Am I arguing for using strategies that DON’T work? No, I am arguing for using a variety of strategies whose research or practice seem to bear themselves out as effective for your students. At the risk of wandering into a discussion of computer simulations, I think it is reasonable to assume that even the most engrossing version of the latest computer game (simulations all after all) have to lose their luster over time. And the fact is that other strategies, case studies in social studies for example, are worthy because these strategies require and reinforce skills that students also need to practice and master.
•  I am not proud of what I will also offer next. If you “convert” your  class experiential – enthusiasts, you can bet that they will have a lot of trouble re-converting to the next chalk and talk teacher they have. I told you I wouldn’t be proud of what I would say. But I believe this to be true nonetheless.
• Experiential strategies are often difficult to assess … Also a sad fact I am afraid. Multiple choice exams about the War of 1812 if you could somehow “simulate” the War of 1812 might be problematic unless you somehow could design a really content-laden experience. However, and this is critical, I guarantee, money-back, that they will be able to write any essay, solve any problem you or an outside agency poses to them, by the nature of the engagement and participation you exacted from their involvement.
• I guess the umbrella comment here would be “Choose and choose wisely.”

What Was Experiential Again?

What the word sounds like: experience. That is creating active participatory lesson segments that involve and actuate the participants to have an actual role in the lesson’s outcome.

So that that “Madison Avenue Flim-Flam” lesson so characterized by my long ago Fred Flinstone supervisor was exactly what I am referring to; i.e. “where students have an actual role in the lesson’s outcome.” As reminder, in that lesson, students “tried” a literary character as a traitor for having saved a Tory from tarring and feathering. The students decided Oliver Wiswell’s guilt or innocence! In fact the verdict varied from class to class and made for some good comparisons, I later heard, in the student cafeteria of all places. Think about it, students actually talking about their lessons and learnings over cafeteria pizza.

Experiential also speaks to other learning strategies. The best perhaps being field trips, real and now, thanks to technology, virtual, where students go to Gettysburg; students go to the Statue of Liberty, students go to Ellis Island; go to the local museum.

Think about it. The good teacher will always BRIEF the class on the particulars of the trip. The organizational as in “bring your lunch or money for souvenirs”, and coming and going details for parents done, the good teacher will spend considerable time preparing her class about

- what to look for

- what to enjoy

- how to engage the “content “

That’s called Briefing and I guess a good analogy would be a military mission. Sergeant Smith says ” Take out that machine gun nest.” If the goal is planned properly the soldiers will be given all of what they need to know, the equipment, maps, and strategies necessary for success. Then, if successful, the officers will Debrief to find out what worked, what didn’t work, how to make the next mission better, etc.

Here is another tortured metaphor. My wife always insists that the sink sponge be kept in the same spot out of the sink, NEVER in the sink! I’ve been known to stumble around in the morning before the caffeine kicks in and to spill a glass of orange juice or two. Of course I then look for the sponge to sop up the evidence. The sponge invariably is dried up and kind of “scuzzy” until I begin to put it into the juice to absorb it. Then, I go to the sink, squeeze said sponge in order to wring out its contents in order to soak up more juice.

Think of the debriefing of any experiential activity as where you as teacher-facilitator, must use your students brains-as-sponges, i.e.,  drop / put these into the juices of the teaching experiences so that they transform from dried up scuzzy and spare organs, to soaked, swollen with new learning, concepts, and processes that they have absorbed through the activity.

So in the end, experiential strategies are DOING activities, that purposefully give over at least some of the responsibility for the learning outcome back to the learners.

It’s easier to say what they are not! They are not

- lecture

- workbook

- dittoes

In other words they are NOT what many teachers customarily characterize as their dominant teaching styles.

Next post. When, where to use and not to use experiential teaching and why teachers may choose NOT to use them.

Experiential Learning: The 5 W’s starting with What

Experiential learning is what the word sounds like – experiencing. Do I have to   remind you of platitudes about ” ,,, is the best teacher” and Confucius’ saying that headlines the blog in the first place?

More specifically it speaks to lesson design by a teacher who is first of all largely willing to forego his sage -on-the-stage role in favor of “guide-on-the-side” where he creates opportunities, activities, situations, that force the learner to take charge, somehow, of their learning and even direct it to their own end.

Let’s use an experience to show what it can be. I had a new social studies teacher who was anxious to show me how he had mastered PowerPoint in his teaching. This was a time when using PowerPoint was pretty much state of the art technologically embedded instruction.

Pete had worked hard to find photographs of the most grisly parts of World War II. He had sequenced them well and used them to complement a lecture about the the war’s causes and its many effects.

I watched the students (10th graders). They were attentive for sure. They took some notes here and there and seemed to have appreciated the teacher’s hard work.

After the lesson was done I praised him for taking what was for the time and that school culture a huge instructional risk. Then I asked him how he could have made the PowerPoint an experiential exercise.

Now I took a huge risk here too because I certainly didn’t want to deflate the man’s hard work. But what I also wanted to do was to scrape his creativity crust just enough to think about how he could have given the students the chances to take charge of the lesson experientially.

Thankfully he took the challenge in the spirit of how I presented it. We

- thought about the content of the slides he had created

- considered the types of messages each photograph might convey to the learner

- considered what the original intent of the photographs might have been

- thought about getting beyond the “content” slash facts of the photographs and thought about what concepts and thinking skills we could elicit.

It was Pete who volunteered something like this. “You know, instead of my creating the captions for each slide I could divide the class into pro- Ally and pro-German and have them write captions from each perspective.”

I asked, “Why would you want this to happen?”

He said, “I think I can highlight the content more strongly by having the students interact with each other by comparing the perspectives that they create. If I put them together in groups they could even get more creative!”

So we both agreed to try it and Pete did me one better. The next lesson I observed he provided the primary sources (again photographs and video) about Adolph Hitler and had the students develop and compare narration that was pro Hitler and anti Hitler.

Needless to say it wasn’t the presentations that drove the experiential values of the lesson as such. Instead it was the mighty exchange of different opinions about what they had created against the validity of the historical context.

That my friends is one example of experiential and maybe not even the best example.

Playing Cowboys and Indians in Your Lesson Design

All right.  I promise no more war story-biographies in the foreseeable future of this blog. But let me remind you that the FIRST post invited you to send me your lesson and unit design ideas and that is the mission and purpose of this blog: That we form a community of creators! That we empower each other to settle for nothing less than quality, creative, highly involving, teaching that is also effective.

By effective, let’s face it, nowadays a lesson or a unit has to have value on many levels. For sure, where possible, we want the lesson to be “fun” and involving. But  fun and involvement doesn’t cut it anymore if we can’t link the time spent and the energy invested to showing that the kids have taken something educationally valuable from it.

Some of you and probably I would and could rail against the A word as in accountability. But I would say “bring on the accountability”. I can show how my kids can read, write, think, problem solve, and decide better from their interaction with my lessons .

Good teaching brings good scores any way you want to measure.

And that brings me back to Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, or House, or Monopoly.

Think about it. Although the reference to Cowboys and Indians may date me a little I can offer up perhaps more timely analogies, like say, playing Star Wars, or playing superheroes.

Or playing virtually ANY video game.

Think about it. “Play” is almost always a modified or simplified model of reality. We can’t reproduce the situation totally, so we simplify it so we can understand it and so we can learn from it.

And that is where experiential learning comes in for much more exploration. The next post will develop the rationale for creating experiential, constructivist lesson strategies and then we can begin to co-develop some lessons of like mind.

Send me your ideas and I will help you.

Madison Avenue Flim Flam???!!!

I promised I would minimize the war story biography entries. Just one more! And you will see why I am including it!

Roll the clock forward a few years later. By now, I had begun to hit a stride that had become very successful. Simply put I had discovered and begun to refine simulation and role-play as the main weapon in my instructional arsenal.

Weapon connotes an us-versus-them metaphor doesn’t it? I regret that. What I mean is that these kinds of instructional strategies, best umbrella-ed under the category of EXPERIENTIAL were just flat out so very effective.

By effective I mean I could engage most any learner any time to actively participate in the learning at hand. I had given a measure of ownership / empowerment to even the poorest academically prepared student to feel success in mastering material and in transferring their learning into some serious skills building too.

How I got there and how I got even better at it may be discussed in future posts. If you are interested in learning and knowing more now, go to http://www.activelearningconsult.com for more. However my intent in this post is to show you how antediluvian leadership, encrusted mental models about teaching and learning, and ignorance of basic learning theory by so-called supervisors, can twist together to strangle creative teaching. That is, if the creative teacher, even at risk for his job, will not actively resist neo-fascist supervision.

If you are a new teacher, particularly a new social studies teacher I will strongly advise that you work backwards in your unit design. Notice I deliberately said unit design and not lesson design. You see, lessons should build toward something or somethings so that the culminating activities of a solid unit will have become the sum of the lessons that built toward it.

Another way to understand this point is the good old fashioned thinking model, Bloom’s Taxonomy; http://www.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm

The conventional wisdom was that you taught from the bottom up. You know, from the Knowledge / Recall spit-back level in order to perhaps, perhaps, elevate students’ thinking by having them ultimately assess some aspect of the lesson or unit. I’d contend that teachers more often than not would bog down on the rote -spit – up learning and rarely get to anything terribly complex or for that matter interesting. Take a look at the SYNTHESIS, or the EVALUATION levels: “Design”, “Put together”, “Create”, “Decide about” ,”Judge”.

Well stop for a moment and think about those higher level verbs …. Don’t they suggest some really interesting lesson activities?

I think they do. I know they do. And more importantly, with a backwards FROM Higher Order Thinking unit design DOWN To Lower Order Thinking lesson design the effective teacher actually justifies  to her students the necessity for the spit-back or is it spit-up lower level lessons in the first place.

So with this brief sermonette as a back drop, understand that when I planned for any unit and when I since worked with teachers anywhere I have them create the most engaging, interesting, motivating, end-activity (grounded in Higher Order Thinking Skills) first and then have them break down and identify the lesson series that will enable their children to practice and master the content and skills they need to have to make the end-unit activity work.

And with that brief sermonette in hand, back to my story:

I was casting around for a way to enable my seventh graders to peel back the dynamics of the American Revolution and to help them recognize that not every colonist embraced its causes. I found a novel, “Rabble in Arms” by Roberts, written in the 40′s that dealt with the conflicts between the Tories and the Patriots. One chapter is about a young Patriot, Oliver Wiswell, who comes upon a mob of Patriots about to tar and feather a Tory.

Tarring and feathering was not a cute hazing activity. It was a fearful experience and often a mortal one. In this story, Wiswell rescues the Tory, brings him to his home, and nurses him back to health.

When I introduced this reading, I asked if one helped an “enemy” was one automatically a traitor? This question led to a lively exchange. I invited the students, a basic, heterogeneously group class by the way, to read the chapter and decide if Oliver Wiswell was a traitor for rescuing the the Tory.

I fast forwarded. We imagined that the Revolution was over and won. And that the winning Patriots, eager to exact revenge on their Tory counterparts, have decided to put Wiswell on trial for treason for having rescued a hated Tory.

We took the characters from the chapter, and assigned these to students. I assigned Defense and Prosecuting lawyers. I assigned a judge and we chose jurors to hear the case.

Students spent several days anticipating questions and cross-examining questions they might be asked. I helped the attorneys create opening and closing statements and suggested questions they may ask. In other words we prepared for a full -fledged trial.

It took I think about a week to pull it all together. In the midst of this I was notified that the High School Social Studies Chair was going to be in to observe a lesson. You guessed it. Of course I invited him to see the trial of Oliver Wiswell lesson.

He entered the class and sat in the back. I introduced the lesson very briefly. I put the Constitutional definition of treason on the board, turned to my “judge” and told him to run the trial.

It was a wonderful thing to see. The kids ran the whole lesson from front to back. Opening statements, questions, cross-questioning, summaries, evidence, all produced by the students. About five minutes before lesson’s end, they had concluded the trial portion. The judge turned to the jurors and we watched them “deliberate” against the treason definition they had gotten.

In truth I don’t remember what they decided! I do remember the verdict was announced about 30 seconds before the period bell sounded. I stood up, thanked the class and assigned a homework task where they had to identify the key reasons why they thought Wiswell was or was not a traitor. The students left arguing and exchanging among each other.

It was a classic. The kids had the content down. They used all manners of skills and reasoning. They “DECIDED”, one of the classic evaluation level verbs in the Bloom’s Taxonomy.

I was pretty proud of myself and went up to the Chair expecting to be anointed as the next John Dewey. The Chair peered at me over his glasses. I noticed that he had taken virtually no notes. He said “Do you do these kinds of lessons often?”

Stupid, as in yours truly eagerly volunteered “Yes!”

Whereupon he said that this was not a lesson. This was “s—t” and that this sort of Madison Avenue film-flam was the kind of teaching he abhorred. And he marched off.

Needless to say his observation said what I have noted above with the salt taken out. But the salt in my teaching sensibilities only burned and burned. In fact I refused to sign the observation. This was pretty nervy in those days and remember that I was non-tenured.

But I refused to agree that this was a bad lesson! It was a great lesson. It was all of what great lessons are supposed to be. And it was an effective one.

In the end, after much, much arguing the Chair grudgingly acknowledged the possibility that the techniques involved might in fact have positive effects on student learning. And what his major problem was, aside from not understanding experiential strategies were in the first place, was that he just did not know HOW to observe this lesson! After all I wasn’t in the front of the room lecturing and droning. I barely opened my mouth! The quality of the student-run activity was the sum of my prodigious efforts to facilitate their learning!

I never forgot that when I became a Chair myself!

And the lessons to be taken from this will be in the next post(s).