If you are reading this blog, I am going to guess you aren’t here for the fancy, elaborate Texas history lessons…or at least I hope you aren’t. If you are, I’m afraid you are going to be disappointed.
I love the history of our state. I’m basically a giant, ridiculous history nerd. This presents a huge problem for me because I want to give history the time and effort it deserves, but I also don’t want to short my students in writing.
Like most things in teaching, it comes down to priorities. What is the most important thing I can give my students to help them flourish in life long-term? The answer to that for me, is to focus on writing.
In order to do that, I move as much as I can out to a center. I have three main types of centers: videos, close reading/writing passages, and projects. I try to design centers that take between 15 and 20 minutes.
Videos:
When I put my videos in a center, I usually use Edpuzzle. If you are not familiar with Edpuzzle, you need to be. You can take videos from pretty much anywhere and assign them to your students. There are so many benefits. You don’t have to worry about ads. If the video is too long or short you can cut it down. If you want to use the video, but add our own lesson, you can do a voice over. Best of all, you assign questions for the students to answer as they watch . This is my favorite way to make them pay attention. Another perk is you can remove the ability to fast-forward, which means they have to watch the WHOLE thing. I do also often ask students to take notes in various formats as they watch to use in our class discussions.
Close reading/writing passages:
Although I more often use these in my small group lesson, I also put some in centers. The ones I usually put there are pulled from old history books, old state testing passages, and passages I have written myself. When I put those in a center, I pair low readers with higher readers or load them in Google Classroom and use Google Read/Write to allow the students to have the passage read to them. Again, I usually ask the students to take notes. When they take notes, I always try to make the format quick enough that even students that struggle can get them done quickly.
Projects:
I also put projects in centers. This is especially effective at the end of the unit. Some projects are for extension/review. Others are meant as an assessment. Either way, I divide the tasks in the project up so that students can do a little each day while I work with small groups. I always try to have a model project for them to look at and do a check in each day to answer questions/redirect off-the-rail projects before moving to small groups.
Talking About What They Learned:
One thing that eases my guilt about social studies centers is taking a little bit of time to talk about what they are learning, even if it’s only a couple of minutes.
Think-Pair-Share: The students love talking to their partners about what they learned. I tell them when they do their notes that their notes will be their opportunity to “think” before they meet with partners. It really helps if you leave the notes from centers a little open-ended. For example, when you are doing Texas Explorers, you could ask them to write down three-five interesting facts about each explorer. When they meet with their pair, they love to share what they personally found interesting. After sharing with their partner, I use my cold-call sticks to call on a few students to share out to the class.
Verbal Ticket Out: If I don’t have time for a formal think-pair-share, I do a verbal ticket out. Whatever I would have asked partners to discuss, I simply ask the whole class. As they leave, they must answer the question. I might say, “What do you want to remember about the Battle of Gonzales?” Again, this works better if you ask an open-ended question in the notes to begin with.
Pop-Up Debates: This is my favorite, but it does take more time. I love to do this towards the end of a unit. If you haven’t done this before, I highly recommend it. We had our first one this week. We just finished learning about the regions of Texas, so the students had to choose the region they liked best and explain why. The best way to learn how to do this is to explore Dave Stuart Jr.’s blog. Just put pop-up debate in the search box. He also just came out with an excellent book this summer that explains everything you would ever want to know about this format AND a lot of other great ideas for ELAR. Last year was my first year using the debates in class. I think they really helped us improve our expository essays. So many of the skills we talked about during the debates directly correlated to improving our writing.
Teaching Without Twitching 