Seneca Falls, the Women's Movement, and Tying It All Together with Essential Questions

What gets me really excited about teaching history is when I flip through my files, notes, and old worksheets and suddenly get an epiphany about how it all connects together. It is not clear who first said, "history is just one damned thing after another," but the quip could not be more apt to describe how history class can seem to our students if we don't do a better job of showing them these connections.

The period of the 1820s through the Civil War can be especially prone to this problem: Andrew Jackson, nullification & states' rights, Indian Removal, the invention of the cotton gin, Clay's American system, the Missouri Compromise, Second Great Awakening, abolitionism, Seneca Falls, and on and on. The content is extensive.

But as I observed a student teacher's lesson on the cotton gin, and then wrote my post on the market economy, and then about slavery, and then Indian removal, and then opened my folder about the women's movement and Seneca Falls convention in 1848, I came across this scribble on some old notes of mine:

shift from colonial economy ----> industrial economy----> concept of "separate spheres"

And I remembered how all these topics fit together and how important it is to SHOW students that. Or ideally, have them figure it out for themselves.

Using essential questions helps. I like to post a "question of the day" on the board every day. If you do this for all your lessons, you can them have students try to link them all together. History will then be more like "one thing leads to another." In other words, we have to explicitly teach students the historian's tool of CAUSE AND EFFECT. (Although the particular example I'm discussing in this post is more relational than causal, I think.)

There is the risk of oversimplifying, of course. What causes something else to happen is a complex process and not always clear. But helping students understand that one event in history can impact another is worth teaching, even at the risk of sometimes oversimplifying.

Let me elaborate on that. It occurred to me the other day that as I use essential questions to shape lessons and units, they can also be used to shape an ENTIRE SEMESTER.  I have a strong commitment to teaching U.S. history as a narrative, even as I work hard to reveal the messiness and complications of the narrative and alternative points of view.  So, when thinking about the first half of U.S. history, the narrative can follow a path of creating a democratic nation, with an emphasis on economic liberty that will be torn apart by Civil War and have to put itself back together again. An oversimplification? Probably. But keeping a central story line can help us avoid the problem of coverage. We cannot cover everything in U.S. history. So if we focus on Big Ideas, a central narrative, essential questions--or whatever you prefer to call it--we can arrange the curriculum in a way that allows students to make these connections.

One teacher I spoke to recently had a little sign that read "Civil War" on it, and all throughout first semester, he occasionally waves it up in the air when something comes up that shows the splintering of North and South. Is this too simplistic? Maybe. Does it overemphasize the "irrepressible conflict" view of the Civil War? Perhaps. But we can't argue with the fact the Civil War DID HAPPEN. So pointing out to students where we can see signs of the Civil War all the way back in the events of the 1770s or 1790s or 1830s can be really effective in helping students see the big picture. Too often they cannot see the forest through the trees.

So how to connect some of the topics of the antebellum period? As a summative exercise after some of these lessons, I might use a drawing like the one below. I think you could use this in a variety of ways. I would NOT hand it out to students. But I might use an old fashioned chalk board and start with one of the circles. And you could pass out index cards to students that had the phrase of the other circles. Other students would be in charge of the arrows. See if the students can create something that looks like this drawing, either on the board, or in their notes. Or on ipads.

So why is this post all about these connections? What about the women's movement and Seneca Falls?

One of the dangers with focusing too much on the Civil War is that we can overemphasize political history and leave out other good stories. But the story of the women's movement is going to continue into second semester. Eventually, you are going to get to the 19th amendment and the 1970s and ERA, right? And how can you teach those things if you don't establish the back story? (Another reason why I love backstoryradio.org! You've got to check this out. I learn so much from these podcasts!)

But the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 fits beautifully into an antebellum unit. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton getting dissed at the World Antislavery Convention in London. The connections between rights for African Americans and women. (Which will come up again and again, right? The connection between the passage of the 15th amendment and the suffrage movement and then again in the 1970s, when the women's movement follows the civil rights movement).

Lesson Ideas and Materials

And then, of course, you have Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. (See this article that claims Lincoln never said that line about the little lady who started the big war. Isn't it a bummer when we find out those great lines were never actually said? e.g., Jackson, "Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" is another one. Sigh....)

My former colleague (and one of the hardest working teachers I know) Janet Mark was the one who helped our whole U.S. history team do a better job of integrating the study of American women into U.S. history. She introduced me to using an excerpt from chapter 9 of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a way to combine the concept of separate spheres, slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. I have adapted some of her excellent materials below:

• In class activity for teaching the concept of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity.
• See here for questions on UTC you can use with students. I like having them discuss the questions, rather than write them out for homework. To get them to read it ahead of time, I would ask them to turn in at least three examples or underline examples in the text of separate spheres. There are lots of them in this chapter.
• See here for commentary on chapter 9 of the book from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.
• Resources on the cult of domesticity from the National Humanities Center.
• And don't forget Stowe's famous sister, Catherine Beecher. You can build a fascinating lesson around a discussion comparing Catharine Beecher's views and those of Angela Grimke and the ideas embedded in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Use this document with students. You could spend an entire period on this, as it raises the fundamental question of whether men and women are different from each other. Each author argued deeply in support of women's power and influence, but from a completely different place. Beecher fundamentally believes that women and men are naturally different from men. This argument is a precursor to the Supreme Court's decision in Muller v Oregon in 1907.  And the argument goes a long way towards explaining why the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments was not widely supported, and why women would not get the right to vote until 1920. (For more on this, see the last resource in this post.)

Teacher Materials for Using the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments:

• See here for a  side-by-side comparison of the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments.
• See here for a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments that I like because I have numbered each of the grievances for easy reference.
• See here for a similar version that I have edited and abbreviated for middle school students and/or students with lower reading skills. Note that it is still rather complicated, but you can either go over it and explain the confusing parts, or I would propose that students can still get the basic idea even if they don't understand every word.
• See here for a worksheet students can use to take notes and understand the document. Adapted from Janet Mark.

Other places to visit on the web:

• Not yet a brick-and-mortar museum, the National Women's History Museum has some good resources, though they have had some negative press about their level of scholarship.
• The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center - has teacher resources, lessons, primary resources, and sponsors a writing competition for students writing on issues of social justice.
• Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia has created a multimedia exhibit about Uncle Tom's Cabin and its place in American Culture. There are some impressive resources to be found here. Check out this page for information about how abolitionism led to the women's movement. And look here for a letter from Angelina Grimke to Catharine Beecher on what was wrong with the idea of colonizing freed slaves in Africa.
• Indiana and Purdue Universities have created a site devoted to Abolitionism.
• For a short, readable article about the use of essential questions in the history classroom, see Heather Lattimer, "Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom," Social Education, 72, (6) 2008, pp. 326-329. If you are a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) member, you can access it online in their publication archives.
• It may be worth a membership to NCSS just to read this article in their publication archives: Dave Neumann, "A Different Way of Viewing History Teaching: Balancing Competing Intellectual Challenges," Social Education, 74 (4), 2010, pp. 184-188. I thought of it because I recall he uses the topic of whether men and women are fundamentally different as a hook in a lesson on women in the antebellum era. But the whole article is worth reading because he discusses three fundamental challenges in the teaching of history. For each of the three, he refers to the antebellum period. The three include (1) the problem of understanding the past in context while making it relevant in the present; (2) the problem of scale: historical trends become significant as part of larger trends, but gain texture and interest when examined in detail; and (3) exceptional individuals shape history in important ways (e.g. Frederick Douglass) but the experiences of most people differ from those exceptional people (e.g. most African Americans in the 19th century).

8 Ideas for Teaching the Declaration of Independence: Text, Storytelling and Long-term Significance

One of the criticisms about the Common Core as it applies to the teaching of history is that the standards emphasize reading of texts over understanding of context. Thoughtful implementation of the standards should minimize this problem, but it is a fair criticism. Good history teaching should always be about the context of the sources, whether primary or secondary. Even the first standard, which is very text-based, refers to context. Note what I have italicized in this standard, below:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.1  

Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.

So yes, students should read the text.  They should read the actual Declaration of Independence--even though the language is challenging-- and not just read about it. Middle schoolers, too, not just high school students.

But, as my dear friend and former colleague used to tell me over and over again when I was a beginning teacher and frantic about what I should teach tomorrow...

Tell them a story….

So here is your chance.

I am not advocating that history teachers go back to the “sage on the stage,” style of teaching that is so often criticized. But a recent rewatching of Robin Williams's performance in Dead Poet's Society reminds me that there is merit to this approach when used effectively and in moderation. Because one thing that teachers can do that our textbooks and Google cannot is tell a great story. (Perhaps not as well as Robin Williams, but standards for dramatic performance for the screen are different from those of the classroom). Great stories are what makes Ken Burns's documentaries so compelling and why we love to show the film Glory in the classroom. The history comes alive because it is about human beings. This is why when I find a great sentence, or paragraph or chapter in a narrative-style history book or a first-person account of an historic event, I like to read it aloud or have students read it aloud. There is power in oral storytelling that cannot be recreated in private reading.

So...

What to teach when teaching about the Declaration of Independence idea #1:Tell them a story...

That Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both served on the committee responsible for writing the declaration, died on the same day which happened to be July 4, 1826--the 50th anniversary of Declaration is just too good to be true.  Except that it is true.  Use this story to bookend your lesson.  Use it as your seductive introduction.  Use it to tie everything up at the end of your lesson.  Where to find more info on this:

Click here for the basic story.

Click here for some interesting observations about why they might have both died on the same day.

Click here for some information on the friendship and enmity of Adams and Jefferson.

Make it even better by going on to discuss Jefferson’s views on the legacy of the Declaration. (see ideas #2, 6 & 7 below)

Idea #2: Jefferson’s view of what the Declaration of Independence was about.

See the section on Jefferson’s legacy on the Library of Congress website, and then look at the 3rd document which you can read more fully here. A year before his death, Jefferson wrote, in a letter to Henry Lee, that the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to NOT to say something new or revolutionary, but, “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take."

You could start your lesson with that idea and then have students read the document to see for themselves the “terms so plain.”

Except, of course, 18th century language is not at all so plain for 21st century students.  So...

Idea #3: Reading the Text

Help students understand the organization behind the Declaration: this is the part of the lesson where you really delve into The Text. This will meet Common Core Standards. Here is the handout I used most recently with seventh graders. (Yes, it was a challenge for them, and yes, they rose to the challenge. It will work nicely for high school students, too.)

a. intro paragraphs - always a good idea to work through these, “translating” the document into language they understand.

b. the reasons - useful to give students a copy of the Declaration on which they can take notes. I like to have them number all 27 of the grievances (it takes only a minute) and then students can see how each of the 27 complaints matches up to an actual event they have studied. You don’t need to go through all 27 of them, but pointing out a few examples will help them see, oh yeah, we talked about the quartering act and here it is in grievance #14.

c. we have done everything we can - go through the next 2 paragraphs- what have the colonists done?

d. therefore, we are going to declare independence

For a fun way to explain the structure of the Declaration, try explaining the Declaration of Independence as a breakup letter. This is very nicely done by a couple of teachers here from teachingchannel.org. Worth a look.

Idea #4. Clear up a few misconceptions.

The website below does a great job of explaining why July 4 is a national holiday, even though independence was voted on by the Continental Congress on July 2, and it wasn’t even signed by everyone until August.

http://www.constitutionfacts.com/us-declaration-of-independence/fourth-of-july/

(Incidentally, this is a great website for a lot of things about the Declaration and the Constitution--two key American documents that students (and adults) too often confuse.

Idea #5: Slavery, the Elephant in the Room

One of the key reasons July 4 is the date associated with the Declaration and not July 2 is that Congress debated some of the clauses in it between those dates.  During that time, the clause blaming King George for slavery was omitted. This is a Pretty Big Deal, if you ask me. Of course, students know that in a few months you will get to the Civil War, but they may not realize that the seeds can be found right here.

Below is the omitted paragraph:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incure miserable death in their transportation hither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. [determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,] he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce [determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold]: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

(You can also have students examine a complete rough draft of the Declaration.)

You could have an interesting discussion with students about the contradiction between the most famous lines of the Declaration, “that all men are created equal” being so completely at odds with the decision to omit slavery.  There is a nice analysis of this at the University of Richmond’s History Engine website. Check it out here.  You could start by seeing if students could figure out on their own why the grievance about slavery was omitted.  Other questions: to what extent does this diminish the significance of the Declaration of Independence? Does it make it “hypocritical”? Or is that ahistorical to think about it that way?  Is it possible for a document to foment revolution in people’s thinking, even if the full expression of that idea (equality) doesn’t come about for another 100 years? or more?

For an elaborate lesson plan that expands this idea to a 3-4 day lesson, check out this lesson from the Library of Congress website.  It has students conducting a trial of Jefferson around the use of the phrase “all men are created equal” and slavery: was it compromise or was it hypocrisy? I’m not sure I would take 3-4 days to do this, but it is worth checking out.  The topic lends itself well to helping students understand the problem of presentism in the study of history: judging slavery and equal rights in the 18th century with our 21st century standards is problematic. Be sure to check out the primary sources that have been selected for this activity.  You can find those here, even if you don’t want to use the whole lesson.

Idea #6: The legacy of the Declaration: What it means to future generations

Jefferson was invited by Roger Weightman, the chairman of a proposed Independence Day celebration in Washington to be attend the ceremonies.  In his response, Jefferson declined the invitation due to his poor health.  It is the last existing letter he ever wrote.  It was dated June 24, 1826, less than two weeks before his death.  In it he offers his view of what the 4th of July should come to mean.

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.  That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.  All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.  The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.  These are the grounds of hope for others.  For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

You can read the whole letter here. Also, note that this letter was selected as one of the 50 Core Documents, along with the Declaration itself, which is a project of TeachingAmericanHistory.org. Read about that here.

What to do with this quotation? I’d read it aloud--it’s so beautifully put. Of course, not every student will understand every word, but you can work on that by cutting it a bit, explaining a few vocabulary words, giving them the document to follow along with--one with vocab explained in the margins.  And then you could discuss what the main idea of the passage is? What does Jefferson believe is important about the Declaration 50 years later? How does that compare/contrast with what we believe is important about it now?

When I read it aloud to my seventh graders, I edited it as follows and read aloud:

“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. . . .These are the grounds of hope for others.  For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”

And then (if you have 120 minute long periods or a few days…I never said you should try to cram all of these ideas into one 45 minute period.) you can go to...

Idea #7: What the Declaration means to the rest of the world: Was Jefferson right? Would the Declaration become “a signal of arousing men (and women) to burst the chains"?

Distinguish between the immediate historic purpose of the Declaration: an explanation of why the Colonies were declaring their independence and the larger, future significance: that the words would become an inspiration for oppressed peoples around the world. You can have students look briefly or in more depth at documents that echoed the Declaration of Independence

such as:

• the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789
• the Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls, 1848 (See here for a lesson from the Gilder Lehrman Institute about this that might be more appropriate when you get to the 1840s). And see here for some teacher materials that I put together on Seneca Falls.
• Frederick Douglass's famous speech from July 5, 1852, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
• the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948
• See this essay, “The Declaration of Independence in Global Perspective” on the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website. The author, David Armitage (professor of history at Harvard) wrote an updated version of this essay in the Wall Street Journal. That essay does an excellent job of explaining (for teachers, not students) the difference between the Declaration’s assertion of popular sovereignty and the most famous statement about the rights of the individual. You can read it here.
• Click here for a great story about Ho Chi Minh’s use of the Declaration in working for Vietnamese independence from France.

Idea #8: Don't Forget to Make it Human

And lastly, in the interest of making history a study of real people, most students (I always get a little nervous when I say “most,” perhaps safer to say “many”?) know that Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence. If you want more background on the red-headed author, you can find lots at the Monticello website.

And if you want to have a little fun with John Hancock’s famous signature, click here for some odd details. Unfortunately, the story about Hancock signing his name so big so that the King could read it without his spectacles does not seem to be true. See here and here. You’ll have to stick with the Adams-Jefferson story.

July 2017 update:
Last but not least, check out another post I did on "Patriotism for Grown-ups." It is a little dated now, but there are still some good links worth checking out within it.

The First "Half" of U.S. History: How to Get through Reconstruction by the End of the Year/First Semester

While Keeping in Mind How to Make It Meaningful for Students

This post is for all of you who struggle to get through Reconstruction by either the end of 1st semester (for those who teach high school and/or U.S. history in one year) or the end of the year (for those who, like me this year, teach the first "half" of U.S. history in one year in middle school.

My initial inspiration for this post was from a comment someone made on an earlier post of mine, Second Semester & the Importance of a Good Syllabus: How to Help Students Find Meaning in U.S. History and a post this January by Glenn Wiebe on his excellent blog, History Tech, What Should Your Kids Know?  In that post, he raised a question I was dealing with at the time, how much time should I spend on the War of 1812? And if we have to make choices as history teachers, how do we compare the significance of the War of 1812 to Reconstruction?

Last year, I spent approximately 5 days on the War of 1812.  A week.  Kind of a lot.  Part of the problem was I was interrupted by winter break.  (The post-winter break part focused on long term results of the war, rather than the war itself, and I used it as a segue to Andrew Jackson).  I spent 10 days on Reconstruction.  To me, this ratio seems a bit off, given the importance of Reconstruction towards an understanding of the Civil Rights movement and race relations today.

My point is not to debate the number of days one should spend on the War of 1812 vs. Reconstruction.  My point is that we DO need to think about what is most significant in the study of U.S. history and how best to incorporate it into our plans for the school year.  In Glenn Wiebe's post, he links to an article, "What Every American Should Know," from The Aspen Institute that raises the issues brought up by E.D. Hirsch in 1987 that helped fuel the flames of the "culture wars." (See also this article by Eric Liu in the Atlantic Monthly).  They are both worth a read, as they raise the most important question our students ask:

After reading these articles, think about what you teach.  To what extent are these things that every American should know? Why? If you can answer those questions, think about how that can transform your teaching, not to mention your crowded syllabus.  Consider the things that students really don't need to know.  Because you're going to have to make cuts.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, the only way to "cover" U.S. history is to make tough choices.  These are my guidelines:

1. You cannot, nor should not, try to teach everything.
2. The textbook can help guide you, but textbooks DO try to cover EVERYTHING, so you can't rely on the textbook to make all the choices for you.  This might mean that you skip whole chapters or even units in the textbook, replacing them with other resources.
3. You need to decide where you want to end and work backwards, so you don't find yourself cramming the Civil War into the last two weeks of school.  

The above are overall guidelines.  But there are many other things to take into consideration.  Most importantly, does your syllabus "tell a story"? Does each lesson lead logically to the next and does each unit lead logically to the next? Does each unit have a major topic/central issue/essential question? Or is just "Unit 4" because that's what comes next in the textbook? This is why you should read the articles I mentioned above.  This is what makes the difference between history that is "one damn thing after another" vs. history that helps students understand how our past shapes our world today.

In a few paragraphs, I will include a link to the calendar of what I taught every day this past school year.  It is different from the calendar with which I began the year.  That one contemplated less time on the American Revolution and the War of 1812, but more on the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Like all of you, I ran out of time and other things took longer than I thought.  You will also see in my calendar all our institute days, holidays and testing days.  These impact how and when we teach certain topics. For example, do you really want to start a new unit the day before a break? Perhaps it is better to add another day into the previous unit.  What do you teach on days when students will have been PARCC testing all morning?  Do you allow time for reviewing in class before a test?  And what does one teach on a day when half the class is out on a orchestra trip to St. Louis? Those are good days to either allow students "catch up" time to complete homework or to do something "extra"--like on May 20, when I did a lesson on Civil War music.

Sometimes you don't finish things because real life intrudes: I spent a good chunk of the day on November 16 discussing the shootings in Paris.  September 11th fell on a Friday this year, and so I decided to spend the day discussing that.  (See this post for those resources.)  Next year September 11 falls on a Sunday.  So maybe I will teach about it on the following Monday.  Or not at all.  Not sure yet.

So below is the link to my calendar, warts and all.  I include it in hopes that it might help others formulate a plan for the year.

Lauren Brown's 2015-2016 syllabus

Below are some other issues to consider when planning out the school year:  

• How are you going to start the year? I note that I spent 4 days on Columbus.  I chose to do that because I really liked the lessons, and they seemed to be a good way to introduce some overall themes we would come back to throughout the year.  But it was a bit of a time suck.  Perhaps I would reconsider this to buy more time later in the year.  Perhaps I could find a way to introduce those same themes using the content of the American Revolution instead. 
• What do YOU especially like to teach and what are you especially knowledgeable about? The best way to engage students is if you yourself are engaged.  I have a special interest in the problem of slavery in American history and my syllabus reflects that.  My syllabus also reflects areas of weakness.  U.S. policies and the attitudes of white Americans regarding Native Americans is incredibly important.  I have struggled for years about how to better include this in my curriculum with little success.  You will see in my syllabus that there is not nearly enough there.  Obviously, to do so, would require that I cut elsewhere.  These are cuts worth making, but I haven't figured it out yet.
• Sometimes I left things out because I couldn't figure out any meaningful way to incorporate them into a larger "story" or unit.  So while I mentioned Irish immigration a few times in passing, the whole topic of immigration in this first half of U.S. history was not something we covered.  Things like the Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the Temperance movement and other reforms also hit the cutting room floor.  We did spend time on the reform movements of women's rights and abolitionism.  And students will spend time on immigration in 8th grade (the second "half" of U.S. history).  But just because the textbook mentions the Second Great Awakening doesn't mean that I have to.  Other times, I sort of "threw things in" that probably should have been left out.  For example, I spent January 14 on the Marshall Court.  In hindsight, I'm not sure that a day on the Marshall Court did justice (no pun intended) to the topic.  While it "fits" in terms of growth and expansion and how the decisions of the Marshall Court, I think in the future I would either need to spend a few more days on it in order to make it more meaningful, or cut it out entirely. 
• We have to consider the impact of things like parent-teacher conferences, standardized testing, field trips, the days immediately before and after school vacations, and our own personal lives.  One wouldn't know from looking at my syllabus why I have 3 Fridays in December titled "First Amendment Fridays."  This came about because, as I wrestled with the newness of classroom teaching after years out of the classroom, I occasionally struggled with figuring out how long it would take to successfully teach topics to 7th graders that I had been used to teaching to 11th graders (more on the specifics of that in this post for MiddleWeb.com).  So when I realized I was running out of time, I postponed some of the details of the First Amendment for after the Constitution test.  (This was also helpful when, toward the end of the unit, I fell and broke 2 ribs and had to miss a few days of school!) The advantage of this series of "First Amendment Fridays" also revealed itself as we got closer to winter break and my students got a little restless.  Having "fun" activities for Fridays in December made a lot of sense on a practical level.  The students liked it so much, I did the same at the very end of the school year with a series of "Fourteenth Amendment Fridays" and "The Fourteenth Amendment Today Tuesday" on the 2nd to last day of school.   
• Sometimes--perhaps especially so in middle school--things take more time because we also have to focus on skills, not just content.  I spent a lot of class time on the Mexican War because we did a DBQ from the DBQ Project on "Was the United States Justified in Going to War with Mexico?" Spending more time developing these skills earlier in the year would have made this project easier for my students.  It wouldn't necessarily save time, but it would better redistribute the time.

Additional resources:

• Eric Lui, "How to Be American: Why cultivating a shared cultural core is more important than ever--and why such a project serves progressive ends."
• whateveryamericanshouldknow.org - the website/project that developed from the essay above.  I haven't figured out how, but I think one could do something really interesting with this website with students...have students come up with their own lists? Find a way to do this as a summative activity at the end of each unit, or the year? If you have ideas, please comment.
• I have earlier mentioned how helpful I have found James Loewen's advice about how to plan out a school year.  You can read it for yourself in chapter 1, "The Tyranny of Coverage," in James W. Loewen's, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History.  It is well worth a read.
• An earlier post I wrote about the new APUSH standards that considers what we mean when our curriculum should cover such-and-such or so-and-so.

Also, see my previous posts about the challenges of unit planning:

• The Practical Problem of Coverage, or How to get past WWII by May
• A Method for How to Plan a Unit Using Essential Questions: Colonial America
• The New Nation: the Problems & Pitfalls of a Challenging Period in American History
• Seneca Falls, the Women's Movement, and Tying It All Together with Essential Questions
• How to Handle the Post-Civil War/Reconstruction Period
• Progressivism: Big Ideas for Beginning Your Unit
• The US Enters the World Stage: Shift in US Foreign Policy, 1890-1920
• How to End the Year...Making Sense out of the Seventies to the Present

Story Time: Reading Aloud in History Class

I started reading aloud to my students from time to time for two key reasons:

1.  I liked doing it, which was reinforced by the fact that they seemed to enjoy it.

2. Practical reasons. There were longer things I wanted them to read, but for one reason or another I didn't want to assign for homework. 

You might wonder why I wouldn't have students take turns reading. And the answer is that sometimes I do. There are students who really love reading aloud. Some of them are good at it, and some are not. I admit, that there are times when I will call on the "good readers" because I don't have time for the slower readers. But I will also make times for all to read who choose to. When I do that, I will usually just go around the room in order. I always allow a student to pass. I don't see the point in forcing a student who really prefers not to read. 

But for longer readings, especially of the narrative/story type, I simply loathe having students read aloud. I hated it as a student and I dislike it as a teacher. I found my reasons well summarized in a Edutopia article, 11 Alternatives to "Round Robin" (and "Popcorn") Reading. Here is an excerpt from that:

Round Robin Reading . . .

• Stigmatizes poor readers. Imagine the terror that English-language learners and struggling readers face when made to read in front of an entire class.

• Weakens comprehension. Listening to a peer orally read too slowly, too fast, or too haltingly weakens learners' comprehension -- a problem exacerbated by turn-taking interruptions. 

• Sabotages fluency and pronunciation. Struggling readers model poor fluency skills and pronunciation. When instructors correct errors, fluency is further compromised.

The article goes on to list 11 alternatives to having students take turns reading aloud. I have mixed thoughts on some of the 11 alternatives. But one of them is having the teacher read aloud. 

If you want to delve into why round robin/popcorn reading is not such a great technique, check out the articles below.

• 5 Teaching Practices I'm Kicking to the Curb - from one of my favorite blogs, Cult of Pedagogy, by Jennifer Gonzalez. One of the 5 practices she mentions is Round Robin/Popcorn reading. The others are worth reading about, too.
• What's Really Wrong with Round Robin Reading? - from the International Literacy Association
• Just Say "No" to Popcorn Reading

So why should you read aloud? One of the best authorities on this topic is Jim Trelease. I first became acquainted with his work after I had my own children. I was in the children's library with my two toddlers and saw Trelease's book, The Read-Aloud Handbook on display. I was hooked. You can read a brief overview of his work in this brochure. Also check out the New York Public Library's discussion of the book for more info.

Another benefit of reading aloud is it might convince students to read more from whatever it is that you have chosen. I have had students ask to borrow my book afterwards or show me that they bought their own copy of the book. I haven't followed up to know whether or not they actually have read it, but this is an encouraging first step.

Alright, so hopefully now you are convinced that this is something you should be doing. What should you read?