Science and History met together. Our focus was on how we teach students to use evidence to support their claims/statements/explanations. Dan shared a lesson from 6th grade where we made repeated observations of a candle burning inside a jar and talked about how we could use that to find evidence for the percentage of oxygen in the air in the room—and then how we could think about any difference between our number and the “expected” value. Tom shared a lesson from 9th grade where we simulated countries just before WWI and passed notes back and forth, trying to establish allies and responding to prompts he gave us. We broke into high school and middle/lower school groups to discuss in more depth. In the HS group, we talked about many areas and skills students find difficult as they work on their writing, noting the similarities or corresponding types of problems that students encounter in science classes.
Category Archives: History
11/27/2018 History Meeting Notes
The high school history team met to discuss writing and the third trimester Democracy in Action class.
Tom met with the middle school team in the middle school. We continued our discussion of what would be the format for PD for the group. After some discussion they came up with a plan for a two stage PD program.
First the middle school history team would meet for a half day (12 -3) discussion that would focus on the following:
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- They would share an overview of their curriculum, followed by a deeper discussion of the themes of their programs. This would help new get a clearer sense of the middle school program.
- They would also discuss how they teach writing in the different grades. Each of theme would examples of student to see how they build on each other’s work and I would give them a sense of how this fits in with what is done at athe high school.
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Finally, we discussed how this first half day meeting might be the incubator for ideas for a full day retreat for all the middle school core teachers. We hoped to schedule the first half day sometime in Jan, and the full day workshop in the spring.
The high school will continue to meet each Friday and may ask for a another PD day in the second trimester.
11/13/2018 History Department Meeting Notes
We met with the English department to introduce the entire humanities team.
After the share we discussed upcoming meetings and our plan to meet with the science department to discuss writing. The high school group left to set up their room for the open house. The middle school team stayed behind and we discussed the following:
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- The High School PD day and how we are continuing to develop the Democracy in Action class.
- The conversations we have been having on writing and how we could be more consistent and effective in our approach.
- Middle school history crew expressed interest in looking at how we teach writing.
- The rest of the conversation was on the best use of PD time for the middle school.
- The consensus was that if all the middle school core teachers could spend a half day together sharing curriculum across the grades.
- They also wanted time with their partner in the grade to look at their specific curriculum and work on what they want to fix.
- The challenge is how to find the time for the middle school teachers to all be together to focus on history.
2018-2019 History Departmental Focus
Type of Work Focus:
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- Documenting the “story” of the preK-12 curriculum
- Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related to progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant
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Description of Work Focus:
- Working on a developing cross divisional writing program that builds on what is done in the previous grade. We will also be working within each division to build a more consistent approach to how we how teach and discuss writing and research. We will also be looking out how geography is taught within each division.
Schedule for Work: We hope to have two half day PD workshops.