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Real-life experiences of (extra)ordinary Canadians
1.1k Plays19 days ago
David Lynch (St. Michaels University School, Victoria, British Columbia)
Finalist of the 2024 Governor General’s History Award for Excellence in Teaching
For more information about the award visit CanadasHistory.ca/TeachingAward
Over the past six years, David Lynch has developed a year-long, multi-stage project-based approach to teaching B.C’s Social Studies 10. “Through their Eyes” engages students with the historical thinking concepts as they explore twentieth-century Canadian history through the real-life experiences of 225+ (extra)ordinary Canadians. These diverse individuals and their divergent experiences act as an enlightening window into the past, humanizing events and equipping students with concrete evidence that they use to assess, challenge, and even develop their own historical explanations and narratives.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of the Teaching Canada's History podcast. I'm your host, Brooke Campbell, and today we are speaking with the finalists of the 2024 Governor General's History Award for Excellence in Teaching.
00:00:16
Speaker
Created in 1996, the award recognizes innovative and impactful approaches to teaching Canadian history. For more information, visit canadashistory.ca slash teaching award.
Innovative Teaching Methods
00:00:29
Speaker
Today I'm talking with David Lynch, a high school history and social studies teacher in Victoria, B.C., Thanks for speaking with me today, David. Oh, totally my pleasure. Thanks, Brooke. Well, why don't you provide us with an overview of your project that you've designed and maybe identify some of the main steps that your students have to take when they're when they're undergoing it?
00:00:51
Speaker
Sure. um Well, there's actually a lot of things going on because it's actually essentially a course-long project that has various stages and we keep coming back to the historical thinking concepts as we go.
00:01:02
Speaker
um So basically, it imagines a social studies course, in this case, Socialist 10, which in BC focused on the 20th century and a lot of history content. um It imagines that course as being essentially a course in historians craft. And yes, you're going to learn all about the time period and you're going to learn all kinds of interesting content and meet all kinds of interesting Canadians. But everything that you're doing is to give you context for you to actually do things with. So basically the context, the content becomes the context for the concepts.
00:01:37
Speaker
And so every round, um it's it's organized like a ah traditional history course with units, chronological units. um But at the core of each unit is actually a concept that we dive deep into.
00:01:49
Speaker
And it doesn't mean that we're not touching the other ones at various times, but there's sort of a core focus for each unit.
Teaching Perspective and Significance
00:01:55
Speaker
um And in that chronological unit, all the information and the content, traditional history class stuff that you you or I might be familiar with, with dates and names and everything,
00:02:04
Speaker
it it It takes on a new meaning because you're using or you're learning it to use it to do something more sophisticated in terms of historiographical challenge towards the end of the unit. So it's kind of it's neat for us as teachers because we're able, and I teach with a team, we we teach the same variations of the same course.
00:02:23
Speaker
um We're able to say to our students, we're teaching this detail to you on purpose. This is not because we want you to memorize it or regurgitate it to us. um You're going to use it But it's giving you this context that's going to make what we do with it all the more meaningful. So um to give you an example, in our first unit, um we we decided to focus on perspective and significance. We thought that those were kind of the easiest in some ways, entry level concepts for our students, which may or may not have ever done any historical thinking because we are an independent school and we get a lot of students from overseas.
00:02:56
Speaker
And we also assume don't assume that they know anything about Canada. or the world or our history. So we basically um might have to start from scratch and we start off with perspective and significance and we teach them the rough overview of World War One because that's kind of where our unit starts, our course starts.
00:03:14
Speaker
And then we start to introduce little activities that are getting to think about what makes an event significant. So we use the Canadian War Museum has a little over the top video game, web based video game that we play with them. and And we, you know, they play the game and it's there's an experiential focus to all of this where they often do something. Then we try to get them to reflect on it. So they play the game and we say, well, what were some of the significant events? And almost inevitably in that game, you die.
00:03:40
Speaker
um And so we were like, well, so what's what's significant? You know, when did this choice happen and where and so on? um And then we tease that out a little of bit and we start introducing the idea of perspective. And so we play a short film called Coward, um which is on YouTube and it's an Irish perspective on the First World War. And It's it's brilliant because it's only about 20 minutes long. There are about four main characters. And at the end of it, we tease out, well, what were the different characters' perspectives on this event? at The same event, at least to a sort of tragic end.
00:04:12
Speaker
And then we're combining those two together with some more little activities and eventually building to the point where they are focusing on a real-life Canadian. And this is where the three-arise aspect of our entire course comes in.
00:04:26
Speaker
um they During this unit and during every unit, they are given a a person, a real person, a real Canadian. And that's our sort of restriction is they have to be either soon to become a Canadian or they actually have to be a Canadian. They have to be someone who is in Canada. um And there's quite a diversity, which I'll talk about in a second, to the different characters they get. But in the first unit, they get a character. ah They don't know anything about them. They don't even know who they are. they They're given ah a coordinate. They're given a little bit of ah a demographic profile, their last name, their date of birth, and so on. And the coordinates take them to somewhere in the war, some Canadian involvement somewhere in World War I. And they have to reconstruct the context of that character.
00:05:09
Speaker
And once they've got that, plus this sort of sort of theoretical understanding of perspective and significance, we then ask them to focus in on ah five minutes in the life of their character and imagine their context and imagine the significant events happening around them. And also, just to make it a little bit more tangible, what's an artifact that is very significant to this character?
Creative Student Projects
00:05:30
Speaker
And it might be a submarine that's about to sink the ship they're on. It might be a bullet. It might be the danger tree, at the Battle of the Somme for a Newfoundlander. There's something that that they have to identify in their character's life in those five minutes that's interacting with them. And it's amazing what the students come up with. you know We had a ah girl a couple of years ago who had ah ah basically the equivalent of a farmerette. which Americans call it, the women who would leave university and go and work on farms, often not suited to it, but they would go and do it anyway.
00:06:01
Speaker
And she focused in on this this woman's, a real woman from the University of Toronto, um focused in on her bloomers. And she basically sort of really, really brilliantly thought this this this pair of pants that this woman is wearing is breaking from tradition for her and her culture and her experience in her time period.
00:06:23
Speaker
And it's it's these blooms. She actually called it a time to bloom. She saw this experience of being out on the farm for this woman after she researched it was like this life changing experience. And the bloomers represented her her her transformation through the events of the war.
00:06:38
Speaker
So it's amazing what kind of things they come up with. You know, we've just all kinds of different broken glass for the Halifax explosion might be the the ballot that that ah an indigenous woman votes for the first time. And it's amazing how they interact with the concepts and also the real characters and the context.
00:06:58
Speaker
And they eventually write a story or produce something the equivalent of five minutes in the life. It could be a video, could be a poem, could be a painting. um And it's amazing the depth of historical knowledge that they bring together and the amazing thinking that they do and to show us the different ways that they understand a significance of perspective.
00:07:18
Speaker
So that's a sampling of like one unit. And we do that kind of thing five times over the course of the year before we do a final culminating thing as well. So I don't know, I could go on.
00:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, why don't you hear about the, at least the culminating, the culminating project. Yeah, sure. that um And we, one of the, one of the things we wanted to achieve um was to change the, um the format, the the way of demonstrating their knowledge in every unit so that we could a develop some skills, um varied skills.
00:07:50
Speaker
but also to try and give them chances to have ways of showing what they know that work best for them. And so there's actually a lot of flexibility built in in each unit that if you you know you really are good at this particular format, you could try that again or you could try something new um In our our second unit, it's about cause and consequence, and we use the interwar, which is just such a perfect period where you have all of these actors, beliefs, and conditions all interacting.
00:08:17
Speaker
um And we started off with ah a simulation where they are members of a fictional country, which is basically the United States, and yeah Russia, um Germany, and Italy, and they go through this series of events where they have to make decisions based on the information they're getting in these little newspapers, What they don't realize is the newspapers are very ideologically bent and they end up simulating the descent into authoritarianism that three of those four countries undertake. And that's just the sort of a beginning activity to get them thinking about what makes countries do things and people do things.
00:08:50
Speaker
And then they spend the rest of the unit learning about the Great Depression and Canada and and our experiences here in And in the end, we actually do ah a culminating exercise. This one's not a personal thing. This is a group exercise where they have to essentially answer the question as if they were writing a university paper, although they're not, as a collective.
00:09:08
Speaker
um Why didn't Canada end up on such an extreme route as such an extreme path as Germany, Russia and Italy? And it's really neat to see them starting to sort of realize that there's so much going on that could explain it.
00:09:23
Speaker
And that there's no absolute answer. And that's actually, that's that's the thing that I've heard from students sometimes is they're so used to rote learning that they'll they'll they'll say to me, well well, what's the answer? Can you just tell us so we can tell you back? It's like, no, the whole point of this is not for that to be the the the focus.
Exploring Post-War History
00:09:40
Speaker
um In the World War II, we we focus on a concept, ethical judgment. We've kind of seeded it by talking about the SS St. Louis and the internment. But we ultimately asked them at the end of the unit, after they've learned about what happened, they've met their character, they've seen some portion of the war, really focused in on an aspect, one Canadian involvement. um We asked them collectively ah to come up with an answer to question.
00:10:06
Speaker
like ah a principled question, an ethical question, which is whether Canada was proportionate or not during the conflict. And we don't always have time for ah We try to have a simulation at the end where we put Canada essentially on trial. And we have a a fictionalized tribunal um and they have to argue for and against whether Canada was proportionate. And we've spent a lot of time through the unit talking about proportionality and this concept and and and how how it could be used to judge conflict. And of course, it's how it's problematic.
00:10:36
Speaker
And then at the end, they have to reflect on their they participation in the trial. And then ultimately, though they've been assigned a side in the trial, they then have to decide what they actually think, and they have to produce essentially a op-ed. which is, again, an interesting style for them. They've often never been able to say I and I think, and and that's sort of a fun way to to finalize that because they can actually go totally against what they they played in trial.
00:11:01
Speaker
And they have to use their characters in the trial as witnesses. So it's a neat and neat way of doing it And then World War, after the war, we split the the history content into a domestic and and an international involvement.
00:11:13
Speaker
um And for their domestic history, they're grouped with a bunch of other students who also have characters. And there's a theme that connects them all. They might all be Indigenous changemakers. They might be LGBTQ Canadians trying to push for for more rights. And they have to essentially build a narrative of the post-war history. And again, this is the kind of time where they say, well, but just tell us what happened. we're like, well, no, you have all these pieces that we've seeded, all these characters, all these events. They get these headlines, but they have to decide which ones are significant. They're building their own narrative.
00:11:44
Speaker
And then the international history, we do a bunch of simulations, UN n simulations and things. And they ultimately, this is where we go back to sort of more traditional way of doing a history where they're they're given a character and they have to decide, did this character make for a better world or not? And so they have to kind of reach a a decision to come up with a thesis and then eventually write an essay on that that question and decide. And then collectively, we do an exercise where we show all the different Canadians and not all of them are positive. Some of them involve very bad things. And we ask, have on net, have canadian Canadians been a good force for for change in the world, positive change or not.
00:12:21
Speaker
Again, it's there trying to come up with the answers, which is really, really neat. It's also disconcerting for some, but by the end of it, there're that we've seen such great growth in their in their learning and their their ability to take on big questions.
00:12:37
Speaker
Oh, I should mention as well that at the end of the course, we asked them to reflect on everything that they've learned. And we've done it in various different ways. One year we did a mosaic where they had to have their characters because by the end they'll have had ah they'll have met at least five characters, probably more.
00:12:55
Speaker
um Each one of the characters is from a different ah demographic kind of bucket to make sure that they're getting a real diversity of perspectives. so We have indigenous people, we have Francophone Canadians, we have Anglophone Canadians, and we have racialized Canadians. And we also have a sort of separate special category to make sure that everyone is getting a female character, although there's there's a lot of inter intersectionality between the different groups.
00:13:20
Speaker
And there's also LGBTQ Canadians in that group, as far as we can identify them, which gets easier as the time periods go on. But by the end, they've had at least five characters. They've had five different units. They've had five different concepts or six concepts. And they then have to somehow show us what they've learned about the course. We did it with Zayak once when they had to bring in their characters and put themselves in there and some key events they thought were significant. We've done it where we do a dollar bill.
00:13:50
Speaker
or they have to design the next dollar bill for Canada and decide what themes connect some of their characters. They don't have to use all of them, but they have to find through some sort of theme that is actually relevant to them that they've learned about. And then we've just done it as well in the past where we essentially say to them, we make them go through an exercise of reviewing and they lay out all their characters and their events and concepts. And we say, well, it's now up to you. Tell us what you've learned. And that's challenging, um but you get some unbelievable stuff and and some some interesting interesting things you weren't expecting. Like I i had a ah student who said, you know, in all of this talking about people, we haven't talked about the landscape and how it is actually
00:14:32
Speaker
shaped the entire history of Canada, both you know its involvements overseas and our land here. And that was a really neat one too. like they When they saw all their stuff laid out, that's the thing that came to them.
00:14:43
Speaker
um I've had other character students, you know, realize that something that linked all of their characters was a piece of headwear. And they happened to have a, you know, at one point they had a Sikh character who was fighting in World War I. And then there was, you know, something in World War II that connected to it as well. And so really, really, really neat things that they come up with that we don't know what they will come up with, but it's it's amazing.
00:15:08
Speaker
and it And it actually... It's funny, in a way, it's really hard to mark and grade and assess. And that at the same time, it's also really easy because you just basically say, all I'm looking for is sophisticated thought, some interesting insight, and some use of the content that you've learned.
00:15:26
Speaker
And so the content is never, it never goes away because I know there's this battle in the education field. Should we be doing content or concepts? And To me, the best thing is to have both of them in there as well, because the really sophisticated thinking is the one that is using all of that information, the dates and the names and the people, and also doing some really great conceptual thinking with it.
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is such a big project. As you said, it's it's a unit. It's the the entire year. um And it's obviously so rooted in the historical thinking concepts. and and As you've explained, you know ah you identify a different one for each section. um You know, when you when you step back and you think about then historical thinking a little bit more as a whole, um how does this project enable your students to to utilize and deepen that thinking throughout all of these segments?
00:16:17
Speaker
Well, one of the messages that that I ah try to communicate from very early on, and it goes back to the the. the realization that we're a very diverse classroom with lots of different backgrounds and and knowledge and and lack of knowledge is that I'm not expecting them to know anything about how ah world events or humanity works, but that we're going to develop a sense of of what makes things happen, how they happen, how do we think about them, how do we talk about them.
00:16:44
Speaker
And I'm also not going to expect that they know any specifics either. But by the end, they're going to have specifics at their fingertips. So i would say that that we we consciously tell them that this is not your grandparents' history class. We're not here to stuff you with factual information.
00:17:05
Speaker
You'll see a real difference in various provinces and their approaches to the way this works. But in BC, really, we've really, really bought into the historical thinking concepts. and they're actually in the social studies curriculum in BC, that they are like six of the eight things that we're supposed to do in terms of our curricular competencies.
00:17:21
Speaker
So they're meant to be there. curricularly, but it also just makes everything that we do take on a new meaning, which I really appreciate. I like it because it gives me inser inspiration is we just basically saying to them, every little thing you're doing, every big thing you're doing, there's some historiographical aspect to it. And we're trying to ultimately, if you forget everything you've learned and you end up going back to, you know, for for a country where you maybe were from um and you're going to have at your fingertips this set of understandings about how things work, how to break things down, how to sort of dig through disinformation, actually look at evidence, assess it, evaluate it compare it, contrast it, um that you're going to have that set of historiographical. And again, historiographical is almost the wrong word for it. It's actually just critical thinking. And so I say that to them as well. We call them the historical thinking concepts, but they're really just
00:18:18
Speaker
Thinking concepts, they're critical thinking. How do things work? Why do they happen? How do we decide if they're important or not? Those things are pretty transferable. And that, for me, makes me feel good about what we're teaching is is that it actually is useful beyond just the textbooks.
00:18:36
Speaker
And so everything that we do, we try to stress that to them saying there's there's a real world application to this. And that's in part of the way that we teach it is, yeah, we're delving back in the past, but every class there's a, there's a, or almost every class, there's a current events thing. And we're trying to use the the concepts in reference to current events to show them that this doesn't have to be backward looking. This can actually be a current day analysis and even looking forward to the future. So it's, yeah, I,
00:19:07
Speaker
whether they whether they consciously come away with the sort of list of guideposts that often influence the teachers. And again, we we have we use them Peter Satius' a list of guideposts adapted by Lindsay Gibson and others at um UBC, we actually come up with our own some we have some our own guideposts that we we felt were sort of important, especially around colonialism and the impact on the way we understand the past. But we don't always make them explicit. We try to sometimes with them, but sometimes it's just guiding us. And it's interesting to see at the end, when we have them do their reflections for the whole year, that they actually bring out some of those guideposts without actually realizing that that's what they've
Historical Concepts as Critical Thinking Tools
00:19:49
Speaker
been taught. And that's always a kind of a neat sign when they're When they're they're telling you what you hope they learned without actually realizing that that's exactly you've been doing the whole time. So, yeah.
00:20:01
Speaker
But I do think there's a danger with the historical thinking concepts to become where you can focus on them. I won't say too much because I think you could can do that. But where you where you focus on them as content rather than.
00:20:17
Speaker
concepts and tools to use. And I've i've seen that in some classes where where they're kind of getting the kids to memorize the guideposts. And that's, to me, is not what they're about. They're supposed to, the guideposts are supposed to help you to do the thinking. They're not they're not the end goal, I guess.
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. And i love the idea of of you saying that you're kind of providing your students with a toolkit and for how they can think and look at the past and and the present, as you as you said.
00:20:48
Speaker
What types of resources do you then like to use to to support teaching history in your classroom? And and how do you like to use them? Yeah. um We have gone far, far away from textbooks. um And ah and then that's no that's no reflection on like there's great textbooks and everything out there.
00:21:09
Speaker
But we've wanted to sort of we've really tried to scale back the amount of content that's fired at them. um And we wanted to focus it on the things that we felt were really, really important. So we actually created our own little course reader.
00:21:25
Speaker
um And it's got little articles here and there. And some of them are Canada's histories articles and everything. But they're they're they're very carefully curated to to give us just a little bit of a taste rather than something that the kids have to read from cover to cover in a linear way.
00:21:40
Speaker
And so that's I would encourage teachers to think about that. And it's it's kind of a multiple year thing. You don't make it the first year. You just basically collect the little things as you go. And then by the end of the year, you'll have this little package with some some great things in it.
00:21:54
Speaker
It gets the kids to think that, you know, you sometimes you do have to do a bit of reading, but not a lot. Like it's three pages. It's two pages here. I want you guys to read the two pages now. Check it out. um So we have that that resource, but every unit essentially is organized kind of with a front loaded way where we will usually start with a simulation.
00:22:15
Speaker
And these are all are developed by my myself and my fellow teachers. And that's usually an experiential introduction to the to the topic. And if it doesn't happen at the beginning, it happens somewhere in the middle. So World War One, they're um they're doing ah a real life sort of simplified version of a parliamentary simulation about the conscription crisis to get a sense of government and everything.
00:22:38
Speaker
So we have collected those over the years. So there's at least one, probably two simulations per unit, just because they some love just learning that way. And that really helps them put the concepts and the content into context.
00:22:50
Speaker
And so those are things that if if you you know if you know of them or you can collect them are amazing. We have a League of Nations simulation where they get to see how it all goes off the rails. World War I simulation where they are the countries of the world without knowing it, fictionalized, and they have to all ally themselves or be left out in the cold and they all immediately attack each other. And it gives them a bit of a sense of the hysteria that started the war. um There's a Cold War simulation that's similar. we have a nuclear crisis simulation Lots of little things, ah a land claim simulation, where they just get bit of a taste of things in an experiential way. So that's thats ah those are really, really valuable.
00:23:27
Speaker
um And then every unit um does, as I said, front loaded. There's there's there's some teacher talk. there's there's Usually it's a slideshow with little clips and videos. But it's really...
00:23:40
Speaker
the The purpose has shifted or not teaching you this stuff so that you remember it to regurgitate it later. I'm just giving you the overall picture with little deep dives here and there to give you a taste for the time period that you're then going to have to dig down deeper into it. So World War Two, we spend probably probably over the course of three classes.
Personalized Learning with Canadian Characters
00:24:02
Speaker
It's not.
00:24:03
Speaker
for an hour a straight and then another hour, another hour, but you know, 30 minutes here, 20 minutes here where we tell the story of the war and we break it up into five phases. And there's lots of slides, pictures, lots of,
00:24:15
Speaker
little video clips. World War Two, we actually teach by, we show a bunch of movie trailers for different movies. And then at the end of it, we then say we use that as an excuse to talk about whether movies are actually good historical sources and and we critique them. And we talk about how they're not always representative. We show a scene from um the Churchill movie, Darkest Hour, where he's on the subway, which never happened. And we play it and we talk about it They're like, isn't that great? Oh, amazing. And then then you say, well, what if it never actually happened? is Can it still be educational? Can it still give us some value? can we can we What are the limits of this source?
00:24:52
Speaker
So there's there's there's there's that. um And then even breaking the war up into five phases, we talk about narrative choices. Why have I chosen five phases? Why didn't I pick ten? Why didn't I pick two? To sure to show them how we're trying to show them a narrative, how a narrative is constructed, have to have to make choices and how it's imperfect as well. And each teacher will do it a little bit differently.
00:25:12
Speaker
So there so so we have we've created those resources over time um to sort of to to to give them the big picture of the story. knowing that they're going to fill in the details with their own research. And then a lot of, I guess the other big resource that we use for the course is this collection of of characters. And I think we have about 225 now.
00:25:33
Speaker
And they're some of them are famous. um Some of them are people you've never heard of. And they just it's it's essentially a fun exercise for us as teachers. Every time we're reading a story and we see another reference to this interesting person that we've never heard of, we like dig a little bit. Oh, this person's great. There's enough of a web presence. The kids can easily research it and they get it. they We build a profile. So this this list just keeps getting bigger and bigger. and We tell the kids to if you come across someone you think is really interesting, then choose them and then tell us why. And then we'll add it to the list.
00:26:01
Speaker
um And so it's it's neat to have people they've never heard of because then they go in with no preconceptions. And then it's amazing, too, that there's you know pretty famous characters to the teachers that the students have never heard of. And then you give them, and with the profile, having a location and a time and everything, it dives in them right into something that you think is significant enough to get them started. Like they might be in a, like I said, a a ship that's just about to be torpedoed. And they don't know that until they realize that their coordinates put them out in the Atlantic and there's a timeframe and they look the ship's name up and they go, Oh my goodness, it's about to sink.
00:26:34
Speaker
And that's, that's probably the the core resource at the, at the heart of all this, this through your eyes is those, those characters, which are, you know, you just start to build the library of them. it's, it's really neat.
00:26:46
Speaker
This is a unit you've been working on and have, have led for, for a few
Course Evolution and Impact
00:26:51
Speaker
years. which I think gives you a unique opportunity probably to step back and reflect on it and look at look at what's happened and how it's changed or refined and and not, but also how the students react to it and and what it's what impact it has had. So can you share a little bit more about about that element, perhaps? What what has the impact been on your students learning? And yeah,
00:27:16
Speaker
um the The course started, there this approach started when BC changed its its curriculum to really focus on the the thinking concepts in 2016 or so. And there was quite a few years there where you were able to pilot or not.
00:27:30
Speaker
And we just sort of decided as a team to jump into it to really shake up what we had been doing previously. There had been a lot of sort of content heavy. i mean,
00:27:41
Speaker
A couple of many years ago, there was a provincial exam we had to prepare them for. And so we were still, there was still a bit of a hangover from that where we were still very much content and testing. And this was, we realized collectively was a chance to just completely go back to the drawing board.
00:27:56
Speaker
um And we, we quite literally had a big drawing board where we had all of the different units, the different concepts. It was this big grid where we were trying to figure out, you know, our different products or little content, where does it all fit?
00:28:09
Speaker
And so, The impact for me professionally has been to completely rethink what I do and why I do it. And it's really helped that I've been able to participate in the historical thinking um institutes, the winter institutes, but also the the community of practice that that you've been hosting. And that's getting me to think about why I do what I do has been really, really helpful.
00:28:32
Speaker
And so it's I've seen the impact for, certainly for me, I've seen it for my colleagues where quite a few of them are not particularly kind ah confident necessarily with the content. And when the content is scaled back and there's a framework and there's ah quite a lot of the students digging things up themselves, and that's helped them to be a little bit more like coaches rather than the the with the wise, all-knowing sages. And that's actually, I've seen that make our my colleagues feel more comfortable with the teaching of it because they they know that they just have to rely on the framework
00:29:11
Speaker
and that the that they're they're getting across these concepts, um even if they're not super confident with them, the way this the units and the the activities are structured is actually going to make them ask the questions of the students, and the students come to these really neat insights that it's structured in there. So that's that's been a neat thing.
00:29:30
Speaker
For the students, I think it's been quite a shift. um We get a lot of students who come to us who are very, very good at road learning. um And for them, it's a bit disconcerting at first. And we do occasionally have sort of very traditional assessments. It's usually early on in a unit. It's meant to be formative. It looks like a test, but it's actually just a Let's check it check in to see what you know, because you're going use it in your culminating exercise where you're going to have much more freedom to show what you know. But they love those because they they they they go, oh, this is something I can do. i know how to do this. And they, they you know, they ace the the formative test.
00:30:09
Speaker
But what they don't really realize is, well, that's just getting you warmed up for the more in-depth critical thinking. I've found that that those those more open-ended, bigger challenge activities at the end of the units, the culminating things, um allows the students to really um sort of come at it from whatever place they start from. and So you'll see some really simplistic things. You'll see some really shallow thinking. You'll see not that much content, but they can still put together something that's that's thoughtful.
00:30:39
Speaker
And we're able to to acknowledge that. And then you'll have kids, particularly gifted kids, who will take it to just these unbelievable heights where I look at it and I go, you're 14 and you're writing better than I ever will in my life. And you're thinking of these amazing levels and you're seeing these things that I didn't even see. This is so great. So that, that I've had quite a few students say, this is a really interesting way of doing it. I've not done this before. you know, we've done lots of projects in the past, but there hasn't been, i've found that with, well, I've certainly found with project-based learning, it can often just be a lot of one-offs. um And there isn't this unifying theme to it or or this progression of of complexity.
00:31:23
Speaker
And I've had students say, this felt like every piece of this course was intentionally planned. There's layers of it. There's a lot going on, but it seemed like you were taking us along this journey.
00:31:34
Speaker
And that was a a neat thing. um I also had students who've complained to me in their their anonymous final la evaluations where they where they've actually said just said, I found this course really frustrating because you wouldn't tell us the answers. You made us figure them out ourselves.
00:31:51
Speaker
You know, you you didn't just tell us the Holocaust happened. You showed us how people have tried to deny it. And then you showed us all this evidence. And then we had to come up with an argument for why there was absolutely clearly intentionality. There was this mass effort to do this terrible thing. um You didn't just just tell us it happened. You made us actually work it out. And that to me was actually a great compliment because I thought, yes, this is what we're we're trying to do.
00:32:18
Speaker
And for first thing, for British Columbia, this is the last social studies course where every student is doing it.
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:32:23
Speaker
um And we were realizing that if it was just focused on the historical content when they go on off to do senior level social studies courses, they weren't necessarily well prepared. But if we left them with a critical thinking focus, that they could apply it in whatever course they do in their senior school thing, whether it was economics or social justice or whatever.
00:32:43
Speaker
So I've I've seen that. um over time, the students had felt like this was a good step to get them from social studies that they'd done traditionally to broadening their their their they're thinking, I guess.
00:32:58
Speaker
Thank you so much, David, for sharing more about, you know, through your eyes, or through their eyes, I mean, and for for telling us more about your approach to teaching history.
00:33:10
Speaker
My pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you so much.