Celebrating Failure in Rm 613

I have a new tradition for the summer: travel abroad with students. It started last year when I took a group of students to Western Europe (Spain, France, and England) and this was where I formalized Minarets Abroad  for my school site. You can read about our adventures here . The group pictured in the city center of Kraków, Poland. This year, I decided to shift the focus away from Western Europe and give students the opportunity to explore Eastern Europe, including Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, and Austria. Unlike the previous trip, our trip was specifically focused on exploring the historical sites of the Holocaust in Europe, which made it a true one-in-a-lifetime trip. By the end of our fifteen day adventure in Berlin, Warsaw, Kraków, Prague, Nuremberg, Munich, and Salzburg, my students and I came to the conclusion that visiting historical sites is far more influential than learning about it in the classroom or from a book. Each and every location left me with new ...

Created using Canva . One of my favorite projects is Down with the Sickness, where students research the effects that disease have on both past and present societies. I still consider it as my top project of the 2015/2016 school year, which I described in a previous post . With a year of experience, I was able to streamline the project and improve student engagement as shown by the end of the semester survey: "I really liked the medical aspect of our history class because it wasn't a typical kind of study for a history class. I had never done anything like it before and it was a lot of fun."  "I enjoyed researching different disease and learning more in depth about how the CDC and the WHO deal with these situations. Creating an infographic was fun because I prefer to show people what I've learned through graphics/art." Contagion Activity with link. I liked creating the infographics and I really enjoyed learning about different disease...

This year marked the 15th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, but it is also the first time that I had a group of students who had no memory of the attacks. In fact, almost  every teacher is experiencing this  as students are born farther and farther away from 2001 and it has completely transformed the way I discuss 9/11 with them. When I first started teaching, I would start class by showing the following video:   Then follow up by discussing what I remember about that day and what I witnessed. I was also a very history-oriented child and I collected every magazine and newspaper that discussed 9/11 over ten years so I would show them those materials; I'm working on compiling them into a scrapbook for students to look at. Students would then share what memories they had or the memories of their parents, but most of the time they would ask me specific questions about the event, like why it happened, how the world changed, etc. Many times it too...

During the first class I took to become a teacher, the professor took half of the class out and informed us that after four years of teaching half us of will have left teaching all together. Now I'm well into my fourth year and I'm still standing. In fact, I feel that this year is going to be... For starters, I have officially started my Master's in Educational Technology. I'm only a few weeks in and, while I'm overwhelmed and stressed, I'm glad that I'm finally taking the next steps in my education. It also helps that one of my amazing friends is doing it with me! I'm also blessed to be going into my second year at Minarets High School, which continues to be my dream school. As many people said, the first year was me trying to drink out of a fire hose, but now I feel confident and ready to be 100% PBL in a 21st century school. Over the summer, I participated in the EdtechTeam's Teacher Leader Certification and becoming inspired to set new g...

Warfare is always a favorite topic for my students. Maybe its the excitement from the action or the emotional response that is brought on by the death involved, but student engagement always improves dramatically as soon as we start discussing a war, especially WWI. This year I had the opportunity to push student engagement even more by mixing the War to End All Wars and project-based learning. When I was in college,  I always wanted to take the History of Warfare, where we would have studied how warfare evolved. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity to take the class I used it and the fact that WWI resulted in dramatic changes in how wars are fought as inspirations for my students' WWI projects. I introduced this unit by having students analyze primary resources to determine the causes of WWI, beyond the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Once the causes were determined and the trenches were experienced by the students , they began work on their Evolution of Warfare pre...

For many people, diseases and history are not two topics that go together; diseases are a scientific topic while history is, you know, the study of dead people. But if you examine the human experience throughout the centuries, you see that diseases have affected societies in a variety of ways. Since many of these historical diseases have been eradicated or cured with vaccines, the social effects of have been forgotten. But now we are seeing a reemergence of these diseases for a variety of reasons. Because of this connection, my sophomore students investigated disees and their effects as part of their project based learning of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike prior projects, this knowledge was not kept within the confines of the classroom; the final projects were donated to Valley Children’s Hospital in hopes of spreading awareness about historical diseases. The project was launched in November with a PearDeck where students viewed of several news reports of recent outbreaks: ...

By far one of my favorite historical simulations to do is the trench warfare simulation for WWI. Initially, the thought of allowing students to turn the classroom into a war zone made me hesitant to do the simulation, but I finally took a deep breath in 2014 and decided to try it out.* I began the class period with the following presentation to have some order to the madness. From my first experiences, I highly recommend that you go over the rules and expectations BEFORE the trench construction begins. With all of the student excitement and noise, it is difficult to get their attention, especially if they begin hiding in the trenches; I would divide up the classroom and allow construction and then it was herding cats to get everyone to refocus for more direction. The main rules I have is that when the lights are on nothing is thrown, but when the lights go off and the war begins then its fair game. As I said, explain everything THEN allow construction to begin. Even thoug...

Last year I had my Woodlake students complete a DBQ regarding Progressivism, where they had to argue which 20th century issue they would invest their million dollars into. As always, I had students finish significantly earlier than others so I quickly threw together another project where they had to create a poster describing a current issue that they felt needed attention. This was meant to keep the early finishers occupied, but turned into a project that the students became excited about: Ebola by Mikayla Juvera New iPhone Concerns by Ramiro Padilla North Korea by Henry Pfaff Unfortunately, because of pacing and an upcoming benchmark, we couldn't invest much time into the project, but I wished that one day I could do this project on a big scale. Then a year later, my wish was granted when I was offered my dream job at Minarets High School, a school dedicated to project-based learning. I knew immediately that one of my projects would be focused on muckraking curren...

Created by Wordpandit.com As I was on my way home for Thanksgiving, I was flipping through Pinterest, I came across the image to the right and I thought to myself: Darn it. That's what I should of done for my government PBL... To back up, one of my first projects as a teacher at a fully project-based school was titled: We, the People of Mars ... This project was geared towards my sophomores in World History and the driving question was "How can we as inhabitants of a new planet create a functional government?" The goal was for students to investigate different types of governments around the world to create their own unique government for Mars.  My inspiration came from the PBL training provided BIE,  where my colleagues and I created a project according to their organizational format. After a very helpful brainstorm with another teacher, they pointed me in the direction of Mars One , an international project that hopes to one day settle humanity Mars that would ...

As the school year races to the close, I have reached another milestone in my career by finishing my second year of teaching. With BTSA completed and my tenure gained, I can now smile at the memory of walking down the halls of Woodlake High School in 2013 and realizing that I would be a "real" teacher. Yet with another milestone gained, I can't help but feel a sense of incompleteness. I'm not sure where this feeling is coming from; last year, I eagerly waited for summer to arrive, but this year I'm wishing I had more time. It may be coming from my recent experiments within my classroom. In the past, I have done versions of project based learning, but I recently embraced student choice and did my first 'official' PBLs. I'm still waiting on my students' completion of the most recent project, but overall I have felt a greater sense of satisfaction and happiness watching my students on their own, rather than my direct instruction. As a result, I'...

“Picture a classroom...the first thing most of us think of is a square room with rows of desks….this traditional classroom space is the product of an industrial-era model education. Just like factories, schools were designed to categorize students by age and (supposedly) ability, then deliver curriculum in an assembly line format.” As a history teacher, this statement made by Kevin Brookhouser in his The 20time Project hit me in the gut. While my classroom does not look as Brookhouser described, elements of my instruction still did. I was increasing rigor within my content, but I still had to teach my students in way for them to do well on our CST style benchmarks despite the recent inclusion of short responses. This had been weighing heavily on my mind so when I heard this quote at the Google Summit in Minarets, I felt guilty and ashamed that I was not making my students "future ready." Thankfully, I was not alone in my concerns and convictions regarding the way to teach...

Dates. Names. Details. Facts. No debates. No discussion. Just dates, names, and details. This is how history was (and probably still is) taught. Due to the expectation of the state testing, teachers had to follow the strict pacing guide in order to ensure that students will absorb the necessary information to pass the tests. Thankfully, things are slowing changing because of Common Core. Even so, I’m still faced with the struggle of quality and quantity of topics as a history teacher. My department has been flexible and accommodating to the new expectations of CCSS; we are adjusting our pacing and tests almost weekly to emphasize the quality of information rather than the quantity, which has been a big stress reliever.With testing season upon us (CAHSEE this week, SBAC next week, then SBAC again in May), I can’t help but worry that I won’t be able to cover all the major topics with my students. What if I let my juniors out into the world without understanding how various minority ...

History has been in a very interesting situation the last two years. With the introduction of Common Core and the dissolving of CSTs, history teachers have found themselves in a realm of possibility with no clear set of content standards. Maybe “realm” is too powerful of imagery for some, but for me I have found Common Core to be a blessing within my history classroom.  Within the last year, my department has been evolving with finding the balance between old content standards and the new CCSS. Since CCSS implementation has been relatively vague for history, we have began experimenting and one of our earliest experiments was with Document Based Questions ( DBQs ). The very first DBQ I did with my students was: Needless to say, the first DBQ was filled with failures, both mine and students'. The biggest failure of all was when I saw how much students struggled to critically think. The Hook Activity, for example, became a painful process when I had to slowly pull the answer...