Another Guest Blogger!

Here is our final guest blogger for the year. Throughout the year, Randy and Michelle will be giving you a look at History Day from a teacher's perspective, while Naomi, Mimi, and Jean will be posting from the student perspective. So, let's meet Randy!

It’s Randy here at the Toledo Early College High School (TECHS) with the first blog entry about doing National History Day at our school. I will start with an overview of our school to establish a context.

 TECHS is a public high school that is a partnership between the Toledo Public Schools and the University of Toledo. The school opened in the fall of 2005 with some seed money from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that was administered by the good people at the KnowledgeWorks Foundation in Cincinnati. We enjoyed a few years of adequate funding with a line item in the state budget for the eight early college high schools. When the economy tanked we lost our state funding and have been limping along like everyone else since. The school was designed to serve populations of Ohio students who are under-represented on college campuses. The target groups are low income, minority, first-generation to attend college and English-language learners. Contrary to the perception of some other teachers in the system we do not have a little “genius academy”. We are specifically discouraged from “cherry-picking” the district’s best and brightest. That being said, I will admit that we have a fair number of extremely sharp kids but most are just average students that we are charged with accelerating to be ready to take serious college coursework by their junior (or sometimes sophomore) year. We only have ten teachers for the four core subjects. Everything else has to be taken at the college level for dual credit. TECHS has had three graduating classes with kids earning a high school diploma and a college transcript with 30-60 credit hours. We are rated excellent and our State Performance Index beat the neighboring highly-rated upper-middle-class Ottawa Hills School District (full disclosure - I live there). 

Our humanities curriculum is largely-based on NHD. We incorporate the yearly theme into our teaching as much as we can, even in work not directly related to the project. For example, opportunities to discuss the Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History were plentiful when we covered the Enlightenment and the French and Industrial Revolutions.  Kids have a pretty clear understanding of the theme by the time they start considering topics. Future plans include choosing music and film titles related to the theme for our TECHS Summer Multimedia Extravaganza assignment. 

The English and Social Studies teachers work together closely on this project. Students receive a grade for both classes. Completing an NHD project is required for every freshmen and sophomore (entering the contest is optional, usually ~70% do so). Our classes are blended with freshmen and sophomores. This is very helpful since there are both newbies and NHD veterans in the class. If students choose to work in a group they can partner with anyone in the school (even juniors and seniors). We are considering limiting groups to three members this year. I will address that in a future post. Our small school is ideal for doing NHD. We have two English and two social studies teachers and about 100 kids in 9th and 10th grade. By the time our students are  juniors they are mostly taking college classes so it is rare that an upperclassman does NHD. We have, however, had a number of juniors and seniors do projects even though it was not a requirement for a class. To me that is a powerful testament to NHD.

 Next Entry: A discussion of our precursor project to NHD - - Multi-genre.