Guest Blogger: Incorporating NHD in the classroom

from Guest blogger, teacher, Randy:

During the first semester our major project is called Multi-genre (MG 2.0). In the past (MG) this consisted of having students research a topic based on the 9^th or 10^th Grade Ohio Content Standards (which resulted in, by the way, our students being more familiar with the standards than some teachers around the district) and then creating ten original writing entries of different genres, e.g., news article, diary entry, poem, etc. This worked well-enough but we realized that our students’ biggest deficit was in researching, not creative writing. 

It is painful sometimes to watch kids look for information. I get tired of saying things like, 

“Anyone can put anything on the internet” 

“Please don’t be surprised if you keep getting the same search results if you use the same search terms”

“No, you can’t cite Google Images as a source.”

“This is not an acceptable source because it is a junior-high project from Missouri.”

Thus, our goal is to help students get better at finding and evaluating sources.

This year, at the urging of Emily, my superb English-teacher colleague, we changed direction with MG. The new assignment now asks students to choose a topic based on the NHD theme, develop a guiding research question, locate ten different historical sources (websites, books, journal articles, etc.) and write summaries and assessments for each source followed by a reflective process paper. The rationale is that students will become better, more discriminating researchers and will have a head start on their NHD research. Since MG is an individual project we suggested that if students had plans to work in a group for NHD they could choose related topics for MG that would coalesce well later on. For example two girls are planning on doing Impressionism as a revolution in the art world for NHD; for MG each is doing a separate project on an impressionist artist. Another group wants to do the Cuban Revolution; one member did Fidel Castro and the other did The Bay of Pigs. At this writing I have the equivalent of six milk crates of MG binders  to grade and haven’t touched them yet. 

Next Post: MG update and Wikipedia.