Chuck Bryant on the Upper School History Department’s Higher Level Group Work

In Upper School History, our departmental philosophy includes the idea that, “we teach kids to think critically, through writing, about history, in that order.” This philosophy inspires our spiraling, skills-based approach to historical instruction in content-heavy courses. We aim to build students’ critical thinking skills, informed by Bloom’s Taxonomy, through three essential questions: “what, how and why?” We recently shared this philosophy at a CTL Lunch and Learn as we began by identifying the “what, how and why” of one specific application of a traditional jigsaw group work model.

What:  AP US History jigsawed “writing lab”

• Modification of a traditional jigsaw, in which 3 skills groups breaks down 3 parts of an APUSH documents based question (DBQ)
• Read documents, and analyze Historical situation, Intended audience, Purpose and Point Of view for each (HIPPO analysis)

How:   Jigsaw with a twist: Student-centered, Formative assessment

• Second stage of higher order group work, begun in September with a Breakout.edu/Escape Room exercise that reviews summer reading, and previews big-picture concepts of the course
• Three groups (1, 2 and 3) of 5-6 students analyze 3 different parts of a “DBQ”– thesis/contextualization; background evidence; HIPPO document analysis for 25-30 minutes
• Teacher then assigns one person from each group to 5 new groups  (A, B, C, D and E). Each group has one skills-area “expert,” and works together for the balance of the class
• Experts teach their skill area (thesis/context; background evidence; document analysis) to the other two group members→ final product: an outlined answer to the DBQ, following the APUSH DBQ grading rubric
• Repeated with the same “planning groups” 3 times each semester, with each group focusing on a different skill during each subsequent writing lab
• Often draws on old student-generated APUSH DBQs– and outlined answers to those DBQs– thus, past students “teach” current students

Why:   Build higher order skills: Synthesis, Analysis, Evaluation

• builds critical thinking through writing in a student-centered exercise, using a pre-write and/or rewrite approach in every unit
• builds on departmental, disciplinary skills spiral, repeated each year with increasing levels of sophistication: analysis, evaluation, and synthesis
• emphasizes critical analysis (cause and effect, primary source dissection, connections), and writing (pre-writing, thesis development, organization)
• formative assessment becomes the prewrite for the summative assessment on the unit test— same material, different focus
• builds critical thinking through writing; emphasizes both formative and summative instruction, employing a “whole-part-whole” model
• low-stakes, formative assessments motivate students to work hard, think critically, and write clear, concise, causal essays
• Modified jigsaw useful for snow day activity!

After a brief overview of both theory and practice, attendees divided into 3 “stage one” groups: 1) Science/Math/Computer Science; 2) Languages; 3) Humanities. Each discipline-area group brainstormed for five minutes on how this model could be adopted for their particular class(es). We then spent the final 5 minutes in jigsawed groups– each with one Science, one Language, and one Humanities teacher, exchanging the results of the brainstorming section.