Sam Kelly

Final Narrative with Questions for Implementation

The first time I ever taught a classroom full of students was in April 2016, when I
guest-taught a 50-minute lesson on the history of anti-Semitism and the rise of Adolf
Hitler to four periods of 10th grade world history classes at my old high school. The
lesson was a success and the students were engaged throughout, but its design was
very simple. I spent the first half of the lecture presenting the PowerPoint the instructor
had already made (he was out sick, so I assumed his duties for those classes) and the
remainder of class giving a lecture I had specially prepared. The lesson was entirely
lecture-based, a format that works for some students but not others. One of my primary
motivations for going to graduate school was to find ways of educating as many
learners as possible, using techniques much more sophisticated than the simplistic hitor-miss all-lecture plan. So far I have learned a great deal about pedagogy, and in
creating this lesson plan I worked to implement the new knowledge and wisdom I have
acquired.
The most helpful resource for me in creating this lesson plan was Integrating
Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design by Carol Ann Tomlinson and
Jay McTighe, which presents a wide range of concepts and actionable strategies for
promoting and enhancing student learning. I am a big fan of backward design in
particular. I believe planning backward is a tremendously useful tool for pedagogical
development, because it focuses on fundamental student understandings as the
paramount goal. Especially in history, which is an extraordinarily broad field, it can be
easy for students to get lost in a sea of information. As a consequence, emphasizing the
fundamental understandings that it is most crucial for students to gain is particularly

Sam Kelly
valuable in my subject of choice. Thus, in planning my future lesson plans, I will work
backward from those critical understandings to derive the means of teaching them
effectively.
I constructed my unit plan overview using the template developed by McTighe
and Wiggins and presented in Figure 3.1, page 30, of the aforementioned book by
Tomlinson and McTighe. I found it to be an excellent way of getting my thoughts in
order. I decided that the key enduring understandings I wanted to promote were the
following: (1) that a well-grounded knowledge of the past is necessary to fully
understand the present and can enable people to create a better future; (2) an
understanding of primary and secondary sources and why both are valuable; and (3)
that peoples experiences and identities can alter their perspective considerably, leading
to biases and inaccuracies, so they need to be conscious about perspectives and
assumptions. From there, the following fundamental questions followed naturally: Why
is it important to know how and why events happened in the past In order to understand
the present day? Who writes history? What are primary and secondary sources? How
can the identity of a person, group, or society affect their relationship with history? And
how does one recognize bias, in oneself and in others?
At this point I decided it would be more helpful to move directly to the 5-day plan
to develop my assessment evidence as part of a naturalistic whole. I did not want to
create an assignment before I was sure of what I would be doing in class that week, as
that would encourage me to base my teaching around the assessment rather than
basing assessment on what I taught my students. I feel that the value of assessment
lies in gauging whether students understood the importance and relevance of what

Sam Kelly
theyve covered in class. In adopting this viewpoint I was particularly inspired by a quote
from Ta-Nehisi Coates in If I Were a Black Kid, an article published in The Atlantic on
June 7, 2013:
I try to get them to think of education not as something that pleases their
teachers, but as a ticket out into a world so grand and stunning that it defies their
imagination. My belief is that, if I can get them to understand the why? of
education, then the effort and hard work and long study hours will come after.
I believe this as well, and keeping this in mind, I decided to set up a lesson that would
effectively communicate my points about the relevance of history, using sources,
analyzing perspectives, and identifying biases.
As one might expect, I intended the first day to serve as an introduction to the
class, its goals, and its expectations. The main non-curriculum decision I made
regarding the first day was to use a seating chart. I did so due to advice I got from Ms.
Warfield, one of the instructors in my Leaders of Change summer placement. She
personally has savant-like abilities to remember peoples names, but for those like me
who sometimes struggle to match names to faces, she recommended a chart as the
next best thing to a literal face-book of students. Knowing names is crucial in forming
personal connections, so this seemed like a good plan. I will begin the class by handing
out the syllabus, which would include a page to be signed by parents/guardians. The
syllabus will be comprehensive and the signatures on it binding, ensuring that it will be
both a valuable resource for students who want to know whats going on and a tool for
me to hold them accountable to expectations. I will introduce myself and go through the
syllabus with them while taking questions on it, to ensure were all clear. We will finish

Sam Kelly
the class with a preliminary discussion of why history is important, emphasizing that a
nuanced understanding of the past is essential to understanding much of the presentday world and can even help us predict what will happen in the future.
I designed Class 2 to follow naturally from Class 1. We will start with a Do Now
reviewing the previous day, asking: Why is learning history important? I will provide 5
minutes to do the activity, allotting about the same time for the class to share a few
responses. Following this, I will discuss historiography and historical sources. I will
explain the difference between primary and secondary sources and why they are used. I
will then give my students a list of various types of sources, possibly projected on a
screen or written on the board to save on resources, and ask students to identify if
those sources are primary or secondary sources. I will collect signed pages from syllabi
during this activity, which will last until the end of class.
I designed Class 3 according to a similar plan, also starting with a Do Now
reviewing the previous class: What are primary and secondary sources? How are they
related and how do they differ? Students would again have about 5 minutes to do the
activity and 5 minutes for a few responses to be shared. Todays class, addressing the
key issues of identity and bias, will begin with a clip from the TV show Community in
which Malcolm McDowell states the adage that history is written by the victors. From
there, we will discuss as a class how the narratives of dominant groups have been
historically privileged over others, how the Internet has increased access to useful
information by countless orders of magnitude but has also unleashed a massive flood of
incorrect and flawed information, and how to spot bias.

Sam Kelly
Class 4 would, in turn, naturally follow up on class 3. Day 4s class will consist of
a group activity. In groups of 3 or 4, students will be presented with two passages, each
of which discusses the same event from a radically different perspective. For example,
one might discuss an event from the settling of the American West from a Native
American perspective, whereas the other would be from European-American colonial
settlers point of view. The students will analyze the differences and similarities between
the documents, looking in particular for how differences in perspective lead to different
interpretations of the same events. I would direct them to question whether looking at
these documents allowed them to understand what really happened, and why or why
not it did. This will take about half an hour, following which the class will share their
findings.
The fifth and final day of the unit would be the logical conclusion. I would start
with a longer Do Now reflecting on the previous days activity, allotting 8-10 minutes
for it. The longer time for the Do Now would be justified because the rest of class would
shift relatively seamlessly from sharing student responses into a discussion and review
of the whole weeks material. We would discuss how understanding the past is vital to
understanding the present and future, sources are vital to understanding history, and
understanding bias is vital to using sources well. At this point, since I had completed the
units planning, I could now specify my main assessment evidence: a written reflection
assignment. As homework for that day, I would ask students to write a 1-2 page
reflection about the importance of history and of using well-selected sources in finding
out what happened, to be due Monday. I would allow them start working on this
assignment in class as time permits. I would also let my students know that the formal

Sam Kelly
chronological coursework, beginning with the pre-Columbian history of the Americas,
would start next week, as the first unit was finished.
During the summer term of the Teacher Education Program, my coursework has
dealt extensively with identity and how it interacts with education, and this motivated me
to emphasize perspective and bias in my unit. I was particularly influenced by Richard
Milners Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working through Dangers Seen,
Unseen, and Unforeseen. Although Milners article specifically refers to researchers,
his analysis holds just as true for historians and teachers alike. One does not need to
come from the same background as someone else to teach that person or write
truthfully about that persons life, but one does need to understand how their own
perspectives shape how they view that person in order to understand what that person
is really like. For much of American history, white male Christian voices and viewpoints
have been privileged over others, and whether they admitted it or not many historians
views were heavily skewed in favor of those groups. My goal is to help my students
recognize biases like those in order to gain a truer and healthier understanding of
reality.
Many of my students will be people of color, and so understanding bias on a
deeper level will be especially helpful to them in combating its pernicious effects on their
everyday lives. As Claude Steele discusses in A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes
Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance, students from marginalized groups may
face stress and upset serious enough to severely damage both their self-worth and
academic performance due to stereotype threat. Steele defines stereotype threat as
the threat that others judgments or [ones] own actions will negatively stereotype

Sam Kelly
them. While stereotypes are unfortunately very real and it is still often painful to be
stereotyped, I am hoping an early and intensive focus on analyzing bias in history spurs
my students to realize that a view does not suddenly become true because people with
a skewed perspective hold it, and that discrimination against them is based not in faults
on their part but in bigots distorted view of the world.
Finally, in the implementation of my lesson plan I will do all I can to promote what
Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has termed growth mindset. Students
with growth mindsets believe that intelligence is not fixed, but rather can grow with the
help of effective teaching and hard work by students. In addition to explicitly stating that
intelligence is not fixed but can grow, and avoiding statements that indicate otherwise in
the classroom, I will also do all I can to incorporate this philosophy into my classroom
practice more subtly as well. These efforts include promoting discussion and
participation in class and welcoming questions, to show that students can learn from
one another and that it is praiseworthy to ask for help when one is struggling or
confused so one can learn and improve.
I still have some questions relating to the implementation of my lesson plan. Is
ten minutes total for a Do Now five minutes of writing and five of response (which
would allow more writing as well) a good use of time in a 50-minute class? Might that
be too much? I am also uncertain if half an hour is truly long enough for the activity on
Day 4 where students analyze two sources, and question whether it might be better to
start sharing group findings on Day 4 and finish on Day 5 in lieu of the warm-up. Time
management is my main concern. Other than that, however, I feel pretty confident about
my lesson plan and would love to put it into practice.

Sam Kelly
Works Cited
Coates, T. (2013, June 7). If I Were a Black Kid... Retrieved August 15, 2016, from
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/if-i-were-a-black-kid/276655/
Dweck, C. S. (2010, January). Mindsets and Equitable Education. Principal
Leadership, 10(5), 26-29.
Milner, H. R. (2007). Race, Culture, and Researcher Positionality: Working Through
Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen. Educational Researcher, 36(7), 388400. doi:10.3102/0013189x07309471
Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and
performance. American Psychologist, 52(6), 613-629. doi:10.1037/0003066x.52.6.613
Tomlinson, C. A., & McTighe, J. (2006). Integrating differentiated instruction &
understanding by design: Connecting content and kids. Alexandria, VA:
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.