How I Will Change My Teaching of a Low-Level History Class

Bloom's Taxonomy

Sophomore World History is a challenging class to teach at my high school. The best students are diverted into our AP program, leaving me three or four classes filled with many uninterested and unmotivated kids that have a history of behavioral problems. I taught four sections of these kids last year. Here are the harsh realities I observed working with this struggling population:

• Half the students will do homework some of the time.
• About one third will not complete ANY homework on time for the entire year.
• Half the students hate reading and do not understand what they read
• Half will take notes only if forced. Next to none will use notes to prepare for a test. (They prefer using the textbook, amazingly.)
• The students are unwilling to do true group work. One student in the group would do the work and the rest would watch or be off task.
• Activities such as skits and reenactments are only partially effective, because so many of the kids have too little background knowledge to understand the relevance of the activity.

I do convince a few students that history is interesting. I do help some students to enjoy reading, and I do get some students to take notes more effectively. However, too many students in these classes were not fully engaged by my methods last year. So I plan to do a few things differently.

• I will assign fewer readings as homework. We will do almost all reading in the classroom.
• Most lectures will be read-alouds of the textbook. Only after that will students be assigned an in-class reading of the same material.
• I used a variation of Cornell notes last year. Few students benefited. This year we will learn by presenting the material and going over it with frequent informal formative assessments such as fast-paced in-class questions ("peppering").
• I plan more summative assessments that include writing--short essay questions that ask for items high on Bloom's Taxonomy such as evaluating why one leader was better than another. These questions will be complex, so no two answers should be alike.

I hope these changes result in greater student engagement and achievement.

Postscript: January 7, 2012:  These changes have produced better though not radically improved grades. Additionally, I will examine the results of standardized testing, available in August.2013.