INTERPRETATION IN THE CLASSROOM
Part Four:
First Year Reflections
It’s very fitting that the current Legacy’s theme is “Interpreting for the First Time,” as I’ve recently spent hours reflecting on how I’ve been “teaching for the first time” these past eight months. When I originally started this series of columns, I was expecting that by Part Four I’d have all sorts of amazing revelations of myriad interpretive techniques adapted to classroom use. Instead, even in March with the end of the school year in sight, I found myself essentially starting from scratch. This wasn’t a bad thing in any sense.
I’ve mentioned in previous columns how I have an incredible support staff at Menchville High School: experienced teachers who have been very generous with mentoring and helping me navigate my first year. Throughout the year, I’ve had observations from school administrators, my own lead teacher, and from senior social studies staff at the district level. Two of these observations in mid-March set me on the path to greatly overhauling my teaching technique.
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced as a teacher has been to not “info dump” on my students. I’m a huge history nerd who loves going into deep dives of the material, and it’s gone against the grain how quickly we have to zip through prehistoric times up to the Renaissance before the end of the school year. You can’t not leave a lot of interesting detail out. (The hazard of a so-called “survey course” that most students have to take early on to get a broad background on a subject.)
The “Do Now” introduction to our lesson on the Inca civilization, featuring a picture of a rope bridge and a quipu strand (used for record-keeping). Students initially thought the quipu were used to build the bridge, and that the bridge would be dangerous to walk on, etc. The point wasn’t to get anything “right” just yet, but to get students interested and thinking about the day’s topic. Photo by Michael Romero.
As a result of my energy and this fast-paced course, my lecture periods were crammed with facts, details, asides, and a ton of supporting information…that likely buried the most critical information students would need to know on tests organized by the school district. A good chunk of my students gamely tried to keep up, but I was accidentally making things more difficult than they needed to be.
Fortunately for me, Rachel Gower-Kinney, a social studies instructional specialist for Newport News Public Schools, understood that what I was doing came from a place of enthusiasm and had ideas on how I could channel it more appropriately. She assigned me a substitute for an afternoon so I could observe Jamin Riley teach his own world history class at Denbigh High School.
Mr. Riley and I had very similar dispositions and speaking styles, and we were both very obvious history nerds. He was able to present the same kind of additional material I loved to bring out, but he split his lecture period up with short videos, random “check for understanding” questions to the class, and a prepared handout that guided students to write down the most important information and left room for plenty of other notes. I was enthralled by Mr. Riley’s class and took several pages of notes on things I could adapt to my own classroom. I went back to school the next day, tweaking my lectures to match what I had seen and cut down on the info dump, determined to start adopting more changes after Spring Break two weeks later.
However, Patrick Day, Menchville’s lead social studies teacher, had different ideas. Shortly after my visit to Denbigh, he came to observe one of my classes. He was pleased to see that my lecture period was a bit better, but he noticed a lot of off-task behavior among my students. Even though most of them tuned back in for the day’s classwork assignment, Mr. Day pointed out many students probably didn’t get everything they needed from the lecture. While I tended to leave students to “take notes using their preferred method” during class, Mr. Day pointed out that wasn’t good enough.
Most of my students are freshmen: thirteen to fifteen years old. (Just like an interpreter, a teacher must know and understand the needs of their audience.) Especially in a school setting, they need structure: being definitively told what behaviors are and aren’t acceptable, what’s expected of them at different points of the class period, etc.
Mr. Day told me I didn’t need to be a cranky martinet or the like, but I should be more explicit about what the students should be doing. So, instead of letting them write notes randomly, I should say, “Write this down in your notes,” and follow up that they’re doing so. When I shared with him the ideas that were percolating from Mr. Riley’s class, he asked, “Why aren’t you using more of that right now?” When I talked about implementing things after Spring Break, he challenged me to implement some of the big ones after the coming weekend and said he would come back to see the changes in action.
I was initially intimidated at how much he was asking of me so quickly, but he insisted that the goals he was giving me were attainable. Spoiler Alert: Mr. Day was right.
Early the next week, Mr. Day came back for my lesson on the Inca Civilization. Before the bell rang, I went around the classroom leaving a handout on each desk on which students would fill in the blanks with critical information from each lecture. On the projector were images of Inca rope bridges and quipu strings. When the bell rang, I immediately asked students to respond to these images with things they noticed about the pictures, what they thought each object was used for, etc. This was our “Engage and Hook” exercise (see my column in Legacy's Jan/Feb 2024 issue) meant to get the students interested in the topic.
When Mr. Day came to visit my classroom, no student was being disruptive, though a number of them were playing games or watching videos with headphones on their school laptops, one or two had their heads down, etc. Photo by Pixabay.
Later in my Inca Civilization lesson, I played this video, "Weaving the Bridge at Q’eswachaka," produced for the exhibition The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire at the National Museum of the American Indian (http://americanindian.si.edu/inkaroad/). This video showed students how bridges are still being made using Inca engineering techniques today. After watching the video, students were more confident in the bridge’s stability, but most still wouldn’t want to use one to cross a gorge. Video by the National Museum of the American Indian.
Nearly all of my students had seen the Disney film The Emperor’s New Groove, set (with the usual Disney liberties taken) amidst the Inca civilization. I showed them a clip where Emperor Kuzco and Pacha fight on a bridge over a gorge. Then, I asked them to compare what they saw with the bridge weaving video. This exercise turned out to be a fun way to review material, and it really helped the students engage. Photo by Michael Romero.
When we got into the lecture, the important bits students needed to write down were highlighted on the PowerPoint slides (and I pointed them out verbally, too), without a lot of extra material. The additional background I still love talking about was still said out loud, but it didn’t visually distract from the major points of the lesson. I broke the lecture up with a few short videos and an occasional question with a candy prize, and I spent five minutes before classwork time recapping the important points students should have written down.
Mr. Day said the two classes he observed were like night and day…not that I was necessarily bad before, but it was obvious more students were engaged and participating in the work. He was genuinely excited that I was able to meet his challenge, and we were both validated when the school’s principal observed me later that week and said I looked as if I had five or six years’ teaching experience under my belt.
An excerpt from one of the “fill in the blank” handouts I used this spring. Filling in these answers covers important information that could end up on Virginia’s annual Standards of Learning exams. My students were also allowed to use these handouts to help them complete quizzes every two weeks or so. Photo by Michael Romero.
Prepping for the Inca class was exhausting, though.I was up late preparing in ways I had not done since the first weeks of school. In the two months since then, every lesson has followed a similar format, and I’ve gotten much faster at getting everything together. Two weeks ago, I gave my first test since I implemented all these changes, and student performance had improved significantly. Energy in my classroom has been steadily higher, too.
Where interpretation is concerned, I’ve tried to keep Sam Ham’s TORE model (interpretation is Thematic, Organized, Relevant, and Enjoyable) in mind. Much of the T and O are covered in unit/lesson plans provided by the school district and adapted by each teacher, but R and E are completely on me. With the changes I’ve made since March, I can really see students finding relevance and enjoyment in class, and it’s apparently helping them succeed in world history.
After four columns, I would have thought I’d be sharing a lot more interpretive insights, but this first year of teaching has shown me I’ve got a lot more to learn. If anything, though, I feel like I’ve finally gotten my teaching/interpretive resources straight. Next year, I can run with them.
