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Structured Controversy is a good way to get students thinking about different sides of an argument and coming up with a consensus about that argument. Below, I have attached a website that describes how structured controversy can be used in a history classroom. History is a great subject to use structured controversy because there are many different issues all throughout history that have multiple viewpoints and different arguments that have been made about those issues. One way that I would like use structured controversy in my classroom would be to use the example of the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists and the arguments that were used both for and against the ratification of the United States Constitution. I would divide the class into groups and then have those groups divide into two pairs. One pair of students would look at arguments from the Federalists, and the other pair would be looking at arguments from the Anti-Federalists.  The arguments that I would be giving each pair of students to look over would be the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists papers (primary source documents).  Each pair of students would look over their documents, write down the main arguments their side is making, and then make a short presentation to the other pair of students about what they found.  Both sides would give their presentations on what their side was arguing both for and against the ratification of the United States Constitution.  As each side is presenting, the other side will be listening and taking thorough notes, but cannot ask questions, disagree, or debate while that pair is presenting.  After the presentations, the students would then discuss what their positions were and provide more supporting evidence for those positions. With their notes as a guide, the students would then switch advocacy positions and prepare and give a new presentation. Finally, students would then drop their advocacy role and generate a consensus based on whether or not if the United States Constitution should be ratified.

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1. Choose a historical question that lends itself to contrasting viewpoints. For example, we illustrate the SAC below with the question "Was Abraham Lincoln a racist?" but many other questions lend themselves to the technique. For example, "Was dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary to defeat the Japanese?"

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A good way to use the jigsaw model while teaching in a history classroom could be while the students are learning about the significance of multiple battles that happened in any war throughout history. Below, I have attached a lesson plan that I made that uses the jigsaw model so that the students can become experts on one particular battle in the Civil War and then teach it to the other students in their class.

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A good way to use reciprocal teaching in a history classroom would be to have the students summarize, question, clarify, and predict something about a particular time period in history. Below, I have attached a video that explains what a reciprocal teaching strategy looks like while teaching about the Great Depression.

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For project-based learning, a good way to use it in a history classroom could be while teaching about basically any war in history. Below, I have attached a website of an example of a project-based learning activity where the students were mainly focusing on Civil War technology and how the technology they chose to learn about impacted how the Civil War played out.

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A MiddleWeb Blog
by Jody Passanisi & Shara Peters
The idea behind Project Based Learning is that students will understand more if they make meaning through inquiry based creation. Project Based Learning can apply to any discipline.

We've tried it in our history classroom to varying levels of success. Being proponents of constructivism, Project Based Learning was not too much of a stretch for us to embrace, pedagogically. However, there are some challenges that result.

In this blog post we'll describe two eighth grade American History units (the U.S. Civil War and the Reconstruction Era) in which we incorporated Project Based Learning and share our reflections on those experiences.

Technology and the Civil War

Our Civil War Unit has always been something we weren't fully satisfied with, so it seemed natural for us to try out Project Based Learning with this unit. We had scaffolded the Civil War extensively with a "Causes of the Civil War Unit" that took months to complete, so students were primed with contextual understanding before beginning this unit.

While PBL often doesn't put parameters on the inquiry process, we did create a few parameters for the students. The framing question was about Civil War technology. Students were placed in groups according to interest in communication, medicine, espionage, weaponry, maritime warfare, etc., and told to explore and answer the question: How did (your group's type of technology) change the Civil War?

The students were only given two "rules": 1) Their projects should fully answer the question and be beautiful, meaningful, sophisticated, and enduring; and 2) They could conduct their research using books or the Internet engine SweetSearch, a search tool that limits results to academically vetted articles and avoids much of the "world wide web" served up by Google or Bing.

Curiosity and engagement

The research and inquiry process was incredible to see. Because the students were able to choose a topic that interested them, there was automatic interest on the part of the students - they were interested in the topic for its own sake. More times than not, students walked in the door to our classroom talking about their project, sat down and immediately got to work before the bell rang, and we did not even have to tell them that class was starting.

Also, the narrow and academically reliable nature of the results on SweetSearch allowed the students to assign more credibility to their search results, spending more time reading for comprehension rather than deciding whether or not to throw out a source. These factors, combined with the space for creativity that was allowed by the open-endedness of the prompt, made for a level of engagement that we have yet to see in any other independent work we have devised.

Examples of student work

Our students created informative and creative presentations that showcased their knowledge to their peers. While there were still the ubiquitous PowerPoints and (now) Prezis, there were also movies, skits, and game shows used as platforms for the students to share what they learned with their audience. One group, charged with conveying how communication changed the war, made a functioning telegraph to show just how quickly messages were sent using this new technology, in contrast to older forms of information transfer.

Another team, also presenting about communication, created a newspaper. In a fairly meta way, they explained how communication affected the people at home. They even included an obituary section and acted out a discussion about the names of the deceased. They showed an understanding both of the content, and more importantly, the impact of the technologies they chose to examine on the American Civil War and on modern war in general.

We had less PBL success during Reconstruction

Our subsequent experience with Project Based Learning for the Reconstruction Era was not quite as successful. Why? We have a few hypotheses. For one, the students did not have as much scaffolding for this unit as they did for their Civil War studies. Without the framing context comparable to what they had for the Civil War PBL assignment, students had difficulty figuring out where to begin their research.

Students seemed to find the concept of the Civil War a little more straightforward than Reconstruction. At the very least, there is an agreed upon beginning and end for the War, whereas even the chronological parameters for the Reconstruction Era are debated. Next time we teach this unit, we plan to provide students with more general context for Reconstruction before they break off into subtopic groups for independent research.

Project Learning pros and cons

There are some definite pros and cons when using PBL for history classes. We can see how this kind of approach might make some teachers, especially those who really feel like certain facts and events must be understood and mastered, go nuts.

The open-endedness of PBL, even with the inclusion of some project guidelines, requires the teacher to yield some control, and that is going to be a challenge for some of us who are more accustomed to holding the reins of facts and chronology pretty tightly.

Similarly, since PBL is most often done in teams, it is always possible for issues of work inequity to arise. (We have a system for equal sharing of responsibility in group work that we'll talk about it in a future post.) However, the amazing creativity, and the spectrum of that creativity, that you see with PBL is definitely worth giving up some of the control. And the student investment in the material cannot be understated. Isn't that what we want - for the students to really engage and care about this stuff? Another plus: Because of the nature of PBL (choice, student interests, teaming, etc.), differentiation and multiple modalities are built into its construct.

What we want in history class is to bring meaning and relevancy to these stories about things that happened long ago. PBL goes a long way to help with this: students are interested and driven to learn because of increased autonomy and the drive of inquiry. Students can make meaning from historical events- and even if it isn't the meaning that we intended in the first place, it is no less powerful, and probably more enduring.
How about you? Have you tried PBL in your classroom? What's worked? What's been a challenge?

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A MiddleWeb Blog by Jody Passanisi & Shara Peters The idea behind Project Based Learning is that students will understand more if they make meaning through inquiry based creation. Project Based Learning can apply to any discipline. We've tried it in our history classroom to varying levels of success.

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A good example of an inquiry model in a history classroom could be a lesson that I made for my curriculum class.  The lesson focuses on the Missouri Compromise before the Civil War started and asks the students the question of how  the Missouri Compromise impacted the North and the South. It makes the students look at primary source documents and try to figure out the answer to that question by engaging in group activity, problem solving, and discussion. Below is the attached lesson plan.

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Constructivism is a broad theory with a variety of perspectives. However, the basic tenet of constructivism is that learning is an active process where the learner constructs knowledge rather than acquiring it. There is a growing emphasis in history education on students being able to construct and analyze historical arguments. Constructivism’s focus on the learner constructing knowledge might lead one to ask: what then is the role of the teacher? While students learn from experience from the constructivist view, a main function of the teacher is to shape those experiences. In many cases it is necessary for the teacher to provide scaffolds for students to construct knowledge. For example, sending students to an archive for an hour might not be the most productive way for them to learn how to construct an historical argument. Rather, providing them with a set of modified primary sources can create the conditions where students can begin to develop their own interpretations of the past.