Top 10 of 25-26  Part 2

Lessons 10-6 - Check out the first 5!

*Note: Some of the files today are large. As such, they are hosted on my district drive. If the link goes down, please let me know!

5. Family Matters - I actually made this lesson last year and completely forgot I did. So, I made it again, and only then realized I already had. What a happy little accident. If I hadn't remade it, I probably wouldn't have gone in quite the direction I ultimately did. I wanted to tell the story of Martin Luther and the Reformation as if it were a modern family squabble. I wanted students to feel like Luther would have. I already do this for the American Revolution and it helps those issues really stick for students. 

I did the same here, but took it to another level - I made it into a 90s sitcom! I made a theme song and opening credits, complete with the characters smiling awkwardly directly at the camera. I added a narrator, a laugh track and Seinfeld-style jazz bumpers between each scene. Not even student got the joke, but those that did really appreciated it. They all learned what I wanted them to learn though. It's much easier to feel frustration when your parents leave your younger brother in charge when they go on vacation than when a Medici becomes pope. Having felt it personally, Luther's challenge made a ton more sense.

This will be an ongoing theme, but using AI as a creative tool is a huge step forward for us as teachers. Things that I simply did not have the artistic skill to create that said in my head for years are now possible. I know there are issues with AI, I get it, but in the right hands - it can be amazing!

4. The Iron Pass - I wasn't sure if this one should make the list as I didn't end up fully implementing the lesson as designed for time reasons, but I think it will influence how I do future lessons so that is reason enough to mention it. This year I wanted to expand my teaching on the Mongols. I tossed around a bunch of ideas but decided I wanted to focus on their role as facilitators of the Silk Road. A colleague told me he'd been toying around with the idea of a trade simulation complete with bandits and the surprise spreading of the Black Death. We came up with a simple card game where different groups would have different products based on the card suits. We'd run the sim twice. Once where they could only trade within their own groups and another where they could trade across the room thanks to the Silk Road. They'd also get an "Iron Pass" card to protect them from bandits.

Yeah, that activity never happened. Time, and doubt about my students' abilities, caused me to replace with it with a simple processing activity. But, what were they processing? I wanted a reading about the benefits the Mongols provided to traders on the Silk Road. Simple text would work, but I wanted it to be story-driven (and not boring.) So, I made it as two journal entries - one before the Mongols and one after. I used AI (a running theme this year) to generate some images that looked like pencil sketches to add a bit of visual life to the journals. Students would read both and then "experience" the changes through the eyes of the traders who wrote the journals. It was simple (and took longer than it should have for them to complete), but the students were surprisingly interested. Narratives are powerful. Stories are interesting. By turning this otherwise boring text into a story, the reading didn't feel like a typical assignment. 

That's the part I'll look to repeat going forward. We simply have to get kids reading more - and if a small tweak like this makes it go down more easily, well then so be it.

Side note, a much braver colleague did do the simulation and his kids loved it. He said they better understood the importance of location and trade than they ever had before. So, next year, I'll try to get to that!

But, speaking of reading...

3. Tales Updates - From nearly the beginning of my career I've done close reading activities I called HA! (history analysis.) Each had a high-interest reading with text marking activities and some follow up questions. Those are now gone. Well, not gone so much as given an overlay. They've been renamed as Tales from the Past. I've expanded the pre-show (introductions) of each with videos and/or introductory tasks. I've also added "text amplifications" as per a training we recently had which basically are side notes that make the reading look more like a textbook. I've also added questions for each of my 4 writing rules.

Mostly importantly, they all have cool cover art where a scene from the story pops up out of an open book. Okay, not importantly, but definitely the most cool.

I don't have much to say about these other than they get kids reading and it beats a textbook. I don't think I'm done with the updates either. I don't love how the reading slides look. It's a tough balancing act. I want them to look good to be appealing, but I want them to be simple enough for kids to stay focused on them.

2. Be a Good Person - This year my department was given the simple task of making our kids treat each other better. We've been dealing with issues of discrimination and it made sense that social studies was the place to talk about it. Still, none of us were particularly excited about the assignment. But, if I'm going to present something, I'm going to make it good. So, I took the presentation we were provided and worked some magic. 

I started with some of the brain development stuff I'd used from Inside Out. I think it important to teach adolescents about why they do what they do. They so often act "out of character" without knowing why. That's what Inside Out (and it's sequel) are really about and why I still hold it as the best movie ever.

With that as the starting point, I decided to do the whole thing in a Pixar animation art style (once again, thank you Whisk.) We themed the main lesson around the idea of heroes and villains. So many of our kids this year either could not or would not see their actions as wrong. By analyzing what makes a villain (hint: it is selfish acts) we hoped students would start to see the problems with their own actions. 

While I can't say we solved the problem, I do think we made some headway. Students were very engaged in the lesson and we had some great discussions. Further, this led to the question of "What is a villain?" becoming a major theme throughout my history content for the remainder of the year.

It was so effective that I plan to start next year with this lesson and use that theme of heroes and villains throughout the year.

.

1. Might or Mandate? I  Student Sheet - After Profit or Patronage was such a hit, I wanted to do at least one more This or That? game. China has long had a "fun" gap when compared to our other topics. There's good stuff there like the Culture Shock and History Mystery, but really nothing game-like. The problem was, what would be my this and my that? We focus on the dynastic cycle when we teach China, but this game game was designed to have a specific ending. After much back and forth, I came up with the idea of the game potentially having multiple endings. Students would still be the leaders of a dynasty, but unlike in the other games, their dynasty could fall at any time during the game.

This required some learning things about Google Sheets that I'd never even considered possible. Gemini was a huge help in creating formulas that were quite complex (at least for my skills.) When it was done, students could simply click a checkbox to "reset" the game to start a new dynasty. It's cool!

I also wanted the visuals to stand out, so I started using images from Mulan as much as possible. I wanted a 90s Disney animation theme throughout. It took about 30 minutes of searching for images before I remembered AI existed. I used the now-dead Google Whisk (WHY GOOGLE? IT WAS SO GOOD!) to generate images "in the style of 90s Disney animation" and they came out great.

Then I remembered AI existed again so I kept plussing. Whisk (and now to a lesser extent its replacement Flow) can animate static images. I took those AI generated 90s style animation frames and turned them into animations. Now, every event in the game was fully animated. Very cool and a big step forward from previous games.

Then I remembered AI existed a third time. If I was going this far, why not go all the way? I voice-cloned the announcer from Mortal Kombat and that disembodied voice became the narrator for the game. He would be the one to silence students after every high-energy discussion. I made his calls for quiet increasingly over-the-top until he finally yells, "CEASE THE MOVEMENT OF YOUR VOCAL CHORDS!" It added a great touch of fun and whimsy.

With some further clean up work by my colleagues, we ultimately had our magnum opus. This lesson truly demonstrates the best of everything I've got - collaboration, inquiry, narrative, graphics, sound. At the end, one student even begged me to make one more before the year ended. I didn't have it in me to do so, but don't be surprised if another This or That? makes the top 10 next year

---

This year brought challenges I've not faced in my two decades plus career. It wasn't a bad year, and was still far better than any of my three years at the high school, but it was hard. I hated dropping activities I've done for decades because I had to spend time on such simple things as how to write a complete sentence. It also bothered me that within 15 seconds of ANY video I'd have a number of students looking down, looking up, looking around - looking anywhere but at the screen. It's an odd shift and I'm not quite sure how to handle it going forward.

As usual though, thankfully, most of my challenges were with students who weren't mine. While I had some discipline issues throughout the year, they were minor and easily managed. My students who got to know me as a real person saw that I was doing all I could for them and there wasn't anything to be gained from misbehaving.

It was the blatant "Nah" I would get from kids in the hall when I told them to put away ear buds, watch their language or stop touching each other that truly drained me. That, or when they'd just straight up lie about something that I literally just watched them do.   We've created a world where 13 year olds think they do not have to be subject to any authority. This is what post-modernism does. It's dangerous and I don't know how much longer our system can hold with it as our overarching principle. 

This, coupled with the continued death of online collaboration, has made teaching much tougher than it has been historically. Teachers Pay Teachers, I still hate what you've done to us. There is no good outlet for talking teaching any more. New teachers don't even know what they are missing. 

But, I'm not quite ready to give up yet. My closing survey showed students overwhelmingly felt they learned more in my class than any other. (Notably many said because I made them learn something every day... which I thought was the norm - guess not.) Fewer than in the past, however, said it was their favorite. I'm fine with that. They suggested I let them sit with their friends more often (nope) or let them use their phones (nope). I'm not giving them free days every Friday, or frankly any Friday. I'm not giving extra credit for coloring pages or hidden image puzzles. I'm already looking ahead to August and preparing for the fight yet again. Thank you to those who continue to come along with me!