Rachel Sarnoff
M.S. Ed. Candidate, May 2016 | The University of Pennsylvania
B.A. June, 2012 | Dartmouth College
Context & Rationale
The Friends Select School social studies curriculum in third and fourth grade focuses on American history and aims to take advantage of Philadelphia’s unique position at the center of colonial America and the American Revolution. Later this spring, my class will have the opportunity to visit Barclay Farmstead as well as Pennsbury Manor to directly experience “the power of place” (FSS website, 2015), but before they arrive at the portion of colonial history that occurred in their own neighborhood, they need to know what came before in order to appreciate both the productive and destructive forces that the colonists brought to the New World. Prior to the unit on the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony, students studied Jamestown through a read-aloud of Blood on the River, a novel told from the perspective of the page to John Smith. The book explores the challenging day-to-day lives of the colonists, and their conflict with the Native Americans, and certainly does not paint a purely rosy picture of the early colonization of the “New World”. As a final project to this unit, students wrote a letter home, as though they were a Jamestown colonist, persuading a family member not to be lured by the promises of wealth and to avoid joining them in America. This and other activities demonstrate the school’s commitment to giving students a well-rounded view of historical events.
Fitting in
Pushing back
This progressive approach to history has influenced the development of my Mayflower unit, for I do not feel pressure to conform to the traditional Thanksgiving story of the Pilgrims and their rosy trip to the New World. Instead, I feel welcome to explore the tensions among those on the ship (e.g., between the Puritans and the others) as well as the complex relationships between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. As evidenced by the aforementioned letter assignment, my students also already have some experience taking on the perspective of a person in history, and thus, role-playing seems to be a suitable approach to this unit.
That said, in the letter assignment, student were not really asked to consider why they were looking at history this way, or to critically analyze their own point of view or that of the story's narrator. In fact, as far as I have seen, social studies for my students has primarily consisted of read-alouds with some class discussion around the events of the story and a brief and heavily structured wrap-up activity. This introduces some challenges to the unit, as students are not used to being asked to do much critical thinking with the social studies content, or to work with it during other times in their school day. In this unit, I will challenge them to integrate the information that they learn from our texts into the writing that I will ask them to do for Morning Work (as outlined in the Curriculum Materials), but this may take a bit more explanation and practice based on their prior experience.
Similarly, the journal prompts that I will present to my students during Morning Work will be out of the ordinary for them. Most days, Morning Work is math-related. Twice this term I have inserted a writing prompt, instead, to relate to the Language Arts unit we are doing on narrative writing, and while not shocking to them, the students are clearly not well-practiced in completing quick writes in response to a prompt. Their entries often come in with incomplete sentences or little detail, so I believe that regular journaling for this unit will be both challenging and important practice for this class.
One conversation that my mentor and I are having repeatedly with our students is about the importance of trying things that are difficult for us, and not feeling discouraged when it is hard. The second half of third grade really steps up in intensity in the math curriculum, and I notice my students feeling more stressed out about getting their work done "right." I think that that challenges of this unit are accessible ones that will be playful enough for students to find motivation and joy in sticking through them. Two primary ways that I will make the unit accessible and bring the students into the fun of studying history is through read alouds and role play.
Integrating narrative
The topic of the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony is not the specific content of my choosing. Instead, this is what my teacher always covers at this time of the school year, between Jamestown and the American Revolution. It is my impression that she usually gives this pretty cursory treatment, a quick interlude between two books that students really enjoy (Blood on the River and Fever, 1793). The book she uses is If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1621, a somewhat silly informational text in question and answer format. To be perfectly honest, this book did not really catch my attention, and I imagine it is not very engrossing to the students, either. It is not, however, contradictory to the unit I am planning, for it complements the role-playing approach, putting the readers in the shoes of the passengers. It is my belief, however, that students benefit from a deeper narrative, compelling characters, and a more complex story in order to connect with history (Levstik & Barton, 2011). Similarly, telling the story through muliple texts avoids the "paragon of clarity" that Brown and his colleagues argue lead people to "overestimate" mastery of any material (17). It is for these reasons that I have chosen to weave together the narrative of compromise and conflict that Philbrick paints in Mayflower, with Pilgrim’s Voices, and real-life depictions in National Geographic’s Mayflower 1620. I will also pepper the unit with some of the fun facts of the previously used book, in order to satisfy my Classroom Mentor.
History is interpretive
I believe that this text set also invites the students to inquire and explore the topic, rather than just take one book’s version of the story. This topic is interesting to me because it is virtually inevitable that most of my students will already have some familiarity with the Mayflower, or that they at already think that they know the story. However, a large part of what I want them to learn is that "knowing" history is an overstatement. By presenting different accounts of the time period, and assigning students different roles through which they should consider the events, I believe I will help them realize that history is, in fact, interpretive (Levstik & Barton, 2011). This is an aspect of historical study that to me is both enthralling, and incredibly frustrating! That is, the mystery is very intriguing, and yet it is difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that there may no “right answer” to much of history. Instead, history is about exploring motivation, cause, effect and consequences. These are the types of questions that I will pose to my students in this unit (as outlined in the Curriculum Maps), rather than fact-based recall questions. Luckily, for both my students and me they do not take standardized tests and so our social studies unit is not accountable to drilling any particular content for an external test. Instead, these conceptual understandings may be elevated to the primary focus of study.
Kids will be kids!
Developmentally, I believe that the narrative-based, role-play approach to this unit is developmentally appropriate for the third graders I teach. It fits not only with their academic work this year (as described above) but also with the way they choose to play in their free time. At recess I frequently witness my students role-playing, taking on different roles in a family, or adult professions that they know something about. This is not the way all of the children play, but just as all children play differently, so too do children learn in different ways. I have designed this unit to have a variety of ways in which students can engage in the material such that those with different learning styles as well as different intelligences (Gardner, 1991) can be successful.
Role play, in this context, does not necessarily mean skit-like performances. Instead, students will each receive a passenger role that they will maintain over the course of the unit in order to have a specific perspective to look "through". One compelling aspect of the Mayflower is that we actually have some information about all of the real people who sailed on it, so this will help the students connect more concretely with history. Because the information that we have is limited, however, students will also have the opportunity to use their imaginations, and extend facts to make some inferences in their journal entries. The other way in which I hope that assuming the role of a passenger will be useful in this unit will be in helping students to step into the "whole" that we will simulate in our fractions lesson (See Lesson Plan 2). I hope that breaking the group into its historical "fractions" will help the students who may not understand fractions on paper "feel" the parts instead.
In attempting to value the diverse strengths that my students bring to the table, I will offer a variety of options that students might choose for their performance tasks in this unit. For example, while students are responding to their journal prompts, I will not mandate the length of response or style of writing. If, for example, a student is able to convey their character’s perspective better through illustration or poetry, I will not require prose. These performance tasks are not designed to assess students' writing skills (though those will be good to observe to a certain extent), so if the technicalities of writing are getting in the way of students expressing their thoughts, I will also consider offering the opportunity for dictation. I will be able to re-assess and adjust these assignments nimbly by reading the journals daily. Regardless of any accommodations I deem necessary, however, all performance tasks will require that students engage in higher-order thinking (Bloom) and this form of differentiation will still hold all students to similarly high standards (i.e., drawing will not simply be seen as a shortcut for those who are not good writers) (Tomilinson, 2006).
Throughout the unit, I will be able to assess my own unit plan, and the extent to which it is living up to my hopes for it (as described in this rationale) both through students’ performance on the assessments, but also through their attitudes and feedback as expressed during our daily morning and closing circles. Fortunately, this is already a part of my students’ daily school routine, and I will be able to sustain it in order to “get the pulse” so to speak, of my students throughout the unit (Denton & Kriete, 2000). My students' actions and reactions outside of our structured unit activities are actually of utmost importance to me, for I have one broader contextual motivation for this unit that will doubtlessly take more than two weeks to teach, but I will hope to cultivate through our lessons. In their day-to-day interactions, my students are having trouble being nice to each other. They are quick to react, blame, or assume the worst in the actions or words of others. By learning to consider things from another's point of view, first academically, but then perhaps socially and emotionally, I hope that they may begin to step outside of their own feelings to consider those of another, and alter their behavior accordingly.