Disrupting Humanities

Just finished Disrupting Thinking by Beers & Probst (2017). I took a quick break from my usual reads on Inquiry to work on my language arts needs. But no sooner had I reached the bottom of the second page of text, did the authors’ words bring me back to Inquiry - and my summer plans … for social studies!:

“Disruptions start with a thought that something needs to be better. (p.7)

After years of continually moving my curriculum towards true humanities (integrated language arts & social studies) and towards more and more inquiry based across the board, I decided enough pussy-footing around - this summer I'm doing it, going whole hog - I'm redoing my curriculum from start to finish… and getting a group together to re-do it with!

After Beers’s and Probst’s idea of disrupting thinking to initiate doing, they ask two questions that I've often asked myself:

1. What needs to change?
2. What assumptions make that change hard?

I knew SS had to be reconfigured from a chapter-by-chapter, seemingly isolated civilization followed by another seemingly isolated civilization to something else, something deeper and bigger. The kids think only one society exists at a time and lack the context of time and place to understand his one civilization connects to another. And it was not due lack of my teaching ability - it was how I was ‘doing’ history.

I know my curriculum has to change  - it has to be more responsive to kids’ needs for critical thinking and critical understanding of key concepts. Content must be taught and learned in more engaging and memorable ways - I know this way is through inquiry.

For me, I am not sure what assumptions make that hard to change what has always been. Time? I teach middle school so there is never enough time. We have 50 minute periods. I could create a 90 minute block if I didn’t share one of the cores or there were no students pulled out for services. But honestly, I think that is the only real obstacle to creating change. I do not have administration breathing down my neck to follow their agenda of compliance. I am trusted to make sound curricular decisions in the best interest of the students. I am lucky.

So all I have to do is start changing it up.