American History Myth Busters Project: Exploring Summit School Curriculum

American History Myth Busters Project: Exploring Summit School Curriculum

By Joanna Murray

History Teacher

Last summer, along with Dr. Gaines and a team of other teachers and administrators, I was able to spend a week at Summit Schools Base Camp training to learn about the Summit Schools approach to personalized learning. There, I learned about the interesting components that make up the Summit Schools Model of Instruction. Developed by the teachers at Summit Public Schools, the PLP is an online tool that allows teachers to serve as instructional coaches while students set individual goals, create roadmaps to achieve them, learn content at their own pace, and engage in meaningful projects that connect to the real world.

This model includes:

Competency-Based Content Progression - Where students progress at their own pace through playlists of content and then take assessments on demand. 

Self-Directed Learning - Students set their own long-term goals and connect them to their daily actions.

1:1 Mentorship - Each student using the PLP has at least one adult mentor who works with them individually to set goals, make a plan to achieve those goals and develop Habits of Success. Because mentors monitor student achievement across all classes in the PLP, they can support the whole student during coaching conversations.

Understanding performance data - Student performance data in the PLP helps teachers understand trends at a glance, identify intervention opportunities, and provide quality feedback.

Facilitating Project-Based Learning - Teachers can create and customize projects for their students, provide feedback on student work and progress, and assess the final product on an interdisciplinary rubric of cognitive skills.

Project-Based Learning - Students build and demonstrate cognitive skills by working through rich, meaningful projects.

In an effort to learn more about the personalized approach to learning, and about the Summit Schools model of instruction, I have been engaging my US History students in a project called American History Myth Busters.  To prepare, I took components of this project from the Summit site, and transfered and customized them on the Hapara learning platform. There, students have been working through a series of menu options to complete the unit. The Project-Based Learning component of the Summit Schools model is framed around age and developmentally appropriate Cognitive Skills that are measured using a rubric. For the Mythbusters project, thus far, my students have mastered, or at least impoved in the Cognitive Skills of Comparing/Contrasting, Contextualizing Sources, Explaination of Evidence, and Point of View. Evidence of learning came as students completed a fairly complex essay that challenged them to analyze a poem about the story of Paul Revere's famous ride and compare what is written there to an article on Revere. Students had to use Evidence to support their claims. A challenge was allowing for students to learn at their own pace, in a self-directed manner, when it quickly became apparent that most of them had no idea how to write a well-crafted analysis essay and even less experience using evidence to support claims. To this end, I added many more resources to the original Mythbusters project to teach students how to write all parts of an analysis essay. Students were able to go back to each video to learn everything from how to write a strong introduction paragraph, to what goes into each body paragraph, and how to write a strong conclusion paragraph. Students went about the task of writing the essays at their own pace, but with a great deal of support not only from me, as I met with individual students in one-on-one conferencing, but also with college AVID students who were able to work with students one-on-one as well. Students also sent the essay drafts to me through Google Drive and I was able to send feedback to each in a customized manner toward helping them each grow in their writing skills. 

Now, most students have completed their essays and are on another part of the Myth Busters project. This is were I have seen even stronger evidence of students setting strong goals toward completion of a project. In this phase of the project, students were put into groups of 4-5. They started the project by engaging in a task to learn the differences between myth romantic exageration, folklore, other types of writing. Next, the group engaged in their first shared project as a group called the Spaceship project. They had to agree, based on a list of seven characters, who would be able to escape a dying planet and who would stay. This project was immediately followed by the students creating and signing a group contract. The idea was that, having spent time working on the Spaceshipproject, students learned about their groups' strengths and weaknesses, and would build their group contract goals and expectations around what they learned while doing the Spaceship project. The final project is for each group to choose a historical character or event in American history and develop a visual project using multiple presentation tools (a presentation platform, video, photographic images) to compare and contrast a mythical, romanticized version to a factual version of that person or historical event. Students must conduct research, toward this end, and cooperate to put together their final projects. At the end of this project, in addition to having mastered, or at least moved over o the rubric continuum, the additional cognitive skills of Multimedia in Oral Presentations, and Selection of Evidence. The project will also have them revisit the cognitive areas of Comparing/Contrasting, Contextualizing Sources, and Explanation of Evidence. All of these cognitive skills will be of great value as these students will soon gratuate and continue to use them in their years and high school and beyond.