Tag Archives: questioning/inquiry

Independent Practice: The Crusades

Here is a independent practice worksheet on the Crusades, which is probably useful for social studies teachers.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Hagia Sophia

Here is a reading on the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and the comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. This is a key piece of Late Antique architecture in one of the crossroads of the world. It’s hard to imagine why students shouldn’t know about this building and this history it represents.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: Mass Extinction

The horrendous heat here yesterday moved me to cull from my files and post this Cultural Literacy worksheet on mass extinction. It’s hard to see a time when, well, henceforth, this will not be timely material.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Independent Practice: Niccolo Machiavelli

Can you use this independent practice worksheet on Niccolo Machiavelli? At my school, we teach him (never, alas, hitting on key concepts he represents, like “political science” or “political philosophy”) in the freshman global studies cycle.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Commodore Matthew Perry and Japan

If you teach global studies or world history, I expect you might be able to use this reading on Commodore Perry and Japan and the comprehension worksheet that attends it. When I taught sophomore global studies for the first time last year, I was surprised to learn that the curriculum the administration of my school prescribed didn’t introduce students to the key concept implicit in this material, namely gunboat diplomacy.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: Mississippi

Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the state of Mississippi that might be useful for a variety of lessons.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Cultural Literacy: Pandemic

Teachers working in social studies or science may find this Cultural Literacy worksheet on pandemics useful. For a literacy connection, nota bene the Greek root dem in this word; it means people, and shows up in other words like democracy and demography, both words related to people. If you look at the post two above this one, you’ll in fact find a word root worksheet on that Greek word root.

Pan, another Greek root, simply means all. You can see that these two word roots, which meet in the noun pandemic, give students an opportunity for some synthetic thinking about these two roots and the words in English they produce.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

A Lesson Plan on Rhetorical Forms in Argumentation

At my school, teachers in all four common branch subjects assign research papers as a matter of academic routine. Unfortunately, as far as I’ve seen and therefore know, nobody on the faculty has developed explicit instructions and materials teaching the numerous skills involved in assembling research, let alone judging, organizing and synthesizing it. Nor does anyone teach argumentation (I assume it goes without saying that we have no debate or forensics team), a key skill for composing a synthetic research paper.

For years, this rankled me as the bad practice it clearly is. Last year, I finally resolved to do something about it: I wrote this unit plan on argumentation, which I titled “Arguing Your Case.” All of this work is adapted, as the unit plan explains in its “Methods and Materials” section,  from Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s excellent manual They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2017). As I write this, the Third Edition lies before me on my desk; this is a textbook, evidently, that will go into numerous editions.

But the gravamen of the book–using basic rhetorical figures to structure argumentative discourse–will certainly remain the same. I’ve already posted the first two lessons from this unit (you’ll find them here and here). Here is the third lesson plan from the “Arguing Your Case” unit, this one on using the “They say” and “Standard views” procedure for laying out, in one’s argument, the current research, conventional wisdom, or what have you, on a particular subject. I use this context clues worksheet on the noun discourse to open this lesson, Finally, here is the combination of a learning support and worksheet that students use to get a sense of how to perform the academic task at hand.

I wrote this unit for more advanced students than I usually teach. If you plan to use this material with struggling learners, particularly kids with low levels of general or academic literacy, you will almost certainly need to edit the texts in the worksheet, which, frankly,  I cribbed from The New York Review of Books.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Independent Practice: Monarchy

Here is an independent practice worksheet on monarchy, which calls upon students to understand monarchy as a concept. I think I assigned this around the time the global studies class I co-taught started dealing with Medieval Europe.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Constitutional Convention

Here is a reading on the United States Constitutional Convention along with a comprehension worksheet to accompany it. This is basic material in United States history, so I can think of a lot of places, times, and manners in which to use it.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.