In my last post, I wrote about how online learning presents teachers with an opportunity to craft learning experiences that promote greater degrees of student agency, which in turn have the potential to instill the sort of intrinsic motivation that many of us seek to cultivate in our own classrooms. With many of our students already navigating the classroom asynchronously, this seems like an opportune moment for this type of experimentation. For this post, I want to share another example of how I have been trying to inject more student agency into my teaching, this time at a slightly larger scale. For context, I was inspired by Eric Hudson's piece titled, "How to Design for Online Learning: Four Approaches to Nonlinear Curriculum," which introduces the idea of parallel units. The gist is that, rather than having all students move through a set sequence, they can pick and choose the order in which they engage with new material. I don't yet have the infrastructure in place to offer students quite this degree of choice in their learning experiences, so I decided to test this out on a smaller scale in my elective, "Religion in America". For context, students taking this course explore the history of religious freedom and religious tolerance in both the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and its application in the courts. In the past, I've allocated about a week for the exploration of anti-Catholicism in American history, which builds up to a common reading of Everson v. Board of Education (our second SCOTUS case of the course). This term, however, I decided to give students an option: they could explore the history of anti-Catholicism or they could explore the history of anti-Semitism, leading up to court cases relevant to their chosen tradition. Due to the fact that I had already developed a learning sequence for anti-Catholicism, it was easy enough to craft a parallel structure for student exploration of anti-Semitism. As you can see in the images below, students begin with a short background reading on their chosen tradition, which helps establish a common framework for understanding. They then have a chance to pick from a curated selection of primary sources, which provides an opportunity for a deeper dive into their chosen tradition (this was also a great opportunity to dig into our library's archives, which I plan to write about in a later post!). At this point in the learning plan, I wanted students to have an opportunity both to share what they had learned with each other and isolate deeper themes emerging in their engagement (recall that all students had explored Mormonism in the week prior, which provided a foundation upon which they could build). As you can see, I've become a fan of using Padlet, along with Project Zero's Visible Thinking Routines, as mechanisms to facilitate and capture this sort of thinking. Regardless of the platform you use, this is probably the most important step in the learning plan. It keeps students in touch with each other (always a challenge in online learning), it gives me a chance to provide formative feedback on emerging understandings, and it establishes an initial framework through which students will read their chosen Supreme Court case in the second half of the week. Having spent some time engaging with each other on Padlet, students who chose to explore the history of anti-Catholicism now read Everson v. Board of Education, which examines public reimbursement for bussing students to Catholic schools, while students who chose to explore anti-Semitism read Braunfeld v. Brown, which examines the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law requiring business to stay closed on Sundays. To bring everyone back together, I asked students to post to a common discussion board, which spills over into the following week. A few reflections in closing:
Developing parallel structures can have positive implications with respect to representation. In years past, Jewish voices had been largely absent from this course, yet developing the learning plan on anti-Semitism allowed me to rectify this. Making this change now has me wondering how I can leverage this type of parallel structure to incorporate a wider range of voices into other courses/units. Curating primary sources takes time. This was definitely the most time-consuming part of this process, as finding relevant sources necessitates both research and curation on the part of the teacher. That said, the fact that students had explored different traditions and different sources meant that there was an opportunity for authentic collaboration: students could look for similarities and differences between their chosen traditions, which in turn meant that I had to spend less time trying to craft tradition-specific discussion questions. Parallel Doesn't Really Mean Parallel. If anything, I think a braid might be a more appropriate metaphor here: students begin on independent tracks, come back together, return to independent engagement, and then reunite at the week's end. These moments of crossover strike me as particularly important, as they present an opportunity to leverage these independent pathways for deeper meaning-making and collaboration.
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AuthorKurt Prescott is a Humanities Instructor at Maret School in Washington, D.C. Archives
November 2020
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