Brookline TAB January 18, 2007

Our Town/ Our Teachers: Historical Writing Bridges the Gap

There are no middle schools in Brookline, so educators at Brookline High School have the challenge of working with freshmen who come to them from eight different elementary schools.While most students are well prepared for the challenges of a high school curriculum, the type of instruction they have experienced can vary from one elementary school to another. Geoff Tegnell, K-8 Social Studies coordinator for Brookline, saw a way to help fix this issue for students. With a grant from the Brookline Education Foundation, Tegnell assembled a team of educators from the elementary schools and the high school to develop clearer guidelines and more common language for use in seventh- and eighth-grade historical writing. Tegnell and High School social studies educator Roger Grande talk here about their work.

Your Brookline Education Foundation grant funds you for two years of research in your field. What has the team set out to do first?

Geoff: We’re exploring best practices and what research says about [teaching and learning history]. We’re discovering the different ways of employing physical or conceptual evidence to present an argument. We’re looking outside our field to see how scholars help students present their ideas in a substantive way.

Roger: Historical writing is a complex skill, so this is a chance to explore that more, to be more discerning, to identify the components in teaching for successful writing, and to develop a more common language so that once the kids get to the high school, they’ll know what to expect and be ready to move on up to the next level

You are working with a group of teachers from multiple grades and disciplines. How does that work?

Geoff: We are working collaboratively, exploring new directions and new literatures. We are reading, discussing, and briefing each other on what we find.

Roger: It’s a way to get people at the elementary schools and high school talking with each other about writing and disseminating ideas about what is required for good historical writing.

What are the other benefits of working with educators from across grade levels?

Geoff: People have different strategies and different “languages” for teaching. Roger is familiar with what teachers are encountering at the high school, while the sixth-grade teachers give us insight into how they’re preparing students for seventh and eighth grade. We’re exploring the common ground in seventh- and eighth-grade instruction.

As a high school teacher, Roger, what is your level of concern about the writing abilities of incoming freshmen?

Roger: You hear publicly that the state of writing in this country is not very good. I’m not sure I agree with that. I’m pretty pleased with the attention we have paid to writing. It’s just that the range of writing skills is too broad.

Is there anything unexpected that has happened with the team’s work so far

Roger: It has been an evolutionary process, in which we are raising questions as we go along. For example, a mini-project that we decided to do that wasn’t part of our original plan was to assess what skills are being taught in earlier grades that will establish a foundation [for writing assignments in future grades].

What do you expect to accomplish by the end of the grant period?

Geoff: Our target is a seventh- and eighth-grade manual for writing argumentative essays. It would address concerns that high school teachers might have for incoming students.

Roger: We will have a scope and sequence of how we teach data collection, weighing of evidence, formatting of a five-to-six-page paragraph research essay, and how that develops from the early grades.

Anything else we need to know

Roger: There are so many other things for teachers to do that to get a group of them to say, “Let’s meet as much as possible” would have been very difficult without our Brookline Education Foundation grant.

Geoff: Our work is already changing the way I teach. We’re looking at how people conceive of history — why we study it, why it’s important. We want to help the kids connect to history in a personal way, to give them opportunities to construct ideas about history. The guide we develop will be much richer, much deeper, with the support of the grant.