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8/1/2020

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Best Practices for Virtual Learning

 
By Matt Doran

Like many districts throughout the country, our schools will be starting back in full virtual mode this fall. Using the Community of Inquiry Framework, I have synthesized some best practices for virtual (or blended) learning classrooms in the infographic below. 
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3/23/2020

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Teachable Moments during the COVID-19 School Closure

 
By Matt Doran

​What can you do to continue the learning at home during the extended school closure? If you are a social studies teacher or interested parent, you really don’t need the latest temporarily-free app. Instead, pose these three questions:
  1. What makes a government action legitimate?
  2. How should governments balance individual rights with the common good?
  3. Do citizens trust the government? 

Watch/read the news and write a daily journal reflection on these questions. When the crisis is over, you will have created a new primary source about this event. Then, go back through history and make connections and comparisons across time and place. Here is a historical look at question 3 since 1958 from the Pew Research Center: Public Trust in Government: 1958-2019. 

​Your students will learn way more from this exercise than filling out digital worksheets.
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3/15/2020

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History Gives Perspective in Times of Crisis

 
By Matt Doran

In times of crisis, history helps us keep things in perspective. Seventy-five years ago, men and women of the Greatest Generation were fighting on the battlefields and working in the factories to defend democracy. Worldwide, more than 15,000,000 soldiers and 45,000,000 civilians died.
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My maternal grandfather, Pfc. Fred Rish, wrote these words on March 15, 1945 from the Philippines:
Dear Mom:

Yes, I am still alive; just too busy fighting to write any sooner. I have lived through Hell these past couple weeks, but I haven't had a bullet touch my skin yet. I've had at least a hundred go through my clothes and equipment! I guess I am just plain lucky. If you think you have mountains back there, you ought to see where the Japs are dug in! This is the hardest fighting country you can imagine.

I don't know when I will get a chance to write again, so please be patient. I still haven't gotten any mail, so I don't know what to write. It's been 2 months since I got a letter from Freda.
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I hope you are well and happy. Say hello to Pop and all the rest. And thanks for the prayer -- I need it.
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Your Son
Fred
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​Read the full collection of letters at WarMemory.com.
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1/3/2020

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On Chronology

 
By Matt Doran

Chronology is a peculiar thing. The television show Wonder Years aired from 1988-1993 and depicted events 20 years earlier—1968-1973. The Arnolds lived in the postwar suburbs. Jack was a Korean War veteran who worked for a defense contractor. Karen was a counterculture hippie. Winnie’s brother died in Vietnam. All of these events seemed so distant at the time.
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An equivalent show beginning today would depict the years 2000-2005. What would the themes include? 9/11, Iraq, West Wing, flip phones, Hurricane Katrina? These don’t seem so distant.
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11/29/2019

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Reflections on Barry Beyer's Practical Strategies for the Teaching of Thinking

 
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By Matt Doran

​Barry Beyer’s works on thinking skills from the 1980s and 1990s still speak to the epistemological challenges of the 21st century. Although the context and application have changed in the social media age, the skills are enduring. Beyer notes that critical thinking involves both cognitive operations and a set of dispositions. These dispositions include an awareness of the need to evaluate information, a willingness to suspend judgement, respect for reason and evidence, and a desire to consider multiple perspectives.

These dispositions are essential to information literacy and democratic participation in the present era. A disposition for fact-checking is a necessary precondition for engaging in this practice. We must first be committed to embracing the weight of evidence, regardless of whether it supports our presuppositions. We must be willing to overcome the draw of confirmation bias to arrive at reasoned conclusions.
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This understanding of critical thinking has important implications for civic education. Learning targets that emphasize knowledge and skills must be accompanied by those that cultivate the necessary dispositions for critical thinking.
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9/25/2019

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Let's Talk about Presidential Impeachment

 
By Matt Doran

The impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868, as with all of the Reconstruction Era, provides a good lens for the study of historiography—the history of historical writing/interpretations. How have historians answered the question: Was the impeachment of Andrew Johnson’s justified? 

Early American history texts presented the Johnson impeachment as an outrageous overreach—part of a broader interpretation in the era of Jim Crow that portrayed Reconstruction as too radical. 

From David Saville Muzzey, A History of Our Country (1943)
Not content with reducing President Johnson to political impotence, the radicals were determined to drive him out of the White House. On the same day (March 2, 1867) that it destroyed the President’s governments in the South by the Reconstruction Act, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, which took from him the privilege, exercised by every President since Washington’s day, of dismissing the members of his own cabinet at his pleasure. It was an outrageous measure, designed merely as a trap to catch Johnson in a “violation” of the law and hence furnish a reason for bringing an accusation against him. When, therefore, the President dismissed his Secretary of War Stanton, who was a virtual spy in the cabinet in close alliance with the radicals in Congress, the House of Representatives impeached Johnson of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The Senate tried the case from March 30 to May 26, 1868; but in spite of the frantic efforts the radicals to secure a conviction, seven Republican Senators were honorable enough to place justice before partisan hatred and vote with the twelve Democrats for the President’s acquittal, making the vote (35 to 19) fall one short of the two thirds necessary for conviction. By this narrow margin the country was saved from the disgrace of using a clause of the Constitution as a weapon of personal and political vengeance against the highest officer of the land. 

​From Samuel Eliot Morrison, 
The Oxford History of the American People (1965)
The Radical leaders of the Republican party, not content with establishing party ascendancy in the South, aimed at capturing the federal government under the guise of putting the presidency under wraps. By a series of usurpations they intended to make the majority in Congress the ultimate judge of its own powers, and the President a mere chairmen of a cabinet responsible to Congress, as the British cabinet is to the House of Commons. An opening move in this game was the Tenure of Office Act of March 1867 which made it impossible for the President to control his administration, by requiring him to obtain the advice and consent of the Senate for removals as well as appointments to office. The next move to dispose of John by impeachment, so that Radical Ben Wade, president pro-tem of the Senate, would succeed to his office and title. 

Johnson, convinced the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional—an attitude later vindicated by the Supreme Court in Myers v. United States—countered in August 1867 by ordering Secretary Stanton, who had long been playing with the Radicals to resign. Stanton refused and barricaded himself in the war department. On 24 February 1868 the House of Representatives impeached the President before the Senate, “for high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution provides. Ten of the eleven articles of impeachment rang changes on the removal of Stanton, the other consisted of garbled newspaper reports of the President’s speeches. 

Although a monstrous charge preferred by George S. Boutwell, that Johnson was accessory to the murder of Lincoln, was not included, the impeach of Johnson was one of the most disgraceful episodes in our history. . . .

No valid grounds, legal or otherwise, existed for impeachment. Yet the Radicals would have succeeded in their object but for Chief Justice Chases’ insistence on legal procedure, and for seven courageous Republican senators who sacrificed their political future by voting for acquittal. . . . One more affirmative vote, and Ben Wade, president of the Senate, would have been installed in the White House. Then, in all probability, the Supreme Court would have been battered into submission and the Radicals would have triumphed over the Constitution as completely as over the South.

In the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, historians challenged traditional Reconstruction interpretations. Writing during the height of the Watergate investigation in 1973, Michael Les Benedict argued that impeachment was a legitimate response to Johnson’s efforts to undermine Reconstruction.

From Michael Les Benedict, "The Impeachment Precedent," New York Times (1973)

Andrew Johnson, however, was not nearly so innocent a victim. After the war, he arrogated to himself the entire responsibility for restoring civil government in the South—under his inherent war powers as Commander in Chief, he claimed—and denied that Congress had any authority in the premises. . . .

Johnson allowed—even encouraged—his Cabinet members when making appointments in the South to ignore the Congressional act requiring appointees to take an oath that they had never aided the rebellion. He and his Attorney General refused to enforce the Confiscation Act passed by Congress during the war, returning property which had been confiscated or abandoned by rebel former owners, taking it away from freed slaves to whom it had been promised and from charitable organizations which were using it for schools and orphanages. At the same time Johnson resisted with all his power efforts to guarantee equality before the law for Southern blacks.

When Congress, after long attempts to reach a compromise, finally set Johnson's Reconstruction program aside in 1867 and authorized military commanders in the South to supervise a new one, Johnson used his power as President to obstruct it, encouraging Southern resistance, ordering commanders to operate in such a way as to frustrate the law, and removing those commanders whom he could not control.

The Republican response, contrary to established opinion, was uncertain and hesitating. Some of the more extreme Radical Republicans favored impeachment and removal by the summer of 1866, but others claimed that the President could be impeached only if he actually violated a law. Despite his obstruction of some laws and his refusal to enforce others, they insisted, he had not yet done that. . . . Not until February, 1868, as the President seemed on the verge of making a shambles of Congress Reconstruction policy, did the House finally impeach him—and then only after he at last seemed to have violated a law, ominously removing the Secretary of War without waiting.

​Like Benedict, Eric Foner has shown little sympathy for Andrew Johnson in his four decades of writing on Reconstruction.


From Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (2010).  
Andrew Johnson was self-absorbed, insensitive to the opinions of others, unwilling to compromise, and unalterably racist. If anyone was responsible for the downfall of his presidency it was Johnson himself. With Congress out of session until December 1865, Johnson took it upon himself to bring about Reconstruction, establishing new governments in the South in which blacks had no voice whatever. When these governments sought to reduce the freedpeople to a situation reminiscent of slavery, he refused to heed the rising tide of Northern concern or to budge from his policy. As a result, Congress, after attempting to work with the President, felt it had no choice but to sweep aside Johnson's Reconstruction plan and to enact some of the most momentous measures in American history: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which accorded blacks equality before the law; the 14th Amendment, which put the principle of equality unbounded by race into the Constitution; the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which mandated the establishment of new governments in the South with black men, for the first time in our history, enjoying a share of political power. Johnson did everything in his power to obstruct their implementation in 1868. Fed up with his intransigence and incompetence, the House of Representatives impeached Johnson and he came within one vote of conviction by the Senate. 
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9/21/2019

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Building a Civic Vision for Education

 
by Matt Doran

If we want to find enduring relevance in education, we must draw from the deep cultural foundations of history and philosophy, not economic and business principles. Education is a social institution with a civic mission. It's not enough to define what we want students to know and be able to do. We must also wrestle with the question: What do we want to students to value? College and Career Readiness is a necessary, but not a sufficient mission for schools. A more comprehensive vision needs to include College, Career, and Civic Life Readiness.

The Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools defines civic dispositions as a concern for others' rights and welfare, fairness, reasonable levels of trust, and a sense of public duty. Civic dispositions are crucial to democratic character formation, and the sustainability and improvement of constitutional democracy. If standards must drive our work, then we need a set of civic anchor standards to match those that define critical knowledge and skills. One good option is to pair some of the indicators from the C3 Framework with the Social Justice Standards from Teaching Tolerance.

From the C3 Framework:

Dimension 2. Civics: Participation and Deliberation: Applying Civic Virtues and Democratic Principles 
  • D2.Civ.7.9-12. Apply civic virtues and democratic principles when working with others.
  • D2.Civ.8.9-12. Evaluate social and political systems in different contexts, times, and places, that promote civic virtues and enact democratic principles. 
  • D2.Civ.9.9-12. Use appropriate deliberative processes in multiple settings.
  • D2.Civ.10.9-12. Analyze the impact and the appropriate roles of personal interests and perspectives on the application of civic virtues, democratic principles, constitutional rights, and human rights.
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Dimension 4. Taking Informed Action
  • D4.6.9-12. Use disciplinary and interdisciplinary lenses to understand the characteristics and causes of local, regional, and global problems; instances of such problems in multiple contexts; and challenges and opportunities faced by those trying to address these problems over time and place.
  • D4.7.9-12. Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning
  • D4.8.9-12. Apply a range of deliberative and democratic strategies and procedures to make decisions and take action in their classrooms, schools, and out-of-school civic contexts.

From the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards:

​Identity Anchor Standards
  • 1. Students will develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society.
  • 2. Students will develop language and historical and cultural knowledge that affirm and accurately describe their membership in multiple identity groups.
  • 3. Students will recognize that people’s multiple identities interact and create unique and complex individuals.
  • 4. Students will express pride, confidence and healthy self-esteem without denying the value and dignity of other people.
  • 5. Students will recognize traits of the dominant culture, their home culture and other cultures and understand how they negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces.

​Diversity Anchor Standards
  • 6. Students will express comfort with people who are both similar to and different from them and engage respectfully with all people.
  • 7. Students will develop language and knowledge to accurately and respectfully describe how people (including themselves) are both similar to and different from each other and others in their identity groups.
  • 8. Students will respectfully express curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and will exchange ideas and beliefs in an open-minded way.
  • 9. Students will respond to diversity by building empathy, respect, understanding and connection.
  • 10. Students will examine diversity in social, cultural, political and historical contexts rather than in ways that are superficial or oversimplified.

Justice Anchor Standards
  • 11. Students will recognize stereotypes and relate to people as individuals rather than representatives of groups.
  • 12. Students will recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination).
  • 13. Students will analyze the harmful impact of bias and injustice on the world, historically and today.
  • 14. Students will recognize that power and privilege influence relationships on interpersonal, intergroup and institutional levels and consider how they have been affected by those dynamics.
  • 15. Students will identify figures, groups, events and a variety of strategies and philosophies relevant to the history of social justice around the world.

​Action Anchor Standards
  • 16. Students will express empathy when people are excluded or mistreated because of their identities and concern when they themselves experience bias.
  • 17. Students will recognize their own responsibility to stand up to exclusion, prejudice and injustice.
  • 18. Students will speak up with courage and respect when they or someone else has been hurt or wronged by bias.
  • 19. Students will make principled decisions about when and how to take a stand against bias and injustice in their everyday lives and will do so despite negative peer or group pressure.
  • 20. Students will plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world and will evaluate what strategies are most effective.




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9/6/2019

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The Importance of Elementary Social Studies

 
By Matt Doran

Those who believe the directive to focus on literacy requires less attention to social studies have failed to understand literacy or social studies. It is true that reading skills help students in other content areas. But the converse is also true: A content-rich curriculum provides the necessary vocabulary and context for successful reading comprehension.

The Council of Chief State School Officers has summarized the importance of social studies in the elementary grades. 
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​Nell Duke, Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, explains the importance of teaching Social Studies and Science in the elementary grades.
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7/18/2019

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On Cognitive Dissonance

 
By Matt Doran

My social media posts typically fall well behind the news cycle (if they even make to publication). Rather than retweeting and linking to articles about the issue du jour, I try to use social media platforms in educative ways that promote contemplation and reflection.

One question many have recently asked: How is it that seemingly decent people justify and rationalize fundamentally deplorable policies and leaders? The psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance helps us understand why individuals will often "explain away" the indefensible. Cognitive dissonance refers the mental discomfort that results from contradictory beliefs, or when our beliefs run contrary to our behaviors (especially in light of new evidence). We seek consistency in our attitudes and perceptions. When what we believe is challenged, something must change in order to reduce the dissonance (lack of agreement).

The need for dissonance reduction is especially acute when it involves beliefs about the self. Everyone wants to believe they are fundamentally good people who make good decisions (about health, finances, politics, etc). But sometimes the evidence mounts against us. In government and politics, this happens when parties and leaders engage in actions and policies that violate clear moral and ethical boundaries. To reduce the dissonance, supporters must change a belief--either I'm not so good at making decisions after all, or the actions/policies are justified.

Aesop's fable, the Fox and the Grapes, helps illustrate cognitive dissonance. The Fox noticed a beautiful bunch of ripe grapes hanging from a high vine. After multiple attempts to jump for the grapes, the Fox fell short. He finally concludes that the sour grapes are not worth it after all. Clearly, the Fox believed two things: the grapes are desirable and he had the ability to reach them. But when the evidence showed the falsity of his belief about himself, the Fox reduces the dissonance by rationalizing that the grapes really aren't so desirable.

Here's a good explanation of cognitive dissonance: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012
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7/11/2019

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Wineburg on Media Literacy

 

​From Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone) by Sam Wineburg. 

"Wedging a media literacy course into an already crammed curriculum is like slapping a new coat of paint on a house that's teetering on its foundation: it lends to better street appeal but it does little to address the underlying problem.
Making headway will entail more than a four-week media or news literacy course. It will require a fundamental reorientation to the curriculum. . . .

What once fell on the shoulders of editors, publishers, librarians, and subject matter experts now falls on the shoulders of each and every one of us. The big problem with this new reality is that the ill-informed hold just as much power at the polling station as the well-informed. Reliable information is to civic intelligence what clean air and water are to public health. . . .
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Jefferson's solution is no less apt today than it was in his era. 'If we think [the people] are not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.'"

​- Sam Wineburg

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