Learning: Innovators
History Gets a New World View

And a new advanced placement exam will reflect this environmental world view starting next year.

History "traditionally has been seen through the eyes of the military and political elite," says Deborah Smith Johnston, an NEA member who trains teachers in the emerging field of environmental world history. "But now we're bringing in social history and biological and ecological views of world history. And it's not just about acid rain."

New approaches to world history, notes Johnston, who teaches advanced placement history and geography at Lexington High School in Massachusetts, have been making headlines since national standards were released in 1994.

"World history is no longer the story of Western civilization," she says, "or an 'us and them' kind of thing."

Instead, explains Johnston, world history today is increasingly looking at big themes, patterns of how the world operates across time and space.

An environmental perspective on world history, Johnston notes, helps students establish connections between, for example, the domestication of animals and plants and agricultural pollution.

Taking such an approach can illuminate why people settled where they did and how they used their land, why rice farming developed in China while the Incas used terrace farming.

Every year, Johnston and fellow teacher Julie Gauthie conduct Environmental History Teaching Institutes for secondary teachers. Sponsored by the World History Association, their training shows educators how to teach world history with an environmental history emphasis.

Environmental world history, Johnston points out, is a mainstream scholarly trend in world history.

"It can be integrated into geography, history, and any social studies course," asserts Johnston, "because it's dealing with big themes--disease, migration, and population."

Impact: The College Board has recognized this new view of world history. It will offer an Advanced Placement Program(r) world history course for the first time in 2001, with the first exam scheduled for May 2002.

Thirty-five college and high school educators will attend the National Teacher Training Institute at the World History Center at Northeastern University this July. They'll become the first teacher-trainers who'll shape the new AP course and guide its introduction into high schools around the world.

"This institute will get teachers ready in both content and preparation," says Johnston. "It's really exciting to see the caliber of teachers and their commitment to a whole new field of teaching."

For More: Contact Deborah Smith Johnston at dsjohnst@lynx.neu.edu. For more on the College Board's new AP program, check the Web at www.collegeboard.org/ap/worldhistory/.

Political Cartoons Draw Lessons

Innovator:William Ray Heitzmann

Job: Professor of education, Villanova University

Bright Idea: This election year is no laughing matter. But William Ray Heitzmann considers election 2000 a unique opportunity to use political cartoons to challenge students to think critically.

"Political cartoons are a wonderful springboard to classroom discussion," says Heitzmann, who's developed a model that uses cartoons to teach thinking skills to students of all ages.

Heitzmann, author of 50 Political Cartoons for Teaching U.S. History (Social Studies School Service), says that promoting thinking through cartoon interpretation requires a hierarchy of subskills.

"You can introduce concepts like symbolism and caricature very early," says Heitzmann.

Elementary students, for instance, can look at a caricature of a popular figure, compare it with a photo to see what's been exaggerated, and discuss whether the caricature is positive or negative.

Older students can learn how cartoonists use visual shorthand. All students recognize corporate logos, but far fewer know that the donkey and elephant represent political parties.

Heitzmann also suggests giving students a cartoon without a caption and letting them write one. Such an exercise can help build student interpretive skills.

For More: Contact Heitzmann at ray.heitzmann@villanova.edu. To learn about building a political cartoon library, using cartoons to teach about stereotypes, and more, go to www.nea.org/neatoday.

The Toll Standardized Tests Take

In his new book Standardized Minds (Perseus, $26), journalist and former community college professor Peter Sacks discusses how America's obsession with testing is impeding real learning.

What's driving the ever-increasing emphasis on standardized test scores? Politicians have focused on an issue that they think appeals to voters. It's seen as good to be "tough on schools."

Public schools are in great danger. The notion that test scores equal quality means that money will flow to schools that have the greatest increase in test scores. Money will flow out of those schools that don't do well. This accountability system establishes an underlying mechanism for market forces to take over education.

Our nation seems to be applying the same regulatory model to schools that we apply to underperforming savings and loan institutions. In the future, will regulators go in and seize non-performing schools, dissolve their assets, and sell them to the highest bidder?

What are the consequences for students? Policy-makers have failed to anticipate the consequences of turning classrooms into test-drilling centers. If they were really concerned about student-centered learning, they'd be listening to the research community about the effects of this testing.

We get students today who are bored with school because of this unrelenting emphasis on test results and on teaching to the tests. Low-scoring students get herded into a perpetual cycle of remediation.

Since high-stakes tests tap surface-level processes, we get students who can't think critically and can't apply tools of learning to real-world problems. Processes that can enrich learning are being set aside, because eveything that goes on in a classroom has to be tied to the standardized tests.

What's the effect on teachers? Just as HMOs have taken decisions out of physicians' hands, the professional nature of teaching is also being compromised.

Teachers are in a difficult position, but they should look at what their options might be locally. Holding workshops for parents and politicians is one. Armed with better information, voters could turn this around.

What's the alternative? We should hold schools accountable for meaningful outcomes that have a connection to the American economy. That economy demands citizens with creative, intelligent minds. Not everyone fits into the same box.

Standardized tests should be used on an informative basis--to gauge what's going on in a district, not to make decisions about individuals. You don't need to test everybody to do this. You just need a sampling.

For More: Visit www.nea.org/neatoday for Sacks's views on the future of standardized testing.

What High Schools Are Doing Right

Innovator:
Gwendolyn J. Cooke

Job:
Until recently, director of urban services at the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP); now superintendent for the Savannah-Chatham County school district in Georgia

Bright Idea:
Traditional American high schools are under fire. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture (see Innovators, January NEA Today), has stirred controversy with his call for high schools to end in tenth grade.

Gwendolyn Cooke takes strong issue with that stance.

"Yes, schools have to rejuvenate themselves," says Cooke, "but you don't have to cut school off at tenth grade to do that. This rush to adulthood worries me."

Research from the Minneapolis-based Search Institute, Cooke points out, shows that teens want families and schools to provide clear rules and consequences. She questions how an earlier college entrance could fulfill that need.

"Colleges are even more impersonal than large high schools," she notes. "Dormitories have few boundaries. Many colleges are graduating little more than half their students after six years. If you look at it that way, they're failing, too."

What to do? Cooke says more than 2,000 U.S. high schools have signed on to implement the reforms outlined in "Breaking Ranks: Changing an American Institution," a 1996 report from NASSP and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. These reforms include:

Making large schools smaller through an academy structure, where 500-600 students are grouped together with the same six teachers. This way no teacher is responsible for more than 90 students a term.

Keeping schools open 12 months a year and, in some cases, 12 hours a day, increasing flexibility for both students and staff.

Designing instruction around individual learning styles.

Enabling qualified high school students to accumulate college credits. "More than 1 million already are getting credits, but we need to encourage this more," says Cooke.

Offering substantive professional development.

It's important, Cooke adds, to remember that academic achievement is only one purpose of high school.

"High school is a transitional experience between childhood and adulthood," says Cooke. "Students need to learn how to live with others and mature in many different ways. It's a journey, and they should be allowed to experience it."

For More:
Visit the NASSP Web site at www.nassp.org.

Good information stands the test of time," says Barb Kapinus, a staffer in NEA's Teaching and Learning unit. Ideas for Teaching and Learning to Read, by Anne P. Sweet of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement, falls in that category.

The publication, now reissued by NEA, provides 10 interrelated ideas for transforming the teaching and learning of reading and offers a two-decade research context on what works in reading instruction.

"There have been dramatic gains in our knowledge about what works and how students learn," adds Kapinus. "It's important to inform the practice of today's educators involved in literacy instruction with these newer concepts."

For a free copy of Ideas for Teaching and Learning to Read, visit the Web at www.nea.org/readingmatters.