Critical Thinking and Social Justice Issues--Please Respond

Educators and trainers can follow steps to deepen critical thinking throughout lessons using Bloom's Taxonomy. Critical thinking and social justice go hand-in-hand in education. Here's a simple way to create a social justice critical thinking lesson based upon an event in history and relating it to a topic today. 

 

Critical Thinking Steps based upon Bloom's Taxonomy:

• Remember
• Interpret and Summarize
• Analysis
• Apply Knowledge
• Evaluation

Consider a topic to which you can apply the above deepening critical thinking process. 

For example:

1. Remember: Recall everything you know about social justice and women's rights.
2. Read/Summarize: Read and summarize an article/book about social justice in order to define one appropriate issue connected to a history curriculum and to students' prior knowledge, For example: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Right to Vote.
3. Apply Knowledge: Students will select an issue about social justice/women's rights. 
4. Analysis: Arrange students in groups to analyze how Staton helped to solve the women's rights voting issue from the book above.
5. Application: In the groups, apply similar methods to solve current issue by creating a list.
6. Evaluation: Collect lists and redistribute to each group (each group get's their peer groups' list) to evaluate problem solving methods. Each group adds ideas to list. 
7. Repeat process by passing group list to a new group for them to add to the idea list.

Create Master List of all issues to class to discuss vote on the best ideas for each issue. Graph data.
Before doing this week's assignment, think about changing the reading in the example above to another social justice issue connected to history and change website for information about related issues today for students selection in order to create ideas for solving the challenge. 

Template:

1. Remember: Recall everything you know about social justice and women's rights.
2. Read/Summarize: Read and summarize an article/book about social justice in order to define one appropriate issue connected to a history curriculum and to students' prior knowledge, For example: ___________________ (title related to a social justice issue of the past).
3. Apply Knowledge: Students will select an article/teacher-made document   list about the specific social justice issue described in the reading above that is current today. For example, ______________________________.
4. Analysis: Arrange students in groups to analyze how issue can be solved. 
5. Application: In the groups, apply similar methods to solve current issue by creating a list.
6. Evaluation: Collect lists and redistribute to each group (each group get's their peer groups' list) to evaluate problem solving methods. Each group adds ideas to list. 
7. Repeat process by passing group list to a new group for them to add to the idea list.
Create Master List of all issues to class to discuss vote on the best ideas for each issue. Graph data.
Please Add Ideas in Comments: What specific justice issue in history would you select articles for the above lesson template? 

University Courses Associated with Critical Race Theory

 

Many politicians are not educators. If they were they would be aware of conscientization: The action or process of making others aware of political and social conditions, especially as a precursor to challenging inequalities of treatment or opportunity; the fact of being aware of these conditions.

University courses that teach about conscientization are directly related to the idea of critical race theory and are vital for new teachers to understand at-risk students, students from lower socioeconomic classes of all races and English Language Learners. These students are often the focus of teacher-training university courses. 

 

Many courses that include conscientization and critical race theory reasoning are threatened to be canceled, along with any associated books that mention justice for all. In some states politicians promote fear that they will offend many parents because they present injustices throughout history toward oppressed and disadvantaged groups in society.

 

• Diversity and Change
• Methodology Cross-cultural Instruction
• Cognition, Language and Culture
• Language Development in Elementary Classroom
• Language Development in Secondary Classroom
• Meaningful Learning with Technology
• Multimedia and Interactive Technology
• Transformative Education Practices
• Comparative Education Systems
• Multidimensional Education
• Becoming a Teacher
• Identity, Inclusion and Equity
• Linguistics Academic Language
• Teaching Online
• Design and Process of Teaching
• Applied Critical Thinking
• Self as a Critical Thinker
  

Assessment and Rubrics

Utah Education Network

Instructionally sound assessment requires more than implementing meaningful tasks and standards. Teachers must develop the capacity to analyze student work, as well as the leadership ability to train students to do this analysis. The Rubistar website with you where you can create your own rubrics.

An assessment is an appraisal of the learner developed by the teacher observing a student and his or her work. An effective lesson plan should contain several opportunities for assessment throughout the plan. It can consist of pretests for determining what students already know, questioning intermittently throughout a lesson and quizzes. An evaluation is static and represented by a grade, a rank, or a score, that a student earns. Assessment is more dynamic, with reflective observation, whereas evaluation is static.  

Formative assessments that monitor progress are given more frequently than summative assessments (or evaluation), which usually occur at the end of a "learning cycle" to measure. Finally, learning outcomes affect your assessment and vice versa.

Essay Structure Made Easy

A thesis statement should be one or two sentences long. It should explain what your essay is about.  It can be in parts, so that it corresponds to the body paragraphs of your essay. It helps to outline your essay before you begin to write it.

The outline might be as follows:

I. Introduction and Thesis--Include the title of the work, the author's name and the year of publication in your introduction. Outline the main ideas of the article. Add a thesis that highlights one or more of the topics in the article that you reacted to. This aspect of the essay should be one paragraph long.

II. Body Paragraphs--Write three body paragraphs, each containing a topic sentence with details that support it. The topic sentence should relate to each part of the thesis. Include quotes from sources to support your claims.

III. Conclusion--Restate your thesis about the issue you are writing about in new words. Summarize the main ideas of the issue you are writing about.

The Four Parts of a Critical Response Essay

Critical Response essays stump many students. Consider writing it step by step in four parts.  This type of essay is usually  based upon a reaction you have to a source.

The outline might be as follows:

I. Introduction and Thesis--Include the title of the work, the author's name and the year of publication in your introduction. Outline the main ideas of the article. Add a thesis that highlights one or more of the topics  in the article that you reacted to. This aspect of the essay should be one paragraph long.

II. Summary--Include a summary of the article, along with  the who, what, where, why and how. of it. Consider creating an argument about something mentioned in the essay.  Transition into writing about the article to writing your reaction to a topic discussed in it.  This part of the essay can be one or two paragraphs long.

III. Analysis--Clearly state the  issue that that you are reacting to, so that you can identify what you are writing about in the remainder of the paper. Use quotes from the article and an outside source in order to argue about the issue. This portion can be several paragraphs long.

IV. Conclusion--Restate your thesis about the issue you are writing about in new words. Summarize the main ideas of the issue you are writing about. Synthesize new revelations you can think of about the article.

5 Great Free Resources for Online Learning in the Arts

Google Arts and Culture has virtual field trips.

Library of Congress contains films and video of historical events.

PBS Learning Media  brings you standards-aligned videos, interactives, lesson plans, and more.  

New York Times Learning Multimedia to find out what's going on in pictures and graphs. 

Smithsonian Learning Lab includes ways to develop your own interactive learning experiences-or adopt exemplars made by teachers and Smithsonian experts.

Distance Education Websites

Use these websites for distance education activities for K-12.

• Newsela
• Teachers PayTeachers
• Spelling City
• Slide Share
• Super TeacherWorksheets
• Flip Grid Allows students to record themselves.
• Edhelper
• Readworks for reading comprehension
• Freckle Math
• Khan Academy
• Kahoot Game-based learning 
• Mystery Science
• Listenwise--podcasts
 

 

Digital Resources that Support Online Learning at Home

It's an unfortunate situation to have children at home all day. They're used to being in school.

Here's a link, Resources that Support Distance Learning, that gives you some great online resources to help students whether you are a teacher or parent.

There are digital resources to content areas in ELA, math, writing, science, PE, history/social science and others to access at  https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/he/hn/appendix1.asp#six

Dozens of links connect you from to worksheets in  math to to the videos of Khan Academy. Sites are user friendly. For example in order to find a video on Khan Academy, all you do is search for the topic that you want the video on.

One caveat to the website is that a few of the links require you to sign up, which is unfortunate because they want a phone number.