Adding Pieces to the Vertical Alignment Puzzle

Jigsaw puzzles are one of my family’s favorite pastimes. We build on our dining room table, a location that becomes “homework central” for my kids during the school year. No time for puzzling then! But during the summer, we have the time and space to leave a puzzle set up for a few days. Whenever we pass through the dining room, each of us stops to put a few pieces together before moving on to our next task or activity.

In reflecting on my work with my problem of practice so far, I realize that I’ve approached it in much the same way as my family tackles our jigsaw puzzles. Embroiled in end-of-the-school-year activities last spring, I considered my problem in breaks between pressing tasks. Attended prom as a chaperone, then talked to my World History colleagues about the skills addressed in their project-based final exam. Graded my last summative assessment, then spoke with my mentors to glean their advice.

After storing away my classroom supplies, I investigated some scholarship that could shed light on my Teach Blue Fellows Problem of Practice, the vertical alignment of Social Studies skills. These short bursts of reading and discussion continued into the fall as I began leaning into my new instructional coaching responsibilities. Each new conversation and article is helping to build a picture of the work I plan to do over the coming months.

Kristin Phillips’ TEDTalk, “Spiraling the Curriculum to Get Sticky Learning,” validated so much of what I had already been thinking. How do we get learning to stick in our students’ minds? We need to practice it over and over again! Similar to my family’s jigsaw puzzle strategy, we space the learning, revisiting key concepts multiple times to practice and to deepen understanding. Rather than covering concepts in a single unit, we space the material in a repeated cycle of learning, waiting, and practicing. Educational research over several decades has shown that this spiraling of curriculum promotes greater retention of knowledge. What’s essential here is that we do this with KEY learning—we can’t do it with everything. In my mind, this is a perfect fit for Social Studies skills. In a history class organized by chronological units of content, only a limited amount of content meaningfully repeats. But historical thinking, reading, and writing skills are applicable to all of our content, and so we should be returning to these disciplinary skills throughout the year, and across courses.

The work of historians and social scientists encompasses a broad array of skills, such as analyzing maps and data, critically reading text-based sources, and corroborating and contextualizing historical interpretations. Asking the two history teachers that I’m partnering with to tackle all of these skills within the scope of our work over this school year would be overwhelming. In her introductory webinar on curriculum mapping, Janet Hale confirmed my instinct when she encouraged educators to go slowly as they map out what to teach at each grade level. Creating a cohesive plan that clearly communicates these decisions about curriculum design and instruction to teachers takes time.

To keep my problem of practice manageable, then, I’ve decided to focus my vertical alignment efforts on three skills over the course of 9th and 10th grade. Moreover, I will be limiting my work to a small slice of students. We are offering one section of a new 9th grade course in our curriculum this year—Accelerated U.S. History and Geography. This course is intended to prepare students to engage successfully with the rigorous work of our AP Social Studies classes in subsequent years, particularly AP World History in the 10th grade year. Since I taught AP US History for over a decade, I’m in an ideal position to support our Accelerated 9th grade teacher in scaffolding instruction in the skills her students will need in AP World History. Informal conversations with my AP World History colleague revealed that many of his students last year struggled with developing and supporting a thesis, as well as with constructing arguments based on primary sources, particularly arguments related to the long-and-short term causes and effects of events. My own work with 9th graders in the past few years, confirmed by discussions with my 9th grade colleagues, reinforced that these are challenging areas for which we should offer students more training and support. So this year I will be working with my two colleagues who teach Accelerated U.S. History and Geography and AP World History to vertically align the skills of developing historical claims, considering historical causation, and constructing historical arguments.

Scholarship on learning progressions has heavily influenced my plan for how to approach this complex work. Learning progressions are essentially paths of learning. They sequentially lay out the building blocks of skills and/or knowledge that students must achieve over several units, or years, in order to master an overall learning goal. Remember my family’s love of jigsaw puzzles? My children weren’t always the best helpers. It took a lot of time and practice with successively more challenging puzzles for them to master this skill. By starting with shape-sorting toys as babies, then moving on to wooden cut-out puzzles as toddlers, then to large-piece floor puzzles as young children, and so on, they now can enjoy building our 1000-piece family puzzles without frustration. That’s what learning progressions are all about—a gradual, supported movement toward mastery over a long period of time.

Songer, Kelcey, and Gotwals lay out a process for developing learning progressions that seems promising as a rough guide for my alignment work. First, they suggest creating preliminary learning progressions. Luckily, I already started to think about this work with one of my mentors in the spring and I’ve sketched out ideas for the building blocks on the path to mastering the skills I have selected. I’ve collected standards that address the skills from each of the various sets of standards for which Social Studies teachers are responsible, attending to patterns across the documents. And I have begun developing sets of student-friendly learning targets and success criteria for assessment of each building block in the progressions. This work is still in a draft phase, and I am awaiting feedback from my Social Studies collaborators (since teachers have so much free time in October, right?). But I hope to discuss their suggestions soon and make adjustments accordingly.

Next, I’ll work with my colleagues to develop and refine instructional activities and assessments that they can implement in their classrooms to support students’ movement along the progressions. Bob Bain’s work on meaning-making in history classrooms offers a variety of ideas in this vein. His suggestions about freewriting, dialogue creation, public reading, and double-entry note-taking on historical texts dovetail with my training in the Reading Apprenticeship framework. I hope to help my colleagues implement these historical literacy strategies in more explicit and purposeful ways to build their student’s causation and argumentation skills.

The more I consider my Teach Blue Fellows Problem of Practice—or the more pieces of my puzzle that come together—the more clearly I see that it has two levels. I’m working on creating a vertical alignment plan with my colleagues, but we’re also experimenting with instructional techniques to carry out that plan. The plan and its implementation operate symbiotically. Thus, it was helpful to read in Shea and Duncan’s work on the process of refining learning progressions that these learning pathways are just hypothetical—there is no universally-accepted type, number, or order of building blocks in any progression. Further, they argue that revision and refinement of learning progressions must be done inside of classrooms through instruction that is driven by the learning progressions themselves. So revision will be a critical step in my vertical alignment efforts. Based on observations in the classroom, critical reading of student work, and discussions with my colleagues, we will reorganize, condense, or add to the building blocks in our learning progressions to align with how learning happens within the context of the Social Studies department and our school as a whole. Hopefully this design and instructional work will offer some common practices and language for students across their years of skill development, ultimately facilitating learning that will stick beyond their experiences in our 9th and 10th grade history classrooms.

I’m excited for the work ahead, but this is some pretty heavy-duty lifting. Hopefully my kids will get their homework off of the dining room table so that I’ll be able to take some jigsaw puzzle breaks along the way.

Works Cited

Bain, Robert B., “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction.” Knowing, Teaching & Learning History: National and International Perspectives, edited by P. Stearns, P. Seixas, and S. Wineburg, New York University Press, 2000, pp. 331-353.

Hale, Janet, “Intro to Curriculum Mapping with Janet Hale: Part 1,” YouTube, uploaded by Chalk, 10 February 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLHgseaVawY.

Phillips, Kristin, “Spiraling the Curriculum to Get Sticky Learning,” YouTube, uploaded by TEDx Talks, 16 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jLANkgniSM.

Shea, Nicole A., and Ravit Golan Duncan. “From Theory to Data: The Process of Refining Learning Progressions.” The Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 22, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7–32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42000229.

Songer, Nancy B., Ben Kelcey, and Amelia W. Gotwals. "How and when does Complex Reasoning Occur? Empirically Driven Development of a Learning Progression Focused on Complex Reasoning about Biodiversity." Journal of Research in Science Teaching, vol. 46, no. 6, 2009, pp. 610-631.