Social studies teachers are pretty good at considering vertical alignment in terms of content. But skills? That would likely require a much longer conversation.
A lot can happen in a year.
I saw it with my own eyes in the skill development of my last set of 11th grade AP U.S. History students. Over the course of a single school year they made profound shifts away from composing historical narratives to crafting historical arguments.
Whenever I passed back a set of essays, l inevitably heard grumbling and groaning as students surreptitiously slipped their papers away into folders. I knew that sometime later, each one would cautiously peek at the rubric and privately agonize over my feedback. I know these striving students took each critique to heart. But I wanted them to recognize and own the amazing growth I was witnessing in all of them as historical writers and thinkers.
At one moment, while passing back yet another set of essays, I asked students to reflect on their writing, in writing. After gathering all of their substantial pieces from the year, students needed to look for patterns in their writing and in my feedback over time. I asked them to consider what skills they had improved upon and how they thought they had made those strides, as well as to identify just one skill that they wanted to focus on in our last weeks before the AP exam.
As I prepared to say goodbye to that group of students in the Spring, I often found myself pondering what would come after Exam Day in the story of their learning, because while all of them grew tremendously over the course of that year, that day is certainly not The End. As one student wrote in her reflection, “I am proud of how far I have come with it, however, there is always room for improvement.“ I wanted my students to continue to improve their disciplinary literacy skills long after they left my classroom. APUSH, however, was the last in the sequence of Social Studies classes for this cohort of students. That meant that all I could do was hope that the educators who had the good fortune to work with these students in the future would continue to help them hone the skills that they had invested so much effort to grow in our year together.
At the same time as I ended my decade-long stint as an APUSH teacher for 11th graders, I took on the new challenge of teaching U.S. History to 9th graders as a result of a course sequence change in our curriculum. So after spending most of my career as the teacher at the end of students' Social Studies journey, my role reversed, and I became the teacher at the beginning of their high school career. That meant that I became responsible for setting up students with the skills they needed to be successful in my colleagues' Social Studies classes. This new position led me to consider how I could work effectively with my colleagues in the later grades to extend the trajectory of students' skill development beyond a single school year. And the new role I've taken on this year as an Instructional Coach has now given me an amazing opportunity to support teachers across grade levels to do this work.
Over the years I have found that our department is pretty good at considering vertical alignment in terms of content. As content-area teachers, we tended to think a lot about what students should know by the end of the year, but perhaps less about what they should be able to do. Moreover, it's easy for a World History teacher to casually check in with a U.S. History teacher to ask, “How much time did you spend on the causes of World War I last year?” and for them to respond with “Oh, MAIN causes? We really dug into that. You should be able to do a quick review on militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism and you'll be good to go.”
But skills? That would likely require a much longer conversation.
Don't get me wrong, we made genuine attempts to vertically align our disciplinary literacy work. I am certain that at some point we created a file somewhere that identified the skills we planned to focus on at each grade level. Alas, I couldn't find that plan in a search of my Google Drive files. . . which means we probably didn't have time to look at it very much after we initially put it together. And even when our entire building committed to a non-fiction writing initiative several years ago, we weren't able to move beyond our work in grade-level PLCs to meaningfully scaffold the argumentative writing skills that all of us in the department were working so hard to cultivate.
Despite these fits-and-starts, I'm not willing to give up on the vertical alignment of skill work, because I know that one way of easing our individual instructional burdens is to take on greater collective responsibility for the education of our students.
And I know that real skill-building takes real time. One year is simply not enough.