Our department’s 9th grade foundational course is interdisciplinary and uses the C3 Framework; its called Geographic Cultural Studies. We developed it at the end of the 2021-2022 school year to address some of the skill and knowledge gaps we were seeing between rising freshman and our upper-level AP curriculum. Last year was the first year is was taught. The only students who did not take it were those freshmen who enrolled in AP Human Geography.
Courses and curriculum are always works in progress. This course has been successful so far and I am very happy with the rigor it has added to our curriculum, however, there are some adjustments needed to make it better. Some of the adjustments were related to content, so that it aligns better with our 10th grade World History course, and others are related to prioritization of the C3 standards and unit structure to support a transition to standards-based / competency-based instruction and assessment.
There is another consideration that pushed me to reflect deeply on this course. Last May I was honored to receive an EARCOS Action Research Grant in collaboration with another teacher at my school that is focused on studying student and parent perceptions around Standards-Based Instruction and Assessment. We hope this will help drive culture and policy changes as our High School transitions to a stronger system. I’ll be piloting Standards-Based instruction and Assessment in this 9th grade course since its the perfect opportunity to study student and parent perceptions at the start of their high school experience.
Course Practices
Beyond the standards and the content, the course involves several key practices that our department has adopted. These are emphasized in both 9th and 10th grade to help prepare students for upper level course work as well as our school’s Applied Learning program, which includes hands-on and project-based courses like Social Entrepreneurship, Business & Finance, or Global Development Studies.
Although simple in their description, these practices add depth to student learning. Of course, their value rests in the extent to which they are done faithfully and with sincerity; It’s not about just checking boxes. Ask our students and they will be able to tell you these are the tent poles around which the course is built.
- Inquiry – Each unit is designed around a Driving Question with multiple Supporting Questions. Students are given a variety of sources for each supporting question but are also encouraged to find their own as they develop research skills. This is essentially the C3 IDM except that I have expanded the structure a bit to cover a larger unit of study.
- Harkness Method – We want our students to be better at engaging in academic discussion. This involves the litany of skills that are constantly practiced through Harkness discussions. An earlier post details more about how I have tried to integrate this into all my courses. The 9th graders have multiple Harkness discussions over the course of the unit, receiving a grade that is reflective of their growth over time in their Harkness engagement as well as their use of course content and skills. This practice has already paid a huge dividend.
- National History Day – We want our students to understand how to research and question effectively, especially with online sources. NHD is perfectly aligned to the C3 inquiry process. As a semester-long project, NHD allows our students to put all of the various skills we teach them together in pursuit of a topic they can get passionate about. Taking time to emphasize NHD adds so much depth and value to the curriculum giving students tremendous agency and opportunity for application.
Scope & Sequence
I have attached the current Scope & Sequences I am working with for anyone interested in perusing it. The next step is to include the guaranteed content standards for each unit. The beauty of a skills-based course is that the content can be flexible as long it as falls within the adopted boundaries. It is still imperative to define the content that students are expected to learn.
At some point, I will get the unit source packets and activities posted. The scope & sequence shows the curriculum broadly, but does not do justice to what we do day-to-day in each unit. A post from last year detailed a bit more on Unit 4, which covered Latin America.
You may notice that each unit includes both geography and history standards. We have not currently prioritized any of the C3 civics or economics standards. The Civics standards are awkward given the context of teaching in China and the economics standards are fairly content specific and do not fit well within the course. They are covered more explicitly in other courses within our department.
The first semester tends to be a little more history heavy in content as students are working on their NHD projects through this time. By semester two, those projects are essentially complete, freeing up students to do deeper research and thinking in those units around the driving questions. The semester two units also make more explicit connections to the present-day and using both history and geography to understand contemporary issues.
This course will be the focus of many posts over the year on topics like teaching historical thinking, inquiry, and standards-based instruction and assessment using C3.
If you have read this far, Thank You! Also, if you currently use the C3 Framework in a standards-based system I would love to hear your experiences with it.