Unethical but interesting teaching strategy for a high school history class

Just finished reading Marcus, Paxton, & Meyerson (2006). Given students' tendency to "historical fundamentalism" (viewing what the textbook, teacher, and assigned readings say as revealed truth), what if the teacher adopted a "two truths and a lie" style of teaching?

"As I teach, I will occasionally misrepresent or lie. Most of what I say will be true, but I will, every day, say something wrong or unsubstantiated: the First Amendment prohibits public displays of religion, for example, or that at the time of Columbus' landing, the population of North America was greater than that of Europe. Check what I say--look in the textbook, examine other sources. Don't take down my statements as gospel, because they're not. When things don't seem to line up, bring it up. At the end of the (lesson/week/unit), we'll review and I'll show you conflicting evidence."

I imagine that this approach would

1. Go a long way toward diminishing (but not eliminating) historical fundamentalism
2. Be interesting/engaging for students, even for those who aren't busy considering all the angles and checking references.
   

On the other hand,

1. I foresee some students getting confused -- they'll remember the lie (what they heard first), not the truth (what they heard later).
   
2. I imagine that this would be very, very difficult to keep up on the teacher's part--mentally, even emotionally exhausting.

Powerful social studies

Trying to operationalize a buzz word: "powerful social studies." I need this to make sense for me and for my students.

Data points:

• Parker
  
• Brophy & Alleman (2006) have a pretty good definition of "powerful ideas" -- fundamental to discipline, not a broad topic (transportation) and not just a factoid ("the fuel used in airplanes is not the same as the fuel used in cars") but in the midrange (categories of transportation, historical progression, relative merits of what's being transported, infrastructure). This points me at ideas that are important and useful.

Thinking about this for myself, I see a core of knowledge, preferably the kind of knowledge that associates with the powerful ideas suggested by Brophy and Alleman. Along with this knowledge comes certain attitudes and abilities that also must be in place for (IMHO) "powerful social studies" to take place. Here's a cheesy little sketch of it:

So: Sure, students need to know something about history, govt/civics, econ, geography, etc. But I also want them to be

• Curious in the face of new (hist, geo, econ, govt/civ) information (attitude)
  
• Concerned when they perceive problem (injustice, inaccuracy, looming environmental collapse) (attitude)
• Critical of new information -- not accepting it at face value but always seeking to triangulate (attitude/ability -- this is a skill b/c you have to be able to operate on the information while at the same time leaving the door open to altering or reversing the info)
  
• Competent at taking action to resolve problems of information, injustice, looming environmental collapse): looking up new info, expressing oneself, etc. (ability)

And of course you address these all simultaneously -- you can't first teach the "base of knowledge" and THEN do the interesting things (curious, concerned, critical, competent) with this knowledge. Both are developed hand-in-hand.

Generativity in teachers

Quick thought about what separates some of the best teachers (and professors) from the rest, particularly when it comes to using technology: generativity. I've now seen it in enough teachers (ex: MR@BMS) and pre-service teachers (KL@UVA) and professors (JP@NCSU) to recognize it.

Sure, a good teacher is a risk-taker, knows his or her content area, students, curriculum, is clear and fair in interactions with students, etc. But if, on top of that, the teacher is motivated to create learning materials and situations, then the amazing things happen.

Examples:

• Creating peg-board and tags to teach geographic regions
• Creating virtual theater for explaining the staging of Pygmalion
• Creating custom videos and dynamic graphs to explain air pressure and temperature

True, off-the-shelf materials can be used. But when a teacher takes the time to customize or custom-create materials, they generally become more powerful--at least for this teacher and these students.

Plus: A generative teacher is probably going to engage students in more active, student-centered, generative activities.

On the other side: A non-generative teacher is probably more inclined to be transmission-oriented, which lends itself to students tuning out, egocentric fallacy, all kinds of other not-so-optimal dynamics.

So: Watch for this.