Among the courses that Will Colglazier teaches at Aragon High School in San Mateo Union High School District is Advanced Placement U.S. history. He also teaches a social studies methods course at Stanford University every Tuesday–“That is a long,long day,” he says. Colglazier has been profiled in various publications (see here, here, and here) and I have done a post about a class I observed last year. So why do even another post on Colglazier?
For my project on looking at best cases of technology integration at the classroom, school, and district levels I went to Dominic Bigue, coordinator of technology for SMUHSD. He identified teachers, including Colglazier, who were making technology integral to their lessons and were willing to have me visit their classrooms. Of those he identified, I have already described lessons of English teacher Sarah Press (Hillsdale High School) and Spanish teacher Nicole Elenz-Martin (also at Aragon). Today, I focus on Colglazier’s Advanced Placement U.S. history class that I observed February 19, 2016.
Aragon’s hillside campus has just over 1400 students of whom 70 percent are minority. Twenty-four percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches (common measure of poverty). Nearly 98 percent graduate. Of those graduating, 44 percent attend community college and 54 percent enter four-year colleges and universities.
The lesson I observed was about Pearl Harbor (1941), particularly historical documents that argued for and against the conspiracy theory surrounding President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Some historians have argued that FDR had prior knowledge of the Japanese surprise attack on December 7th and kept it a secret in order for the U.S. to have popular support for entering the war against Hitler (Japan, Germany, and Italy had formed the Axis Alliance). Before, the class got to these documents and their analysis, Colglazier went through a number of tasks as he usually does for each lesson.
The Lesson*
A cart of Chromebooks stood near the door and students pick up the devices as the tardy buzzer sounded. The 26 students sit in their work groups at clustered desks.
“Happy, Happy Friday,” says Colglazier to open the lesson. He is a tall, lean teacher wearing a button-down, long sleeve grey shirt and jeans. On the screen is a list of announcements and the agenda for the 50-minute class. He goes over each one and asks if there are any questions about what students are to do on each item; he spends time on the Socratic Seminar scheduled for the following week. A few students raise their hands and Colglazier answers questions. He explains to class about the importance of collaboration within their groups for upcoming tasks but not to the extent of copying notes from one another.
Colglazier then moves to agenda item called “Research Assessment.” He spends a large chunk of time during every lesson on students determining reliability of sources (e.g., bias, inconsistencies) in answering historical questions. The exercise focuses on an Internet article about smoking (see here). Students go to article in their Chromebook and fill out a work-sheet. He gives the class seven minutes to complete the questions and click SUBMIT to send him their answers. Group members, the teacher says, can share sources they find to check on reliability of article on smoking. Flashed on the screen in big numerals is a stop clock counting down the time. He ambles around the room checking with students if they have any questions and seeing if they are running into any difficulties. After submitting their work, Colglazier asks for what sources students used to determine reliability of article. Students say they used Wikipedia, Center for Disease Control, and other sites to corroborate whether article was biased or not. Students knew differences between URLs that had .com and .gov .*
After this Research Assessment and feedback from students, Colglazier moves to documents on Pearl Harbor including a diary entry of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a Japanese telegram decoded prior to the attack on December 7th, and film clips from the History Channel on both sides of the controversy over whether FDR hid knowledge of an attack on Pearl Harbor (see here). For each document and source, the teacher questions students on the reliability of the source and whether there was evidence to support the theory that FDR knew of the attack beforehand. As Colglazier asked questions and students answered about each of the documents and film clips, at least half of the students were also taking notes with pen on paper.
In scanning the room every five minutes to see whether students were engaged, I noted no student was off-task.
“Which is the most powerful evidence,” he asks “on the side of FDR hiding knowledge?” Which evidence, he asks, contradicts that FDR conspired to keep it a secret? Students look at each of the sources and give different answers, depending on how much weight they gave to the source’s reliability. No consensus emerged from students. He asks students to write a paragraph for homework, using evidence from documents, and take a stand on the question.
“Ten minutes left in class,” Colglazier says. “I need to have you finish these documents and you need to find corroborating sources that support what you say in your paragraph.” Colglazier wanted students to replicate the assessment of these documents as they had in assessing the smoking article they did earlier in the lesson.*** Each group member has to locate a different website for corroboration. He urges students to talk to one another and but still must find separate websites.
Stop-clock clicks away. Teacher walks around and answers questions from individual students. I scan class again and students clicking away and discussing sources with other group members. With two minutes left, Colglazier tells class to save their work on Google docs and then submit it later so that he can look at what they have written and their websites by the end of the school day.
Buzzer sounds. Students leave. As they are leaving, teacher lays out graded quizzes from last week on desks, students pick them up while Colglazier takes questions from other students.
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*Colglazier also has a Current Events blog for which students have to write original posts during the semester.
**For those viewers who wish to see student responses, Colglazier sent them to me, stripped of names.
***The teacher emailed me on February 24, 2016 to make this point. He also supplied student responses to the questions on corroboration.
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Thanks for re-blogging part 3 of the series.
It might not be a coincidence that Sarah, Nicole, and Will are STEP grads. So proud of Will – whose practice is featured on different venues as you note, Larry. He is also a co-instructor in the History/ Social Science C&I in STEP – your “workplace” for many years. Thoughtful and well-reasoned uses of technology.
Thanks for comment, Rachel.
So we have teachers integrating technology. And?
I’ve seen teachers teaching well in groups. So? I’ve seen teachers teaching well in singles too. Good teachers teach well. Their methods tend to be idiosyncratic and not hugely transferable.
The key is: what does Will achieve with technology that he could not achieve any other way? You don’t tell me that in this blog. You don’t even attempt to, more’s the worry, given that this is a “best case”.
Where do the iPads work that paper does not?
“He engages them” is not an answer. I’ve seen teachers who are engaging, but actually quite poor teachers. What, precisely, about the engagement is helping them learn?
How does using technology like Will does help a teacher who isn’t that good? Will it make them better? Perhaps — and I think this likely, because good teachers can do all sorts of things that average teachers cannot — it will make them worse. I know using iPads like that would make me worse, because it would exacerbate my biggest weaknesses.
He’s cool and uses technology, and you should too, is not an argument. It’s an appeal to authority.
It’s not helpful to a junior basketballer to be told “play like Michael Jordan”. We need to be told what the individual parts of what is successful, how they are successful, and how we can emulate that success.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. You ask fine questions: “what does Will achieve with technology that he could not achieve any other way?” and “How does using technology like Will … help a teacher who isn’t that good? Will it make them better?” Sadly, those were not the questions I asked in the three posts I wrote about SMUHSD teachers nominated as “exemplary”in integrating technology into their lessons. The question I asked for each post was: what happened in the lesson I observed. I described what I saw. I urge you to write and answer those excellent questions you asked.
But you are not writing what you observed. You are only writing a dry list of factual procedures.
If the lesson was indeed exemplary then you observed some things much more important than those. So why do I have to guess what those things are?
How does that help someone who does almost exactly the same procedural things, yet fails to integrate technology well?
What I observed, I reported as best as I could of teachers that the technology coordinator of the district identified as exemplary. Definitions of “exemplary” surely differ but, by reputation, these teachers exhibited those procedures and behaviors that I reported.
I agree with your points about tech not automatically improving teaching and learning. But I find it interesting that you think this post is strongly pro-tech although one with weak arguments. I do not find it that way at all. Instead I find it as neutral a description as possible.
I appreciate the description of the teacher and student behaviors in this series of posts. Teachers are always being told to integrate tech and these snapshots show what that supposedly looks like when it is successfully done.
What I think I see in all three posts are teachers using the tech as yet another resource for their teaching. I see lots of conversations and not just clicking. I see unscripted teaching. I see goals in their lessons, both high and low on the “rigor” or Bloom scale, similar to what we currently have.
I see students that do what is asked of them. This is in contrast with some other classroom descriptions that Larry has written. Is that because of the tech or just the school/community norm? I will paint with a very wide brush and hypothesize, given the school description, that it is the school/community norm.
I see classroom similar to my own small fairly rural school except that we share computers within departments . However, I am being told that we are falling behind in technology in ways usually left annoyingly unspecified.
But maybe I am only seeing what I want to see…
In your reply to a previous comment from a viewer, Alice, I find that you accurately describe the three posts I have written about different teachers.As part of the project I recently launched on “exemplary” instances of teachers, schools, and districts integrating technology, these descriptions–soon to be supplemented by more classroom accounts in another district–are, as you have observed: “What I think I see in all three posts are teachers using the tech as yet another resource for their teaching. I see lots of conversations and not just clicking. I see unscripted teaching. I see goals in their lessons, both high and low on the “rigor” or Bloom scale, similar to what we currently have.I see students that do what is asked of them.” As you observed, I, too, see similar events and actions in these classrooms. After I have many more instances of “best cases” of teachers integrating of technology into lessons–it is the administrators whose definitions of “exemplary” that pointed me to these teachers–I can make some generalizations about what “exemplary means and what teachers do, just as you are doing from an N=3. Thank you for your observations, Alice.