New 7th Grade History Standards!

Jacqui Duvall
Aug 9, 2017
3 min read

This upcoming school year is going to be full of changes, both fun and chaotic. My school recently hired 11 new teachers/aids throughout the middle school and the music department. For those of you working at a large school, this may seem like nothing, but for a middle school with a total of 12 core teachers, this is a BIG change! In addition to all of the new faces, history teachers were given a new set of state standards for the 2017-2018 school year. This post will be about how I have interpreted these new standards, my feelings about them, and how I am going to be incorporating them into my class this year.

This past year, my school district has started doing more vertical alignment and PLC work - this has been fantastic! We were lucky to have a great leader in our History PLC who was able to get a draft of the history standards before they were officially published. We were told that these would be very close to the end result, and to start working on getting "I can" statements ready and looking at how the standards fit into our current curriculum. Fast forward to June and say hello to our new 2017-2018 standards........ and guess what, they are almost completely different than the draft we were given. I don't blame anyone, but it means that the work I had done was basically useless. Therefore, I started anew with a clean slate. The good news is that I like the new standards better than the draft I was given because they are easier to interpret and make more sense for teaching middle school.

The First Step

The first thing I did with the new standards was get them into a printer friendly version, and PDF table for me to make edits and take notes on. Below you will see what that looks like and can even download it for free for your personal use. I do not have one for 6th and 8th grade, so I apologize for that.

Click on the picture below for the PDF version of this document!

Above is the first page of the document that I made. It has the "Inquiry Anchor Standard," "Inquiry Standard," a column for making sure it was covered, the date it was covered, and room for notes. The notes section will be used for documenting what the topic was, how it went, and/or ideas of future projects or lessons.

After each page of standards is another page with extra room for dates covered and note taking. I plan to cover each standard multiple times because some are vague and can and should be repeated throughout the year. I also left a small space to the left to write in the number of the Inquiry Standard, so I know on which standard I am documenting.

The Second Step

The next step for me was to start filling out a copy of the document with lessons and topics that I already teach in my class. The reason I made a copy of the document is because I want to keep the original for lessons that I am going to cover this year. I may or may not keep all of my lessons the same or I may change the order in which I do them, so I don't want the dates or notes to be confusing when I look back at the end of the year. So I will think of this copy as a "rough draft" of sorts.

As you can see, I have started to write in the notes section the different topics that I already cover, and some ideas of things I could cover that would show proficient understanding of that standard. For example, under "Analyze Human Population Movements and Patterns" and "Analyze Global interactions" Inquiry Anchor Standards, I have written in the following topics:

Immigration in America
Emigration in Europe and Latin America
Ancestry Books
Urbanization in America & Asia
Allocation of resources and movement due to the location of natural resources and arable land in Africa and the Middle East

Most of these lessons fall in the middle part of the year, which creates a problem. I need to make sure that I repeat the lesson several times during the year, not all in one unit or in two units in the middle of the year, but never again. Therefore, I will probably add a lesson or two for the beginning of the year to introduce the standard, and one at the end as the final proficiency assessment.

That's all for now, my friends. I will be talking with my other history teachers from the 6th and 8th grade about how they will incorporate the new standards. Hopefully, I can update you every couple months this year on the progress of my system and if I have made any changes.