001I can you know everybody and thanks thanks for coming out tonight to hear our social studies presentation my name is Tom you saw I'm the social studies and media department chairperson I work at Churchill junior high school and East Brunswick high school so I work with students and teachers grades 8 to 12 and my name is Dan Moran and I'm the social studies supervisor for the district I worked for grades K to 12 I work very closely with Tom and I oversee the social studies programs for the whole district we both also started here as teachers yeah both of us came of age Eddie's for all we know is he's bronze right yeah I started in 2000 in this street apartment and about six seven years ago I transitioned into my current position yeah I
002started in 93 in the English department and now here we are so thanks for coming out tonight and what we want to do is give you an overview of the department and try to give you kind of like a sampling of the kind of things that the students do from grades K to 12 and the scope of the program yep so one of the things that I talk to parents every year at orientation nights so when a new presentation for eighth grade and tenth grade parent orientation nights I always say that history class as we all experienced it probably when we were in school is very very different than what our students experienced today so for example when I was in school at the high school history class was you know the teacher kind of
003standing up in the front and just talking at us for a span of about 45 minutes and you know I would just sit there and feverishly write notes and every five minutes or so I'd shake up my hand you know because it started a cramp until I you know go again for another five minutes and the teachers stood up there and had the overhead projector and would kind of hold this piece of paper over his notes and would slowly go line by line by line and that's what we did daily right it was just committing things to short-term memory it wasn't really building upon any type of skill base wasn't doing something that may be better in my science class at writing a lab it didn't make me better at solving some sort of formula
004or problem solving in a math class it didn't make me stronger in reading and interpreting complex text that I was facing in a language arts class it just improved my ability to commit things to short-term memory regurgitate it on an assessment and then it was just gone so one of the things that dr. Moran and I really really wanted to do when we got together in this department was to make it much more than a skills-based to focus on the things that were transferable to focus on the things in class we're gonna make students stronger lab writers in a science class to make them but are consumers of the language arts to be able to read like complex text like some of you see on your tables tonight these are the texts that our students
005are grappling with the skills that they're gonna use not just as they go into different classes throughout the district but also as they go on in their lives because these are the things that they're going to be working on as they grow into into adulthood so we want to kind of walk you through the skills tonight that working at Wright that we that we have our students practice in the department all right okay okay we have to go back we flipped through everything really really quickly there but one of the first things you're gonna see is we're very big on asking questions we think historians ask questions we want to show you right some of the kind of the old-school questions that Tom just mentioned and we want to show you kind of some improvements
006on them all right so we just want to show you it like a generic set of history questions that sometimes people might expect get asked in a history class so here's the first one Europe in what year was Rome sacked by the Visigoths on the spot but that would be kind of like an old school to have a question that we would have in some of our classrooms okay name three European leaders present in Austria at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 okay it's a 19th century Europe no takers all right okay one of the most significant differences between the presidencies of Millard Fillmore and Zachary Taylor in fourth grade we focus on the history of New Jersey so here's a question how many municipalities are there in New Jersey right another
007one is what's the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution all right more people might get that when we think which region remained free of European domination by defeating an Italian invasion force with the accompany that map question okay so now truth be told these questions actually came from old exams that we used to give at East Brunswick High School and some of the exams that we gave at Churchill junior high school and at Hammarskjold as well so this would be kind of like a question that when I was in high school you know I would face and these kind of you either know it or you don't type of questions right so what we do is we like to think that we ask that our questions not just we but as we're gonna you're
008gonna see tonight we get our students to ask better questions it's a big piece of what we do and one of the resources that we use in classrooms throughout the district is this it's called the questioning chart so the questioning chart was something that came from I believe is an elementary school teacher who first introduced it to dr. Moran a few years back and it was presented at a professional day workshop and it just took off from there if you walk into a lot of our classrooms again K to 12 throughout the district and you look on the walls in many of the rooms you see this questioning chart and what we love about the questioning chart is it enforces the idea of asking higher or higher level type of questions to again get away
009from the either you know it or you don't type of responses that we found we were getting from kids because those were the types of questions that we were asking them it also gets our students to learn how to ask these more complex questions so if you see here on the top left-hand corner the area in purple who is who did what is what did a lot of our teachers refer to those as Siri questions or Google questions okay what they do with their students is they've done this is a great exercise they say okay take out your phone it's an interesting question take out your phone and if Siri can answer that question right that's what it is it's a basic question right it's an either you know it or you don't type of
010question but there are questions that Siri can answer and as you charts a transition into the orange zone they become a little bit more complex right when would when did when can how might yeah yeah and then you go into the green and then they're really more challenging I've been in classrooms where a teacher or better yet a student will pose one of these questions in the Green Zone and then it becomes the next 20 25 minutes of the class as students start to kind of build on their responses to those types of questions and this is a really important skill to be able to teach our students to be able to ask these questions so this is something that again is a kind of anchors a lot of what we do in social studies
011and it's a great reminder for our teachers but also it's a great skill for our students and a lot of our students their binders in their notebooks they have this questioning chart like in there on the first day of school a lot of our teachers give it out and they have the students kind of color it in and they explain exactly what the significance of it is and then they have it in their notebook and it's something that you know has used to them throughout the school year I was in a classroom last week and I saw the teacher all the students had this taped to their desk so every student had the question chart taped to the desk it's it's everywhere if you go through the district right and again like Tom said you
012know the the the best thing is is to get kids thinking about higher level questions and that fuels their research that fuels class discussion as opposed to just reading a bunch of facts so what we want to do now is we want to take you back through those original questions and kind of show you what we expect now from our teachers our from our students and the kind of conversations we have in our classes so here's the first one right it what year was Rome sacked by the Visigoths anyone l-410 that's right but so that's a basic question right you could know that but this is a better question what led to the fall of the Roman Empire and are there any similarities between Rome and the United States like that's a much higher level
013question we think that's a question much more interesting that you get a lot more mileage out of that of his story in a real historian would ask okay name the three European leaders present in Austria at the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 anybody know okay see a principal Merrow dick from Austria you have and tell you by the way here's my cheat sheet okay because I had to look it up myself all right so you have a Tsar Alexander the 1st from Russia Frederick Vilhelm the 3rd from Prussia and Lord Castle ray from Great Britain again this was this was a question that was once on one of our on one of our exams so what might be a better question what challenges do leaders face after a war right this is
014something that applies really to any conflict in human history it's a great great question that she could ask kids okay what are the most significant differences between the presidencies of Millard Fillmore in Zachary Taylor and this one okay so Taylor dies in office Millard Fillmore takes his place and Taylor was ardent that he was not going to compromise and so the compromise of 1850 sat on his desk and he refused to sign it and when Millard Fillmore took office after Taylor's untimely death he signed the compromise of 18 50 we all learned it in high school but you know it's one of those things that we forget so what might a better question be to what degree does a president influence domestic policies right this is a question if you teach American history that you
015can go in in any time during history the American presidency and ask that type of question apply certainly to a class if you're doing on modern American politics but certainly if you're going back all the way to the time of George Washington our next one how many municipalities are there in New Jersey I don't want to shout at a number or take a guess for this one how many municipalities are there in New Jersey five hundred and sixty-five all right that's a lot right so so you could know that but the even the follow up is so what this is a better question what role does local government play in the lives of citizens that's a big focus we talked about in grades four and grade five right and at a higher level you can
016actually have a student a high school student ask why are there so many municipalities in New Jersey and if a student asks that I can guarantee one of our teachers would say that's a great question right and then they would kind of pursue that and look it up right and the lesson what's the 4th amendment to the Constitution you know this one even know what that protects you against unreasonable search and seizure right ok so that comes up something a lot in our classes the Constitution but a better question is you know how and why does it limit the power of law enforcement right I was in a class last week where the conversations were all about why would the Bill of Rights limit the power of the government instead of extend the power of
017the government why the Bill of Rights all about what the government can't do instead of what it can do and when you ask students that they're kind of pause and they're like yeah why is that and that's that's a great teaching moment that's much more valuable than just memorizing the Bill of Rights anyone could do that but knowing why they're there and how the Constitution is written in such a way to restrain power that's a much more interesting topic we think and finally our our token map question which region tree named remain free of European domination by defeating an Italian invasion force anybody you got a one-in-seven take guess never know the country no one it's very close you're close the right half of number five oh sorry six okay no no it's similar size
018so that's good guys I know Ethiopia is number five but again it was another one that Dan and I as we were kind of putting this together all right let's just double check on this way Ethiopia is landlocked yet no it's definitely it's definitely number five okay so what made a better question be what are some of the long-term effects of European imperialism on African nations right what are some of those effects are still felt today inside of Africa why does sub-saharan Africa struggle so mightily can we connect some of that back to imperialism that took place you know in the in the 19th in the 19th century so the next thing that was the first skill as historians ask questions another skill and this is something we're really really devoted to really passionate about
019that we started talking about the day we met and sort of work it together is that historians read you really can't say you love history unless you love to read you can love the History Channel and things like that but real historians read all the time and that's all we want students to do yes they read textbooks but you they read so much more we're going next slide sure all of those books on this on your tables these are just a sample of the kind of books that students read in all of our classes from the time they're in kindergarten all the way up until they're seniors and start taking elective class and stuff like that so we do have the giant textbooks but we also have all kinds of other things that kids read
020and kids read a lot in our district right and they read more and more every year right yeah and it's not just reading for the sake of reading it's what are they doing with that that's something that's that's really really important when we first kind of started this initiative it started with this one book on the Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis and when Dan and I at first met you know III really wanted him sell him on this book like I thought it was really important that our kids were reading in class and at that point all students were exposed to in a class and socialized classroom was just the textbook and students tend not to love to read the textbook but I knew that they would really fall in love with this book
021if we just gave it a shot so in one of our first meetings I had this whole big pitch ready for Ford and I was you know I'm gonna saw him on this book and within three seconds I sold them on the book and I had like 50 other reasons why we needed to do the books now let's just do what you're right this is you know Gaddis is a great writer and we should be reading the books and then this one book has grown into if you look around the tables there's well over thirty five books that are now in the hands of our kids across you know grades K to twelve and that's a great great thing in eighth grade alone the average student is gonna read four books this year for books
022beyond the textbook four books in class one a quarter that's a great great thing because when they do that they're not only getting a different perspective sometimes on history they're not getting just exposed to different types of writings some some of its historical fictions of its pre true nonfiction that's really really challenging but it's also what we do with it that's really important so here you can see on the screen this is from an eighth grade classroom where they're taking part and something called a fish bowl and a fish bowl activity is where students kind of come together around a common theme in a book and they have a conversation with each other one of the cool things about this picture this picture even in this picture right you know where's the teacher right where
023is it it's the kids that are doing the teachers are putting the students in the position where they could do these great things and where the teacher is standing right next to me as I'm taking as I'm taking the picture right and this the teacher is there helping to kind of push the dialog when they need to jump in but it's really the students that are doing it's the students that are reading it at home and coming in having these opinions about a book the teacher giving them the prompting them with particular questions and then the students having this free-flowing dialogue with each other and we do in a lot of different formats so oftentimes we use spaces kind of just like what we're in today you can see here a teacher in the media
024center that's actually at Churchill junior high school but doing an activity that again is tied to reading where students are having that conversation about what they read and the picture there on the bottom right hand corner because is it a ninth grade classroom okay so we're doing it in all types of ways it's not just reading for the sake of reading it's actually having a purpose reading with a purpose and using it in the classroom and all those titles are tied into our curriculum as well another thing we do is that our adults in the district read a lot as well we started something about four years ago called the nonfiction book club and these are the titles we've done so far we've run it eight times and these are books that we get teachers
025from all across the departments and all across the district to come and we meet three times a semester and we read some books and we talk about them and sometimes those books trickled to their class like this is a classic example was one of the first books we read was about somebody was scaped from North Korea from a prison camp and this book is now taught in our world history class but not all of them are but it's it gives you a sense of the kind of culture we're building here where the teachers are readers and and they don't read enough and things that they've read we've brought in to our curriculum and a teacher will bring in a book and say you know I read this I'm this graphic novel and I think it's
026gonna be really good and we'll go that and we'll pile it at that with the kids so it's something that that work we have this whole reading culture in the department that we're really proud of and that the teachers and the students have kind of embraced as well yeah one of the cool things too about this is it's inspired a lot of our teachers to then use these books with their students in class so beyond escape from camp 14 Cemetery John you see there on the top that's about the Lindbergh kidnapping a great piece of New Jersey issue and you'll see in a slide a little bit later on in our presentation the author of that Robert Zorn actually got to come in and meet with our students after they had read the book which
027was fantastic and the day's about the Kennedy assassinations another book that we use with our students in class Janesville closing down of the General Motors facility in Wisconsin is another book that teachers are using in class so it's great that this has kind of inspired a lot of our teachers to then be able to use some of these in class okay so our next skill historians right right and that's one of the things I what historians do that's one of the things that we talk to our students about right from day one right right from you know those early grade levels what do historians do that's what we're gonna focus on in our class and one of those things that historians do as historians right they write all the time they research and then they
028write about it that's a really really really important skill it's something that again transcends social studies no matter what area a child emerges from each bronzer goes into they're going to have to be able to write okay so it's really really important and it shouldn't just fall on you know the language arts department it's our responsibility as well so we do a lot of writing in social studies one example and you'll see a couple out there on each of the tables I believe and if you don't have one I could certainly pass one to you but we have our students work with these quite often it's a document based question okay and we start these all the way the very younger levels my daughter is a third grader at Memorial and she's doing these document
029based questions where they're looking at nonfiction texts they're looking at images and graphs and charts and things of that sort okay and they're kind of breaking it down right this is what a historian does so if you look this is actually an example from eighth grade and there should be two on your table one is about the American Revolution and one is a document based question a titled leadership in the nation's early years but these are activities again that we're doing all the time with our students and some of this text if you go into you really take a look at it it's pretty complex it's challenging but again it's this skill set that we think is really really important all right it's one thing to be able to read history to be able to
030analyze history but it's another thing to be able to write about it and that's a really really important thing in this again it's something that we emphasize all the time the assessment questions that we you know ran through before those are the ones that you would have seen in our social studies classes maybe 15 20 years ago but this is what a common assessment really looks like now in fact this is I'm showing you a common assessment at the eighth grade level this is what they look like now okay and when we started we started doing this you know sometimes the students would complain to their teachers it's what is this English why are you making us write so much this isn't English and the teachers would say well you got it you know you
031have to learn how to write and if you want to think about history you know it's much easier for the students to just memorize stuff you know they would you know that's that's a slam dunk it's a lot harder to form an opinion all right about a number of documents or about a bunch of data you're handed and say what do you make of this and form an argument about this or do some research and really write all the time and not just one research paper during the course of the year and your assessments become writing based as opposed to just um true/false or fill on the blank that's much more demanding of the students but we've seen how much how much more pays off yeah and and the other thing too is it's important
032to understand that the contents still really important I think it's really important that the students emerge from their experience in East Brunswick schools consumers of the content so for example you know a student is gonna read this book on Paul Revere Paul Revere and I but also write about it as they're doing the document based question on the American Revolution that's how they're learning the content so as opposed to you know the you're just kind of standing at the front and just you know taking it from their head and putting it into the students head for a very short period of time they're becoming owners of that content as they read through as they write about it and what we found is it's much more a longer lasting experience for the students to learn history
033in that way so we're always writing and going along with writing two of the things that our district subscribes to which we think are really really terrific and powerful are Turnitin and newsela turn it in if anyone knows what that is it's a program it's it's sold as an anti plagiarism detection service where if a student writes a paper it gets submitted to turn it in Turnitin compares that paper against its bank of papers that it grows every day and against things on the internet it lets you know if somebody's plagiarized but the real value of Turnitin we found is that teachers can give electronic feedback so so many of our teachers and this starts in grade six we have six graders doing this students will submit papers or writing assignments and the teacher can
034make all their comments right online on the stream so there's no more handwritten stuff they get back their comments much more quickly they can write much more there's no illegible marks for when people's arms get tired and students can respond to them it's really really powerful and that's something that college students across the country use as well so we have students here at hammer sholde already using Turnitin the second thing is that newsela is a service where we always want students to do current events right it's not just about the Congress of again and we want them to read what's going on now right but especially what younger students they're all learning to read at different levels newsela is a service where it will take the same article about the same topic right and it
035will level it so that some students at one level can read the article some students at a different reading level can read the same article but maybe with different vocabulary may be more challenging sentence structure and they can also have a conversation about it right it's been wonderful teachers can teachers can have students respond on newsela I've seen lessons where students have learned how to annotate online electronically using newsela so that's a really really powerful thing and again what are the kids doing their reading and their writing like that's what history should be that's what historians do and then the last thing is this year was the first year we're very excited about this was that in grades four and five the ILA teacher is now also the social studies teacher right so that's very
036very seamless and when we transition to that it was not a big it wasn't a you know you know a big deal at all because we were doing so much of that in social studies already so in ila when the kids do historical fiction that will tie in with what they're doing in social studies sometimes so it really makes everything much more natural and organic okay and historians celebrate now what do we might celebrate not just class parties with cupcakes and things like that right but we mean that if you're a historian and you've learned things you want to share it right now if you're a professor you want to try to publishing and so you get tenure somewhere right but historians love to share what they've they've learned right and we encourage that in
037all of our students right um we want students to think about their research to get it together and then to present it to people and not to present it like a class report where somebody stands out like this like I learned about Patrick Henry and Patrick Henry was we want them to be able to talk to strangers in a public place like we're doing now actually right and sell their research and get other people excited about it as well so from the time they're in first and second grade we want them to work on those speaking and listening skills yeah one of the things that I would always tell parents when I was a teacher back in the classroom when we'd have back-to-school night was I would say part of my job is to prepare
038your child for the midterm afore the final exam so for example I could tell you right now there's gonna be a question on the Atlantic Charter on the midterm exam where they're gonna need to know what provision number two of the Atlantic Charter is I promise you that I'm gonna do that part of my job I'm gonna prepare them for that common assessment even though my bones I didn't like that common assessment but those old school kind of questions they were still around but what's really important is that your child is able to emerge from my classroom as a more confident public speaker as somebody who can research who knows how to research as somebody who is a talented writer because these are the things that they're gonna need to do as they get on
039in life and the thing that scared them the most was this was the public speaking part right they knew like anytime it was right who wants to volunteer to go first to come up in front of the room and speak nobody volunteer right it was always like I had a you know like I pulled the old popsicle sticks all right Jimmy you're first here we go it was something that was a real challenge for them but it was so important let me think about it right in life everybody's going to present an idea you have to present yourself in an interview to try to win that job everybody has to use that skill it's so important and it's something that we really need to be doing in our classrooms and again like dr. Brandt said
040it's something we really focus on K to 12 one of the things that we're really really proud of is it hammer shield every student engages in presenting his or her research to the public so we have different forums one of the things we do is our famous folks festival right and another one is something called history con these are both started by teachers we have wonderful wonderful teachers in this district right and this is a place kind of like an old school science fair where students first research a person and even how they get to that person even how they decide to who to research that's a whole process but they research somebody they learn a lot about that person and then they present that person we open up the cavity red hammer sholde there's
041different time schedules and people come in and they interact with the students and the great thing when you go and say these are just two of the many many students who do it the great thing is that when you go up to a student they don't give a canned speech so you don't go up to somebody and say you know Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers and Betty Wright it's you they can interact you could say tell me about Jackie Robinson tell me why he was so important and the student will do it you could ask those students really hard questions we've done it we'll ask kids really really hard questions and they're there right there because they become authorities on this and they've invested a lot of time in it so we have a
042thing called the famous folks festival where the students research of a person of their choice and it could be somebody really famous maybe somebody not that famous but somebody worth the research we do a thing called a history con where students might take a historical idea right like say like you know um the Roman army or on you know on the original the first Olympics or things like that right and their research that we have a lot of different forums like that we have a thing called an in-class museum we do things like this for the little kids they have a thing called Night at the Museum but we want the kids to learn how to speak and we've learned that you don't teach kids how to become better public speakers by just saying like
043just go in the front the room and start talking or go prepare an or rapport with some index cards so there's actual speaking and listening skills in the New Jersey standards that our teachers address the they use in their plans that they do lessons on if you want people to become better writers you have to do writing lessons you can't just hope good writing happens and it's the same thing with speaking and listening so by the time the students are ready to do this their authorities and one of the great things about this is the first time we did this the first time the famous focus festival ran I think it was three years ago the last question any student asked in sixth grade to their teacher was like by the way like what how
044many points is this worth like they really weren't concerned about how many they were very excited that there are a lot of people come and we get a huge huge turnout for this and every year what it has to stop after the first hour and they have to go back to class like oh and you know it's really really affirming and it's really really incredible what these kids are able to do and one of the cool things about this too is they're researching about people and topics that they're really interested in that's one of the things that we have found when students are doing that when they feel more invested in it it becomes a much better product they dig deeper into that research I remember talking to this young man about Jackie Robinson remember
045asking him because I love baseball I love Jackie Robinson so I gotta ask you so why Jackie Robinson why did you pick him as your topic he said to me he said you know what because I love to play baseball I always heard about this guy Jackie Robinson but I had no idea who he was I didn't know why it was important I just knew he was important he was like a name in a textbook to this kid right and I did all this research and here's what I kind of he was so excited to tell me about who Jackie Robinson was and why it was so significant and that was great that was great because back in the old days right oftentimes you were given your research subject you know alright you know tell
046me about you know President Jimmy Carter and his domestic policies or something along those lines we're in this case these students got to experience and research something that was interesting to them and that was the skill that we really wanted the student to focus on right that's another example recently this year we teachers did a thing of a class museum about inventions so this young man over here did the electric guitar he plays the guitar and I spoke to him and he was really really eloquent about about about the creation of the other electric guitar Les Paul and things again cuz again he was really interested in it um he could have picked whatever you wanted to within reason right but the point is that the subject that the students pick is almost beside the
047point the point is using those skills so that was great this here the poise eventually we want them to be able to do this when they're older right and that's an example of our high school kids talking at the innovations Expo about what he was doing in his history class right being very eloquent you noticed like you know he has a little thing in his hands but he's looking right at the people these kids get a lot of confidence as they get older and it all starts when they're little it's amazing to watch maybe I don't know if anybody had a chance to go to go to this last year but the confidence that with which these kids speak is incredible it really is I think back when I watch these kids and I think
048back to when I was in high school and how nervous I ever was you know to actually speak in front of an audience of 20 kids forget about you know being somewhere like this where you have people from the community who you don't even know who are kind of coming up to you and you're happy to talk to them about what you're doing in your class the confidence is really really incredible and we'd like to think that part of it is because it's something again as a skill that we enforce all the way up and the last example of celebration this is something new we're doing this year at hammer sholde right again started but started by one of our great teachers is the National History bee it's a obviously national contest about knowledge of
049history we had every student at hammer she'll take the qualifying test everyone took it we had 91 students qualify for the regional finals and they're actually gonna be held at hammer sholde in April I think it's April 17th so it's just another way that we make history kind of like you know what a big part of their day and and when the students found out they were really really excited about this so this is our first time through it historians listen to experts right whether you're a student of history a student in one of our classrooms or whether you're a teacher right and you want to grow professionally to develop professionally you're listening to experts a big key of what we do here in our social studies program so for example here we're trying to
050always bring folks in from the larger community who could help us with that so on the left hand side is the director of the county of freeholders Ronald Rios and he came in to speak with our Churchill junior high school students last year about the importance of civic education and what a freeholder does you know it's one of those things that you know sometimes students see we have a friller students enter know what a mayor does but what does a freeholder do right so we kind of inform them of what his job was and how they can kind of play a role in being part of that that's civic duty was it was a great presentation the picture on the right was Robert Zorn robertson was one of the the writers of the books that
051we use about the Lindbergh kidnapping and he came in and he met with our our students and it was great you sat there for an hour and answered questions what was interesting was the questions that the students were asking was a blend of tell us more about the Lindbergh kidnapping you know but a lot of it was how did you do your research how did you actually sit and write a book they got wrapped up in the skills part of it as well as they were asking the questions and I remember him commented to us the first time he presented to our students well those were great question he was like well usually I just get asked about you know the kidnapping but they wanted to know what the skill of being a writer that's
052a really really really important thing and why do you have that up there yeah like you know we've done this with a lot of writers too this is avi famous famous author avi did a Skype session with our kids at Churchill Candace Maillard there were this book destiny of the Republic students were tweeting it sending her questions on Twitter as she was answering so we want the kids to engage with the writers they read and and we and the writers always say that the students you know show up really well yeah the Candice Marlins a funny story are we read that in ninth grade and the teacher Mike Smith asked me one day says you know what do you what do you think Tommy I'd love to get Candice more she's a huge name and
053what cost us thousands of dollars to bring her in so we couldn't bring her in live in person to speak with our students but our students have read this book loved the book and she has you know our own Twitter account and he said what do you think should we should we just start tweeting her questions yeah why not yeah you have nothing to lose right so go for it start tweeting her questions and after day she started responding and was having kind of like a back-and-forth with the teacher but the teacher was kind of presenting the the student questions and it was a really really powerful powerful thing we've had Skype sessions with authors as well so students being able to interact in that in that fashion it's really really been great okay yeah
054yeah okay have a good flight one of the other things that we do in terms of bringing the community in as each year we do a Veterans Day celebration at the high school so in this case we bring in members from all the branches from the Marines the Navy Air Force and Army uh so we do a nice celebration there but then we bring them into our classrooms so they can interact with students they could talk about kind of their experiences many of them are veterans of our of our current wars in the Middle East so they talk about that and what it's like to be you know somebody who's relative close an age to them what it's like to be an active active service so that's been a very very powerful experience for our
055students as well and finally this one was was very recently we had a Holocaust Remembrance Day that we honored at Churchill Junior High School and we were very lucky we were able to get a survivor of the Holocaust to come in and speak with our students okay so this is a generation of folks who are you know rapidly you know passing away and so he's a 93 year old gentleman lives in Monroe is a Holocaust survivor and he came in and he spoke with our students and it was so powerful in the opening moment of his presentation to our students we held up he rolled up his sleeve we're at a tomb once had been which had you know signified what his number was in one of the concentration camps and he talked to our
056students about how for two or three years camera what it was that that was who he was he was a number he wasn't a name it was an identity to the Nazis he was just a number and then he went in and he spoke about his life during the camps and then you know transitioning after the war and how it shaped the rest of his life it was such a powerful experience but anytime that we could bring the community into our schools whether it's a politician whether it's you know someone like this can be anybody that our students can become immersed in history that's one of the things we really want the students to leave our program with this this feeling of immersion to make them part of history part of the experience it's so
057so important to us and that was a very very impactful presentation that he made another way you make history alive is you go places right so we bring people in but then we send the kids out so for the first thing you know if you if you have children the district you know that everyone goes to the farm we do different kinds of community the kids get the apples the old seat get to see the horse that's very exciting right we bring kids to the Municipal Center all right and when I talk to kids how was it like oh we want to see the jail they all want to see the jail but they get to go to the Municipal Center and see the court and see what that's like even though it's right across
058from the library as they all know they get to go inside they could see like how their community worked communities is a big big part of our elementary curriculum as they get older they're going other trips to like on the left there is the stock exchange before the stock exchange on the right is the 9/11 museum right so we want the kids to go out we want the kids to have these appearances yeah they want on the floor of the stock exchange there's a great trip that was one our economics teacher of the high school led the students into a competition which we won and it was really cool because it was a regular academic level economics class and we defeated a bunch of AP level students at different schools and we won this competition
059so we got to send our students to the floor of the stock exchange and they were blown away by the experience because it was so digital you know I think sometimes you know we study the history of the exchange we think of ticker tape flying all around and papers everywhere but they couldn't believe how digital it was it was a really really great experience for them to see what it's like to be a stockbroker and then also to a doctrine I mentioned the 9/11 museum that's becoming really a staple of what we do at the high school we do that trip each year now and it is so powerful to hear the students and some of the things that they have to say after they come back from that experience is is really really a
060great thing it's a great experience that we provide for for our students and then another way we do both the field trip out and bringing people in is we've started doing virtual field trips right again engineered by the teachers they did the research on this we thought this was a great idea so we'll have a bunch of students to gathered in the media center at the library and here on the left is Ford's Theater so we can't bring the students to Ford's Theater right we can bring forward theater to the students and this is all alive you have people from the National Park Service talking live to the students answering their questions and the one on the right is Edison's labs all right so Thomas Edison's lab that's another National Historic Site and students learn
061about Thomas Edison ninth grade they could post questions to the Rangers there it's really really interesting and really really great yeah and finally historian's collaborate right so they take all these skills that they've been able to develop and they work with other people who are also working to refine those same skills so that's again a big piece of what we do in our social studies program we share out so for example here are the picture on the top left hand corner that's from one of our criminal justice classes at the high school and what our teacher does is he bring students outside and they kind of get to experience we asked you that question before on the 4th amendment they get to have a conversation with the police officers about the Fourth Amendment and how
062it applies during traffic stops and things of that sort so again learning from the community it's a big piece this a great collaboration example on the top right hand corner as its students from our mock trial program which is a very successful Club here at East Brunswick High School going to hammer shawl to talk students through a court a simulation exercise it was really really great it was it was a two-hour long activity that they ran with the hammer Schultz students and it was it was really really powerful and then finally one of the the great experiences that we have as part of our social studies department is our a people team or the We the People team so this is a group of seniors two years ago actually this picture was taken in Washington
063DC after we had won a state championship we got to represent New Jersey at the national championship and here we were at the the Sam Rayburn building at Congress and it was so impactful as our students got to testify and talk about congressional issues and they got to apply so much of the research and the knowledge that they had one of the cool things for me as a history nerd was we found out right before we walked in the room that this was one of the rooms where they had the Maine Laura gate hearings back during the time of Richard Nixon's ultimate resignation so it was just a really really powerful experience and I'm happy to say that just a couple weeks ago we won the state championship again so in late April we'll be
064going back down to Washington representing New Jersey in the national championship and it's it's a really really great program and what this program does is it gives back it works with students and the We the People Club in eighth grade where we hold each spring a kind of a contest for them where they come to the high school and they compete in an afternoon long presentation in front of our seniors it's a really really good experience so what we tried to show you is that you know what historians do is what we want students to do that though those two categories aren't exclusive right and this is something that the teachers talked to students about all the time it's kind of in the air we breathe now in the history department and we're really really
065excited about that and that's if you talk to your students just saying it's a skill based curriculum and they'll be the first ones to tell you so thank you for coming and we'll certainly be around we invite you to look around at some of the books that are on the tables so you could see the kind of things that students read and we'll be around to take questions if you want to talk to thanks for coming out tonight thank you very much we appreciate it thanks [Applause] you