Teaching thinking skills through the use of artifacts is a fun way to engage students in curiosity and wonder. Many students need to develop higher order thinking skills, and the use of artifacts lends itself beautifully to this process. Artifacts focus instruction on evaluation and analysis. Students share a fascination with everyday objects, past, present and future. "What is it?", "What does it do?" seem like simple questions, but they open the portal to unlimited questioning from a curious student. The analytical skills of observing, hypothesizing, inferring are core skills necessary for building imaginations and inventiveness. In addition these skills help students become better citizens of our global community as decision–makers. Even relationships need to be "figured out" and "assessed". Students need analytical skills when they use their smart phones, log on to a computer, watch YouTube, social network on Facebook, or take a swig from a Monster energy drink. The changing world of technology has made available an enormous amount of information with a few clicks of a mouse, thus making it extremely important for our students to be able to evaluate and sort information. Some of the information on the Internet is not reliable and some even deceptive and dangerous. Therefore, the ability to judge the credibility of an information source or what websites are safe has become an indispensible critical thinking skill that needs to be explicitly taught.
I am a special education inclusion teacher working with a variety of age groups and learning levels at Edgewood Magnet School in New Haven, CT. This means I collaborate, consult and co-teach in the regular education classrooms, modifying and differentiating instruction for students with special needs. Edgewood is primarily a neighborhood school with grades kindergarten through the eighth, with a diverse population. The students have a wide range of ethnicities, economical strata and varying degrees of academic and emotional strengths and weaknesses. The school has an enrollment of about 450 students with approximately 60% African-American, 12% Hispanic and the remaining 29% Caucasian and Asian. This diversity offers enrichment to the classroom, allowing each student to bring their own background knowledge and life experiences to the learning community. In addition, it provides an arts-integrated curriculum, an educational approach that supports multiple intelligence theory and uses arts education as a means to assist students to improve their academic performance and enrich their lives. Arts-integration curricula use art forms--music, visual art, theater, and dance to teach other core subjects, including math, reading, and language arts. This unit aligns with the philosophy of the school. The unit is inquiry based and the activities I plan appeal to a variety of learning styles and provide for differentiation of instruction.
The importance of high stakes testing has concentrated the curriculum on reading and math. Social studies is not a subject included in the Connecticut Mastery Test, therefore taking a back seat to the rigors of reading and math. However, standardized tests measure students' ability to think critically. This is usually assessed through different strands. For example, The Connecticut Mastery Test tests students on:
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· Forming A General Understanding, which includes making predictions and using content to determine meaning,
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· Developing Interpretation, which includes using evidence to support, drawing conclusions,
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· Making Reader/Text Connections which includes synthesizing relevant information
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· Examining Content and Structure, which includes making judgments and analysis.
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This unit demonstrates how test and curriculum standards can be met in the instruction of a content area.
