This Friday marks the 12th year in a row that we've come together at the cabin-sized "Purden Lake Conference Centre" to connect the local to the global, get warm by the fire, and move Social Studies education an inch closer to some place it has never been before.

On the grill for discussion topics:

1. Consolidating our resources for Indigenous Residential Schools -- the Lejac Case Study.
2. An explanation from Rob on how he understands the triangulation approach to assessment (as presented by Sandra Herbst) and what the implications might be for local social studies teachers.
3. A "critical friends" look at how teacher education programs can anticipate problems of practice that occur in teachers' first five years of practice.

Pacific Slope Professional Development Retreat Nov 19th and 20th, 2020.  On the agenda this year:

1. Social Studies and Distributed Learning in North Central BC.
2. Social Studies and Covid: local teachers responding to the quarter system 
3. In light of 1 & 2, a scan of what SD57 teachers are after from their professional development during Covid and how to make the most of the available methods of delivery. 
4. Input from consortium on a workshop idea for confronting conspiracies with students.

Update:  Love the workshop ideas and title we came up! -- "From 911 to QAnon: Challenging Conspiratorial Thinking with Historical Thinking"

ROLE-PLAY SIMULATIONS
We've found that creating and adapting simulations for students has been an easy ticket to engagement. When students' identities are engaged and at play, learning sticks. Here are four of our most popular role-play simulations:

Battle for Quebec (Social Studies 9)
This activity starts off as a role card game where students take characters and military equipment based on historical events surrounding the Battle of Quebec in 1759. Their resources are then deployed in a Risk-like dice-based board game. Who will prevail? Britain or France?

Glen co-designed this project with students from his Social Studies class.  It was their idea to transition from the card-based role-play (seen on the left)  to the map-based board game (seen being played on the right). Photo/video Glen Thielmann 2018.

MANIPULATIVE SETS
Over the last four years the TTSP team has been creating kits of primary and secondary sources and objects to be used as "manipulative sets" in the Humanities. Manipulatives are common and effective in Mathematics (e.g. Cuisenaire Rods), and collections of sources are readily available online or from suppliers like TC2 -- but what could we use for hands-on constructivist learning and meaningful assessment?. We set out to design resources that students could use to break down problems related to people, places, and events in order to make their own decisions and judgments about how others have arrived at historical and geographic accounts. The kits come with teacher guides and suggested activities -- there are many ways to use manipulatives. The most common use is to use the sources to work through the historical and geographic thinking concepts known as the "competencies" in the redesigned Social Studies curriculum.  We are also starting to use these sources, and the problems they suggest, with Building Thinking Classroom strategies as researched and developed by Peter Liljedahl.

Place in Education -- a unique experiment in place-conscious and experiential learning, geographic literacy, and integration of humanities, sciences, and arts. The Pacific Slope has partnered with the Prince George Social Studies Teachers' Association to put on this event which takes place in Barkerville, BC Sept 27-29th, 2018.

Check out all the details at http://GoldRushEd.ca

Great things happen when teachers collaborate. Ever since it's formation in 2010, the Pacific Slope Educational Consortium has staged an annual retreat to develop an essential inquiry for the year and share our progress towards placing critical thinking in the core of our individual and collective practices. These events take place at our Purden Lake Conference Centre over an evening and adjacent Pro-D day -- a key realization of our ongoing goal to engage in meaningful, place-based, and productive professional learning. This year we are happy to host the executive of the recently formed Prince George Social Studies Teachers' Association as they map out their activities for the coming year. We get things going on Sunday June 4th with an evening session on developments with the new Social Studies curriculum. On Monday June 5th the Pacific Slope will reflect and share on their upcoming publication for Social Studies 9 and the PGSSTA will plan a fall retreat for local Social Studies teachers and consider some new initiatives to support its members. Both groups will then turn to critical questions regarding the new curriculum and associated classroom practice. Of particular interest are the various Grade 11/12 Social Studies electives in place for the next school year and what local teachers are planning to do with them.

Our format features 3-4 talks on the symposium themes, and 3 excursions (with a few choices for each), all set in the spectacular setting of Barkerville Historic Town. This world-class heritage site will be closed to tourists and open to symposium participants, so we will have unique, behind-the-scenes access and room to learn.

Details to follow in January 2016, including the launch of the symposium website.

Mumbleypeg 2015, our annual Social Studies teacher retreat at Purden Lake, was a great reminder that not all teacher Pro-D needs to take place in classrooms or lecture theatres. This small consortium of educators designs most of it's Pro-D gatherings with a few basic principles in mind: something to do with fire, good food, strong conversation, and an inspiring setting. This year, the rain came in fits and starts, but not enough to dampen our Thursday night reverie by the fire. Someone brought out some Extra Old Stock and toasted Harper's Old Stock Canadians, which we took to mean us. Knives were tossed, boats hauled from the water, wood split, moose steaks grilled, bottles opened, jokes told, coals banked, and snoring heard to wake the dead.

For our Friday session, the two areas of focus were research/writing skills and the new BC Social Studies curriculum. On the topic of research/writing skills, we wondered about how much do we teach, why students needs this, and how do we teach it?  We used the essay writing guide from http://historyskills.jimdo.com/ to centre our discussion and, if nothing else, this probably convinced more or us to revive attempts to teach formal writing for research essays in our classes, not just as prep for the SS11 exam (which we agree required a different "formula" for success), but as a way to organize and drive thinking (primary benefit) as well as to demonstrate learning (secondary benefit).

Our other endeavour was to unpack the new curriculum. A few of us had not had a good look at it yet, while others had been been mucking about in the new waters for some time. We had copies of the K-9 Social Studies Curriculum, the Draft SS10 and proposed Gr. 11/12 electives. We used the SS9 curriculum to centre our discussion, and were impressed by two things: the sheer volume of historical content that could be attached to the course the way it is framed (1750-1919), and the related challenge of how to approach the course thematically or from a framework other than that of the familiar sequential survey course -- the history teacher's skilled tack over a long distance with a strong wind aft and only occasional forays ashore. The content bookends effectively place most of the old SS9, all of the old SS10 and some of the old SS11 into one course. Rather than simply drop a pile of topics and rebuild a survey course, the new SS9 begs for a new framework. We didn't exactly nail one down (not that the six of us would teach the course in the same way), but we did see how the four "Big Ideas" (basically: ideology, environment, power, identity) could act as new curriculum organizers. We also speculated on the use of some kind of matrix for unit design where the content and competencies would form the axes. While this appeals as some kind of curriculum checklist, in reality it is hard to draw out a single skill from one historical case study or vice versa. For example, do bits and pieces of WWI pop up throughout the course as they help elicit a skill or competency or follow a theme, or does it make more sense to teach WWI in one go and dogpile the associated skills? Part of what made our discussion interesting was to wonder if we have become history teachers instead of socials teachers, and if this was a problem or even a real thing. It is quite possible to approach Social Studies through a different lens, a geographic one, for example, and maybe the new curriculum makes it easier for us to broaden our skillsets as teachers. We noticed that the SS9 course, and perhaps others, was laid out to make project-based learning and cross-curricular inquiry a more natural fit. The lack of provincial exams and paring down of learning outcomes -- tempered somewhat by the massive amount of Canadian history that takes place between the start and end dates -- really does open the door to a different approach.

We agreed to all take a stab at throwing together a new SS9 outline and see what happens next. As is often the case at our Pro-D sessions, we left with the an uneasy feeling like we had generated more questions than answers, a result of having our ideas challenged by others, especially the easy ideas. We also left with that warm feeling that we were lucky to be doing what we were doing -- working with students, teaching in a field that continually offers us change and interest, and having colleagues to keep us sharp and connected.

Get set for the 6th annual Pacific Slope Retreat and SD13 AGM.  This year, we take to the shores of Purden Lake and the "Lewis-Spike Conference Centre" for a plenary session on Thu., Sep 24th starting at 6:00 p.m. and seminar sessions on Fri., Sep 25th from 9:30-2:30.

Once the traditional knife-tossing game and steak dinner are out of the way, we have an ambitious agenda.

This year we will explore design aesthetics for courses under the new curriculum.  What elements of design should guide us as we put the new BC Social Studies curriculum through its paces?  What kind of frameworks can we use to make sense of the swirling mass of competencies, skills, and content?  Is it that easy to pick and choose from among the (vast) content areas (now even vaster with the curriculum re-org)  in order to address competence, or is SS more like Math in that there is some core content that is necessary for students to encounter in sequence? Can we map this out using the "juggernaut" of the new SS9 as a test case? What's the difference between history and SS? What if we used a geographic framework to understand our role as SS teachers, or sociological, philosophical, ecological, anthropological for that matter? What does the new focus on Aboriginal content actually mean when it comes to course design? How do we broach the subject of historical revisionism as we look to a post-colonial curriculum and pedagogy?

When that whole business devolves into a cage match, we have a practical topic to go to -- an evaluation of the teaching resources posted at http://historyskills.jimdo.com/ including a document on written essays.