Welcome to the MICDS 11th Grade US History website!
On this site, you will find our course curriculum and teacher-maintained pages which outline individual course syllabi and announcements.
We devoted a significant amount of time in the summer of 2007 to overhauling the 11th grade regular US History curriculum from the traditional chronological format to an innovative and (hopefully) engaging thematic approach. Our hope with this process is to strengthen the skill development of our students at the front end of the course (technology, research, historiography, etc), deepen the evaluative process by focusing our study on specific thematic concepts (7 thematic units will be designed to all include a writing piece, a presentation piece (use of a course website to document each student’s work over the year), and a factual assessment piece), and strengthen our end of year cumulative process by creating a substantial final project that will serve as a cornerstone of academic accountability and substance. The work that is being done involves substantial inquiry into how to shift evaluation from product to process. The work is also examining how to utilize a variety of assessment strategies that will enhance both the assessment process and its viability in increasingly transparent academic settings. With the initial work that has already been done in overhauling the curriculum, time has already been committed to how we teach and insure that the impact of the classroom carries forward when we send them home to learn and think. Time will be spent identifying the technological tools that will best support this new curricular approach which represents an exciting, but significant shift in pedagogy. Thus the goal of this website and our current academic direction is to identify and define how we evaluate process, shift the teaching of manageable factual information to homework while emphasizing critical thinking to a greater extent than we already do in the context of classroom activities. Furthermore, the use of a website to document much of our work will help force additional responsibility (and accountability) for personal learning onto the students.
If you are an educator or historian and are interested in learning more about our thematic approach to US History, have comments about this website, or are interesting in dialoging with our teachers and students about their individual pages or written work, please contact Scott Small at ssmall@micds.org, Carla Federman at cfederman@micds.org, or Elizabeth Helfant at ehelfant@micds.org.