Field Blog #3

Orange High School

Last Friday, I made another visit to Orange to do an observation. Again, the two classes I sat in on were the honors and the college prep sophomore history classes. It was Halloween, so all of the students were in their costumes and just having a good day. They had candy for each other, they took pictures on their phones to document the fun, and so on. I could just really see the strong bonds that were formed in the classroom. The teacher was again really friendly with the students, asking how they were doing that day, giving them candy, asking about their Halloween plans, and more. After they got the fun stuff out of the way, they got down to business and started their work. What they devoted the whole rest of the class period to was a DBQ, or a document based question. When I was a sophomore in high school taking AP U.S. History, we would do these assignments all the time. It was interesting to take the way I had done them in school and see how other places completed the same assignment. They went through the two different prompts they could choose from and really unpacked what it was asking. They then split into groups depending on who picked which prompt, and then discussed where they were going to go from there. A DBQ is a packet that consists first of one or two questions and then multiple, usually around ten, historical documents, which could be photographs, excerpts from speeches, political cartoons, or other pieces like these. The assignment is to answer the question in an essay format, incorporating some of the documents for evidence to back up the claim they are making. When they split into groups, they had to discuss which documents they tentatively chose to include when they actually form their essay. They all brought up reasons why they felt each document was or was not good for their specific question and they had a deep and insightful discussion. When they finished, they got back together as a main group and discussed with Mrs. Price about what they had just talked about. This class period was one similar to the one I experienced in high school, so it was interesting to be on the outside, not actually learning and being a student.