Prior to joining the incredible MJDS community, I taught in and led high schools for fourteen years. Starting in 2010 the schools I worked in began implementing Document Based Questions (DBQs) as part of their humanities and social studies curricula. The impetus for this came from multiple research studies and, locally, the work of two phenomenal educators from Evanston Township High School in Illinois. These two educators had realized how effective DBQs were in developing several higher lever critical thinking, reading and writing cognitive abilities. The DBQ Project was born and quickly spread to dozens of high schools around the region. As the principal of two different Carmen high schools here in Milwaukee, we implemented variations of these and other DBQs and the outcomes for our students were profound.

I chose to highlight DBQs this morning because of their awesome implementation in our 8th grade, facilitated by Adon Kaufman. Click HERE to read his blog and get a sense of what’s happening in his classroom. The takeaway I want to highlight is this – our 8th grade students are learning to think, read and write in a way that is rigorous for any high school 11th grader. This rigor is evident across our content areas and we are preparing our students for life in and well beyond high school.