One class, one question, one town. Then the plan for the next one.
A Backyard History day is called Model and Plan. I run a walking investigation with one of your classes while their teachers observe. That afternoon, the teachers plan their own. Here’s the whole day, with the walk I’d run in my own town as the example.
The schedule
What teachers watch for
Teachers walk with a one-page observation sheet. It asks three things: what questions are doing the work, where students are producing rather than receiving, and which move you could make tomorrow without me. That sheet is what separates the morning from a field trip. It’s also what the afternoon starts from.
What teachers leave with
A second walking investigation, designed by them, for their own students, on one page. The planning template follows the four dimensions of the Inquiry Arc that Investigating History is built on: the question, the disciplinary tools students will use, the sources and the evidence they’ll weigh, and how they’ll communicate what they conclude. Plus the route, the unit it maps to, and the date they’ll run it.
They also keep the morning’s materials: the question, the stop cards, and the sources, so they can run the same walk again next year.
The Stockbridge example
This is the walk I’d run with a third or fifth grade class in my own town. The question for third grade: Who decided what this land was for? The question for fifth grade: What did the fight over slavery look like from this valley?
A low stone wall in the woods.
The wall runs across three property lines. Students look at the wall, then at a parcel map, then at a LiDAR image with the trees removed, where the wall turns out to be one of hundreds. Sources: the LiDAR layer, the parcel map.
What they’re doing: noticing that the map and the ground disagree, and asking why.
The sheep era.
A photograph of these hills bald, from the 1800s, next to the same view today. A short account of the wool trade.
What they’re doing: explaining the walls, and realizing a landscape that looks permanent was decided by people with reasons.
The Stowe family tract.
A deed or a map showing the land once held by the family of Harriet Beecher Stowe. For fifth grade, one page of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and one paragraph of what it did.
What they’re doing: connecting a name on a deed to a book that moved a country, and learning that the connection is thinner than the story they want.
Great Barrington, fifth grade only.
The site of the Du Bois boyhood home, and the fact that his great-great-grandfather Tom Burghardt had been enslaved in this county. A short passage from Du Bois on the Housatonic.
What they’re doing: holding two things at once, a valley that produced an abolitionist’s book and an abolitionist’s great-great-grandson, and one that enslaved people first.
Back in the room, students answer the question with evidence from the stops, and name what they’d want to find out next. In my experience the best next question comes from a kid, and it’s usually about who isn’t in the story.
Why this is Investigating History, not a field trip
Every stop runs the same sequence the curriculum runs: a question, sources that don’t fully agree, perspectives, a claim from evidence. I don’t tell students what happened here. The town does, and they have to read it.
I facilitate; I don’t lecture.
Logistics
One class per day, about 25 students, with their teachers and any others you’d like observing.
The route stays within a fifteen-minute walk of the school. No bus.
The walk runs in light rain. In heavy weather we run the morning as a source investigation in the classroom with photographs from the scouting visit, and the walk moves to a scheduled makeup.
Off-campus permissions, supervision ratios, and student safety follow your district’s own field trip policy. I’ll ask for it when we book.
Accessibility: tell me during scouting and I’ll build the route to it.
You provide the room for the afternoon and the teachers’ release time. I bring everything else.