 Kim Goer is a high school humanities teacher at Foundations for the Future Charter Academy. Today, Kim and her social studies 30 students are using the considering perspective strategy to deepen their understanding of the concepts they're learning. Considering perspectives provides students with an opportunity to investigate information from an alternative perspective, encouraging students to set aside their personal biases and consider the validity of another person's values. This opportunity to engage in critical thinking is foundational in the development of the student's ability to validate information. So these are our objectives. First, we are really focusing on that critical and evaluative thinking. So you're going to have texts in front of you, you're going to have pictures in front of you and I really want to see can you think critically about this? Can you take a moment to not memorize the information but really understand the meaning and the concept behind what you're seeing? Do you have questions? All right, let's try it. So now what you're doing is you're thinking about these questions. So for a soldier of East Berlin, what is his perspective? When he is seeing what's happening, think put yourself here. What are you thinking? What's going on? You've been a soldier. You know soldier life. You know you had a job to maintain that military perspective. Now things are in chaos. How do you feel as a soldier who's used to order in a time of chaos? Okay, so what your job is right now is to put yourself in this perspective and start thinking about what do they think? What is their perspective? Elaborate on that. What are some of the values? What is important to them? And then give me some actions that they might agree with to exemplify. So that's what you're doing on the back as you're going through each one of those from the different perspectives. Initially I thought what is going to be the best way for them to to engage with this and it's always easier I think for them to see an image or for them to connect with a person in an image. So that was my first step in thinking we need to start with some sort of image and so and going along with that it's always I find easier when students have some sort of scaffolded template to follow. We've been using the state exemplify explain method in class in terms of our writing structure so they're familiar with it and so naturally I just thought okay I'll take that structure and put it onto some sort of template for them to be able to use as a guide in their discussions. As students work together in small groups to examine different perspectives Kim is able to circulate and engage students to help strengthen their critical thinking skills. By doing so these students learn how to apply those skills in a variety of situations including applying different perspectives in their critical essays they write in their social studies 30 class. Yeah I would say that because we're doing it in a classroom environment we have the ability to adapt and experiment about that because we did have because we're sitting in pods we have the ability to discuss about it and get some feedback on what we were thinking other things that we didn't consider or things to add on to that so by having the ability to experiment that concept in class it allows us to kind of perfect it and work it out in the real world when we're not being when we don't have to follow that activity where we can apply it to just normal lifestyles. It's also just really fun. So one of the reasons that I thought considering perspectives would be really important is because I find that students have a hard time separating their thoughts from someone else's thoughts and on a position paper especially in grade 12 and social 30 it becomes really important for them to be able to demonstrate of very knowledge of different perspectives on an issue. So what I'm hoping to see come from this is I'm hoping to see the those critical thinking skills in the writing so especially in dash two um the dash two position paper is an issue based paper where students are having to assess the underlying values of different perspectives so I'm hoping that through this activity they saw the process of putting that together and that I will see a greater focus on the values of a perspective in their next written assignment. What I'm hoping for the dash ones is that I'm going to see a variety of perspectives on an issue so it's not just going to be the generic everyone kind of agrees with this or this is the mainstream but I'm going to start to see different insights based around the ability to see this from a different perspective. So I'm in I'm taking 30 dash two social and the the third assignment is literally other people's opinions and so you write about other people's opinions and where they come from and how it could be influenced and then you talk about your own so it's important for me to see the other the other opinions in order to create my own. Being impartial and like being very objective because obviously we all have our own personal biases and by taking the time to recognize a different perspective just allows us to kind of um with just suppose um our perspective with a note perspective that we didn't initially or instinctively consider which just allows to be more informed and educated on just the matter. I guess the two takeaways are doing this when they've had the content or the context to be able to make decisions based on historical knowledge or contemporary knowledge um as well as understanding the value in seeing a bias or seeing a different perspective.