When
planning for a social studies lesson, consider taking up the various curricular
mandates in the Alberta Social Studies program as well as various principles of
good planning:
1. Connect history to issues
in the present: Rather than studying history for its own sake as if
that is going to help students in some way, as mandated in the Alberta program
we want to engage history through helping students see how the past is
connected to issues in the present.
2. Engage students in
inquiry: In contrast to an approach to education where we tell students
what we want them to know and expect them to passively take notes while we
talk, we want to engage students in an inquiry process whereby we problematize
the content by posing an inquiry question for them to consider that requires
students to take a position and support it with evidence gained from their
inquiry.
3. Build in ‘enabling’
constraints structures: In posing well-crafted questions that require
students to take a position on an issue, we provide students with ‘enabling
constraints’ that allow them to focus their inquiry in a way that is manageable
and purposeful. Further, we help students in their learning by adopting
‘enabling structures’ creating graphic organizers that will help them to focus
their responses highlighting the areas that we need them to specifically
consider in order to thoughtfully respond to the inquiry question.
4. Provide rich
resources and materials that will enable students to thoughtfully and
meaningfully respond to the inquiry question: Adding a layer to the inquiry
process, we want to incorporate rich resources like video and primary source
documents that will help students to provide viable and thoughtful responses to
the central inquiry question.
5. Engage students in
small group and larger class dialogue and deliberation: By opening up a
space for dialogue and discussion where students share their thoughts and ideas
with their peers, and in larger classroom group discussions, we give students
an opportunity to make meaning of core concepts, propose tentative responses,
and (ideally) mutually inform one another. Preparing students for democratic
living must involve engaging them in current issues where they have the
opportunity to deliberate and respectively discuss their thoughts within both
small and larger group settings.
6. Adopt an seminar,
deliberation, and perhaps action format: Once we pose an inquiry question
for students, we can not simply stop there. We need to expose them to a range
of resources, materials, and content that will help them more deeply respond to
the central inquiry question.
7. Connecting ideas to
the world and teaching for understanding: It is not enough to
give students the definition of key ideas and concepts like imperialism, they
must be given opportunities to connect these concepts to how they currently
live in their world. We can accomplish this by creating an inquiry question
that asks them to determine if the concept under study is present in the world
today.
8. Begin with the end
in mind: Often we engage students in inquiry along with dialogue but
then fail to build in an assessment plan that will help the teacher better
appreciate the extent to which students understood key notions and ideas we are
trying to engage them with. Consequently, we need to build in an assessment
plan that is communicated to students right at the beginning so they are clear
how they will be evaluated in this inquiry process. This kind of thinking
draws on Wiggins and McTighe’s insights regarding thinking with the end in mind
by having students show their understanding through one of six types of
understanding: explain, interpret, apply, have perspective, empathize, have
self-knowledge. For example, rather than having students simply defining
imperialism, after studying primary sources we ask students if the original
relationship among Aboriginal peoples and Europeans reflects an imperial
relationship. In doing this they must apply what they know within a new
situation, thus demonstrating knowledge of the concept.
9. Forefront the
criteria for assessment and strategies to successfully respond to the
assessment task: Here again, even when we have a clear assessment plan
sometimes we as teachers fail to explain to students the criteria they will be
assessed on. Further, we also often fail to provide guided instruction that
includes various strategies that would help them create work that reflects
these criteria. If we don't teach students how
to successfully achieve particular tasks and what strong and poor
work looks like, we aid the already strong and disadvantage those that may not
have supports at home.
10. Engage students with Aboriginal
perspectives: To
do this we can take up Dwayne Donald’s central insight that we need to pay
attention to the relationship between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal peoples,
and in particular the original relationship that existed before, as he states
‘things went wrong’ starting in the mid 1800’s with the annihilation of the
Buffalo and the beginning of mass European settlement on the prairies.
This
is a lot to take in and may seem, for some, distanced from the lived world of
the social studies classroom. However, all of these insights are extremely
practical for creating meaningful social studies lessons and units. In what
follows I have created a string of lessons that reflect how these various
elements might live within a grade seven social studies class in Alberta. You can find this lesson here:
http://changingeducatinoalparadigms.blogspot.ca/2013/10/engaging-aboriginal-perspectives-in.html
http://changingeducatinoalparadigms.blogspot.ca/2013/10/engaging-aboriginal-perspectives-in.html
