Page 112 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

84 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Your yearlong goals and portrait of student progress are likely to feature relatively generic knowledge and skill developments, and especially growth in attitudes, beliefs, values, and dispositions to action that transcend the content taught in individual lessons and even units. You need to plan to give these yearlong goals consistent attention if you expect your students to make consistent progress as the school year unfolds.
Revisit your list of goals often. They have the potential to serve as powerful self- monitoring tools as you plan, implement, and assess instruction. Finally, consider engaging your students in these exercises. Talking about your goals and ideals and setting high expectations go a long way in realizing them.
Unit Planning
Unit plans are the major subsets of the yearlong plan. From each unit plan you will develop lesson plans that are at the most refined level of specificity. Research indicates that educational policymakers, textbook publishers, and teachers often become so focused on the content coverage or learning activities that they lose sight of the larger purposes and goals that are supposed to guide curriculum planning. This level of planning is typically ignored in elementary social studies textbook series, which pro- vides one more reason why unit planning is necessary—and requires resources beyond the textbook.
Goals aligned with big ideas drawn from selected content are needed to guide each step in curriculum planning and implementation. Goals are most likely to be attained if all the curriculum components (content clusters, instructional methods, learning activi- ties, and assessment tools—all topics of chapters in this text) are aligned and designed as means of helping students accomplish them. This involves planning curriculum and instruction to develop capabilities that students can use in their lives inside and outside school, both now and in the future. In this regard, it is important to emphasize goals of understanding, appreciation, and life application.
Ideally, each unit builds on the preceding ones so that there is a continuous revisiting and applying of big ideas. The net result is depth of understanding and memorable learning. Research indicates that networks of connected knowledge structured around powerful ideas can be acquired with understanding and retained in forms that make them accessible for application. In contrast, disconnected bits of information are likely to be learned only through low-level processes such as rote memorizing, and most of these bits either are soon forgotten or retained in ways that limit their accessibility (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).
Weekly and Daily Planning
Goals and big ideas should guide weekly and daily social studies planning. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of the classroom and the multiple challenges you face in your role as a decision maker (Doyle, 1986), they are often ignored as attention focuses on the planning of activities. This is how social studies becomes piecemeal, combining a flurry of disconnected bits of information with a worksheet, a fun hands-on activity, or a discussion of a fanciful piece of children’s literature that only topically matches the original goal.
Generally speaking, all of the unit components such as goals, big ideas, instructional strategies, activities, and so forth should remain in place as you prepare your weekly and daily lessons. Often, there are learning sequences that develop over several days, so your plans should reflect that. Coherent content linking prior knowledge to new material
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