Page 113 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 4 What Social Studies Planning Tools Are Available? 85
should be a daily priority along with scaffolding students’ task engagement. Research on learning tasks suggests that activities and assignments should be sufficiently varied and interesting enough to motivate student engagement, sufficiently new and challenging enough to constitute learning experiences rather than needless repetition, and yet easy enough to allow students to achieve high rates of success if they invest reasonable time and effort.
You also need to plan appropriate opportunities for modeling and instructing stu- dents in learning and self-regulation strategies. This requires comprehension instruction that includes attention to propositional knowledge (what to do), procedural knowledge (how to do it), and conditional knowledge (when and why to do it). Strategy teaching is especially important for less able students who otherwise might not come to under- stand the value of consciously monitoring, self-regulating, and reflecting on their learning processes.
Introduction to Planning Tools
The host of tools that are available for you to use in your planning—especially those mandated by your district such as content standards, pacing guides, and textbooks— often leave the impression that you simply “do” social studies. Teachers who are new to the field, not particularly passionate about social studies, or obsessed with facts, might secretly feel a sense of relief: “At last, they have told me what to do.” We, on the other hand, view all of the tools available to you, including the social studies standards, simply as resources to guide your planning.
Good unit planning begins with a specification of major goals and associated big ideas, then proceeds through the planning of content selection and representation, development of big ideas through discourse, application through authentic activities, and other elaborations addressed in subsequent chapters of this book. As a way to help you see the big picture of unit planning and how each of its components fits into it, we have provided a planning tool. The planning tool is presented in Appendix A.
NCSS Standards
The NCSS (2010) published curriculum standards that address overall curriculum design and comprehensive student performance expectations. Associations devoted to disciplines such as economics, political science (civics and government), history, and geography also have published standards that feature the priorities of their respective disciplines (see Chapters 5–7).
We encourage you and your colleagues to first establish your program framework using the social studies standards as a guide and then supplement it with standards from the single disciplines where relevant. The NCSS (2010) publication, National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies Teachers: A Framework for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment, has been designed to serve three purposes:
1. It serves as a framework for social studies program design from kindergarten through Grade 12.
2. It functions as a guide for curriculum decisions by providing student performance expectations in the areas of knowledge, processes and attitudes.
3. It provides examples of classroom activities that will guide teachers as they design instruction to help students meet performance expectations.
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