Page 115 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 4 What Social Studies Planning Tools Are Available? 87
fundamental themes of geography associated with it: diversity of people, places, and cultures; human/environment interaction; location, movement, and connections; regions, patterns, and processes; and global issues and events. If your state has standards or content expectations, they may align with national standards.
Local Curriculum Guides
If you and your colleagues are being asked to revise your existing social studies curricu- lum to meet a designated set of standards or create local ones, we encourage you to begin with what you have and use it as a framework for decision making. You might address the following questions as you engage in this process:
• How many of the standards clearly connect to my current curricular plan?
• Are there elements in my current social studies program that need to be expanded in
order to align with the standards?
• How can the standards enhance my current social studies curriculum?
• How can I use the standards to guide my planning for depth of understanding and, if
necessary, reduce the breadth of topic coverage?
• How can I use the standards accompanied by the performance expectations to guide
my selection of instructional activities?
• How can I use the standards to align my assessment practices?
• How can I use the standards to guide my resource selections? (Brophy & Alleman, 1995)
Typically, the documents generated for social studies at the local level are designed by teachers serving on a curriculum committee whose primary task is to take national and state guidelines, localize them, and make them “user friendly” for teachers. These guide- lines usually are helpful in determining what should be taught at a given grade level, but if taken literally, they may result in a litany of disjointed facts that in the grand scheme of things are meaningless.
Textbooks
Despite the criticisms leveled against social studies textbooks, they remain a favored resource. One reason is teachers’ lack of time and resources to create their own units. Another is textbook companies’ claims that their materials align with national and state social studies standards and testing programs. Finally, many educators still believe that by covering the specific topics in the text, often through an over-reliance on a read/discuss model, their work is done. In contrast, we emphasize the Five Qualities of Powerful Teaching, adopted in the NCSS Position Statement (2008) and described in Chapter 3. Throughout this text these elements are blended with content in an attempt to create meaningfulness.
New teachers often have high expectations for textbook series because they are packaged attractively and presented to suggest that they are carefully developed and revised to meet the needs of students at each grade level. Even experienced teachers may suppress their mis- givings about these textbook series because they think, “These texts are written by experts who know what they are doing, so who are we to question their work?” In fact, textbooks are written by people who work for the publishers (mostly English majors), in response to multiple and conflicting pressures. Consequently, we urge you to view each textbook as a tool, not as “the curriculum.” We have provided a checklist for you to use as you determine its function (see Figure 4.2) and to help you leverage your plea for additional resources.
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