Page 125 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

Summary
Planning around goals and powerful ideas sets the stage for powerful social studies teaching. Backward planning means starting with your desired results for student learning, understanding, appreciating, and applying, and then working “backward” from there to figure out what doing that will take. A central criterion of good planning is alignment of all key parts. Good planning begins with attention to your yearlong social studies goals—not just learning of knowledge and skills prescribed for your grade level but also the development of related attitudes, beliefs, values, and dispositions to action. This agenda needs consistent attention throughout the year. Within this framework, unit planning begins with identification of the most powerful ideas associated with the unit topic. These ideas then become the content base for your lessons, activities, and assessments. Weekly and daily planning then
are needed to fit your lessons, activities, and assessments.
Many tools are available to assist you in your planning, including national, state and local social studies standards and curriculum guides, college textbooks, your elemen- tary social studies textbook series, Internet websites, guides to children’s literature that relates to social studies topics, and your teaching colleagues. Standards docu- ments are most useful as checklists for assessing existing plans and identifying ways to improve them, and curric- ulum guides specify the content (topics and skills) you are expected to teach at your grade level. It all begins, how- ever, with goal-oriented specification of big ideas around which to structure the unit in general and each of its component lessons and activities. If you have done this correctly, both you and your students will know why the content base of each lesson and activity is important and how it can be applied to life outside of school.
CHAPTER 4
What Social Studies Planning Tools Are Available? 97
Reflective Questions
1. Imagine that your school district decided to pilot an initiative that would provide social studies teachers with a three-hour block of time each week to work on planning. How would you spend the time, and what effects do you think it would have on your teaching?
2. What are some creative ways of making more time for planning? What do you think would be the results?
3. Goal-oriented planning is viewed as a major challenge by many teachers. Why do you think this perception exists? What could be done to address it?
4. Imagine you are a teacher in a setting where literacy and math are the top priorities. Your
background is heavily weighted toward social studies—and you believe you should be able to satisfy both. You are also committed to actualizing the NCSS aim that states “the primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.” What steps will you take in your planning to ensure that you satisfy the prior- ities of your institution and at the same time prepare a powerful social studies program at your grade level?
Your Turn: Planning Your Social Studies Program for the Year
Locate the social studies curriculum documents and other available planning tools (e.g., NCSS and state social studies standards, textbooks, maps, globes, tech- nology resources, copies of old standardized tests) that your building administrator, mentor teacher, and other colleagues have referenced. Add your notes from your college social science classes, instructional units you
have designed, and artifacts you have collected, includ- ing objects, photos, and pamphlets.
Set aside several hours for doing some overall social studies planning. If possible, pair up with your mentor or a peer teaching at the same grade level. Pose the question, “What do I want social studies to look like in my classroom this year?” List
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