Page 203 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

The National Council for the Social Studies (2010, p. 9) makes the following argument: “Young people who are knowledgeable, skillful and committed to democracy are necessary to sustaining and improving our democratic way of life, and participating as members of a global community.” The NCSS states that classrooms should be “laboratories of democracy” for students to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In such laboratories, discourse among the teacher and students is needed for students to develop effective communication skills. Students need to learn to listen to others with an open mind, ask questions for clar- ification, and offer their perspectives backed with evidence, logic, or research—in general, engage in a civil exchange of ideas that can lead to new understandings, new perspectives, or new solutions to problems. We believe social studies classrooms that promote discourse of this kind will help students become committed and capable citizens.
Contemporary models of effective teaching and learning emphasize the role of the student as well as the role of the teacher. In Chapter 3, we noted that the following principles have emerged from research on teaching for understanding: The student’s role is not just to absorb or copy information but to actively make sense and construct meaning; activities and assign- ments feature tasks that call for problem solving or critical thinking, not just memory or reproduction; and the teacher creates a social environment in the classroom that could be described as a learning community, featuring discourse or dialogue designed to promote understanding. In Chapter 3 we also summarized the implications of the NCSS (2010) position statement that depicts social studies teaching and learning as powerful when it is meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. All five of these qualities, but especially the latter two, emphasize the need for active student engagement in knowledge construction, particularly through reflective teacher-student and student-student discourse. This chapter describes how students actively construct knowledge, how effective classroom discourse can help students construct such knowledge, and recommends procedures for creating a classroom environment supportive of effective classroom discourse.
Recall discourse in your elementary social studies classrooms. What did it look and sound like? Who did most of the talking? Was student–to-student interaction encouraged or stifled? Were there whole and small group discussions of topics and issues?
Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
CHAPTER 8 How Can I Use Discourse Powerfully? 175
a radical change in my students’ attention spans, participation, and knowledge base. They started to have meaningful conversations with each other and they began to dig into important issues such as slavery and women’s rights.
After reading this chapter, I am reminded that students construct knowledge in unique ways as they develop social studies understandings. I realized how important establishing productive discourse in my classroom is for students to construct knowledge actively. Teaching for thoughtfulness means teaching fewer topics, but in more in-depth ways.
At the end of the year my students became skillful discussants, and when I walked into the classroom the question I was greeted with every week was, “Mr. Moore, when is our next discussion? When is our next debate? What is it about?”