Page 262 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

234 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Before reading further, try this exercise yourself. In your textbook, pencil in your responses. What activities do you remember from elementary social studies? What do you think these activities were intended to teach you? What did you actually learn from them? What do your responses imply concerning your own ideas about good versus poor learning activities?
We will return to these examples and summarize the findings from our study at the end of this chapter. First, however, we will offer our principles and suggestions for selecting and implementing learning activities.
In previous chapters we underscored the importance of using major social studies education purposes and goals to guide planning, but we also noted that such goal- oriented planning is not often evident in the content found in textbooks or in the recitation-dominant discourse patterns observed in classrooms. We suggested that the way to improvement lies in focusing content development more clearly around powerful ideas associated with social understanding and civic efficacy goals.
We continue with these themes in the present chapter. We use the term activities to refer to the full range of classroom tasks, activities, and assignments—anything that students are expected to do in order to learn, apply, practice, evaluate, or in any other way respond to curricular content. Activities may call for speech (answer questions, participate in discussion, debate, or role play), writing (short answers, longer com- positions, research reports), or goal-directed action (conduct inquiry, solve problems, construct models or displays). Activities may be done either in or out of the classroom (i.e., as homework); in whole-class, small-group, or individual settings; and under close and continuing teacher supervision or largely independently (on one’s own or in col- laboration with peers). Activities are differentiated from strategies, which are broader and represent instructional approaches such as inquiry, storytelling, simulations, and so forth.
Our research has addressed fundamental questions about the nature and roles of learning activities: What are the intended functions of various types of activities? What is known about the mechanisms through which they perform these functions (if they do)? What is it about ideal activities that make them so good? What faults limit the value of less ideal activities? What principles might guide teachers’ planning and implementation of activities?
Principle 2: Opportunity to Learn: Students learn more when most of the available time is allocated to curriculum-related activities and the classroom management system emphasizes maintaining students’ engagement in those activities. Since the more time spent on instruction, the more children learn, activities for use in instruction should be selected carefully. The activities should be stimulating and challenging, and aligned with the powerful goals and content. Principle 7: Practice and Application Activities: Students need sufficient opportunities to practice and apply what they are learning, and to receive improvement-oriented feedback. Activities should incorporate opportu- nities for students to refine their knowledge and skills through practice. However, such practice should come in the form of varied tasks so that the students have opportu- nities to refine their knowledge in different contexts and different formats. Please see Chapter 14 for a more in-depth description of these principles.
Opportunity to Learn and Practice and Application Activities
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.