Page 264 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

236 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
(4) added principles describing how teachers might structure and scaffold activities for their students.
When designing instructional activities, ask yourself, do they provide for (1) active learning? (2) application of intellectual processes? and (3) opportunities
to work with actual objects?
Basic Assumptions about Ideal Curricula
Our position is rooted in certain assumptions about key features of ideal curricula. Most of these assumptions reflect basic principles that are commonly stated in curriculum texts but often not reflected in the instructional materials used in today’s schools.
Curriculum development should be driven by major long-term goals, not content coverage lists. Thus, activities should be included because they are viewed as means for helping students acquire important dispositions and capabilities, not just to acquire cultural literacy construed in a narrow, “trivial pursuit” sense.
Content should be organized into networks structured around important ideas, and these ideas should be taught for understanding and for application to life outside of school. Teaching social studies for understanding and application requires concentrating on key concepts and generalizations that help students understand and appreciate how the social world works, how and why it has evolved as it has, how these understandings can be used to predict or control social outcomes, and what the implications may be for personal values or social policies.
Content provides the cognitive base for activities. Coherent content structured around powerful ideas leads naturally to activities that call for students to think critically and creatively about what they are learning and use it in applications involving inquiry, invention, problem solving, or decision making. However, parade-of-facts content leads to low-level activities calling for retrieval of definitions or facts (matching, fill in the blanks) or isolated practice skills. These low-level activities will yield few opportu- nities for authentic applications to life outside of school.
Activities are not self-justifying ends in themselves but instead are means for helping students to accomplish major curricular goals. They are designed to fulfill this function by providing structured opportunities for students to interact with content, preferably by pro- cessing it actively, developing personal ownership and appreciation of it, and applying it to their lives outside of school.
The knowledge and skills components of the curriculum should be integrated in ways that are consistent with the previous assumptions. Thus, the skills included in a unit should be the ones most naturally suited to important applications of the knowledge taught in that unit. Critical thinking skills and dispositions are developed most naturally through assignments calling for addressing value or policy issues that come up in the process of studying particular content. There is no need to manufacture artificial exer- cises to develop these skills. Instead of engaging students in artificial exercises in identi- fying logical or rhetorical flaws, for example, you would engage them in policy debates or assignments calling for critique of currently or historically important policy arguments or decisions. To the extent necessary, you would model and provide instruction in the skills
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