Page 266 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

238 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
Principles for Designing and Selecting Activities
Consistent with these assumptions, we suggest the following principles for designing or selecting activities. For more details, see Alleman and Brophy (1992) or Brophy and Alleman (1991, 1992).
Primary Principles that Apply to Each Individual Activity
This first set of principles identifies necessary criteria that should be met by each individual activity considered for inclusion in a unit. Failure to meet any of these criteria constitutes a flaw that would disqualify the activity from further consideration.
1. Goal relevance. Activities must be useful as means of accomplishing worthwhile curricular goals (phrased in terms of target capabilities or dispositions to be developed in stu- dents). [Goal: Develop an understanding regarding the various forms of exchange and money and the tradeoffs associate with each. Activity: In pairs, identify each of the pictorial represen- tations of the various forms of exchange and money and discuss the negatives and positives of each.] Activities may serve many goals, but each activity should have a primary goal that is an important one, worth stressing and spending time on. Activities that amount to mere busy work do not meet this criterion; nor do games and pastimes—no matter how enjoyable—that lack a significant curricular purpose. Nor do activities that are limited to reinforcement of vocabulary or skills that are never used in authentic applications.
The content base for activities should have enduring value and life application poten- tial, not just cultural literacy status as a term that students might encounter in general reading or social discourse. Even if a word, person, or event is currently a common term of reference, you should ask why this is so and whether there are good reasons for it to continue to be so indefinitely. If there are, the reference is probably useful as a way to remember some important principle. Thus, it might be worth including Franklin’s quote about hanging separately if we do not hang together or Lincoln’s quote about not fooling all of the people all of the time in a history curriculum, and perhaps even building activities around them (discussion of their meanings or debate of their validity or applica- tion). There would be much less justification, however, for including quotes such as “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes,” or “Shoot if you must this old gray head...,” let alone for making them the focus of activities.
There must be at least logical (preferably research-based) reasons for believing that an activity will be effective in accomplishing its primary goal. This seemingly obvious prin- ciple is violated with surprising frequency. For example, many supposedly motivational activities are not actually likely to develop motivation to learn the content. Consider introducing a unit on rules and laws by having students teach classmates some of their favorite games and spending time playing those games. It is true that one can make con- nections between game rules and social rules or laws, but there are important differences between game rules and social rules. Using the former as an analogy to the latter may create misconceptions; time-consuming play is not needed to introduce the concept of social rules; and there is no reason to believe that playing games will motivate students to want to learn about social rules. (If anything, it may cause them to resent this intru- sion into their fun.) Remember, an activity suggested in a teacher’s manual will not nec- essarily fulfill the functions stated for it (if any). In fact, it may have no significant pedagogical value at all (it may have been selected via computer simply because it fits the theme or topic, with no concern for goals and major understandings).
Activities should be built around powerful ideas, not isolated facts or other peripheral content that lacks life-application potential. The geography components of current social
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.