Page 269 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 11 How Can I Design, Implement, and Evaluate Instructional Activities? 241
blems, make decisions, or engage in citizen action projects. The most desirable discourse activities involve discussion or debate rather than just recitation, and the most desirable writing assignments involve sustained writing rather than just filling in blanks.
6. Adaptability. Activities that can be adapted to accommodate students’ individual differences in interests or abilities are preferable to activities that cannot. Other things being equal, activities that offer students some opportunity for choice in deciding what to do or autonomy in deciding how to do it are preferable to activities that lack these features. Similarly, activities that students of differing ability levels can address at multiple levels of difficulty or sophistication are preferable to activities that require all students to use the same process in order to produce the same outcome.
Principles That Apply to Sets of Activities
The principles in the previous two sections apply to each activity considered individually. In contrast, the principles in this section apply to sets of activities developed as part of the plan for accomplishing the goals of a unit. Each principle might not apply to each separate activity in the set, but the set as a whole should reflect these principles (insofar as it is possible to do so while still meeting the primary goals).
1. Variety. The set should contain a variety of activity formats and student response modes. Within the range of activities suited to the unit’s goals, variety is desirable as a way to accommo- date individual differences in students’ activity preferences. There might be both individual and cooperative activities, for example, as well as variety in communication modes (reading, writing, speaking, listening) and information-processing requirements and task forms (communicating understanding, responding critically, conducting inquiry, solving problems, making decisions).
2. Progressive levels of difficulty or complexity. Activities should progressively increase in levels of challenge as student expertise develops. As students become more accomplished in meeting the demands of various activity formats, they can take on more complex assignments, assume greater autonomy in deciding how to organize their responses, gather data from a broader range of sources, and so on. Consider whether the set of activities reflects (1) variety, (2) progressive levels of difficulty, (3) life application, (4) a full range of goals, (5) concrete experiences, (6) a connection between declarative and procedural knowledge, and (7) natural application.
3. Life applications. Students should get to apply what they are learning to current events or other aspects of their lives outside of school (in ways that make sense given their levels of development). Even if they do not involve taking action, such applications should at least include opportunities to develop understanding and appreciation of how the ideas currently studied in school apply to issues that call for personal and civic decision making. Much current instruction fails to include such applications, and when it does many of the so-called applications are confined to de-contextualized “academic” examples or cases that do not apply to students’ lives outside of school. For example, students sometimes are asked to make predictions about a fictional country based on what they are told about its geographical features. If students are to develop appreciation for the value of geographical principles, however, they will need authentic opportunities to see how the principles can help them to understand how geography influences what people do, the types of shelters people have, the kinds of resources people have access to, and so forth.
4. Full range of goals addressed. As a set, the activities should reflect the full range of goals identified for the unit. In particular, to the extent that values or citizen action goals are included along with knowledge and skill goals, the set should include 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.