Page 270 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

242 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
designed to develop values or citizen action dispositions. Whenever a goal implies doing, activities should include actual doing, not just reading or talking about it.
5. Concrete experiences. Where students lack sufficient experiential knowledge to sup- port understanding, sets of activities should include opportunities for them to view demon- strations, inspect artifacts or photos, visit sites, or in other ways to experience concrete examples of the content. Concrete experiences are especially important in connection with knowledge that children ordinarily do not get much opportunity to develop through their everyday experiences. To learn about conditions of life in past times or in different cultures, for example, children may need to handle artifacts, view photos or films, or read or listen to factually based children’s literature in addition to reading textbooks. Resources of this kind are increasingly available on the Internet or in video and CD-ROM formats.
6. Connecting declarative knowledge with procedural knowledge. Students should learn relevant processes and procedural knowledge, not just declarative or factual knowledge, to the extent that doing so is important as part of developing basic understanding of a topic. For example, sets of activities in government and civics units should go beyond teaching facts about government (capitals, names of office holders) to include activities designed to develop understanding of governmental processes (what different levels of government do and how they do it) and citizen participation dispositions and skills (voting, lobbying). Similarly, in learning about different forms of maps, graphs, and other data display formats, students should learn not just that the different forms exist, but why they exist and how they can be used as tools to accomplish particular purposes.
7. “Natural” applications. Activities that are “naturals” for developing understanding of a unit’s content should be included in the set for the unit. Retrieval charts and related comparison/contrast methods should be used whenever the content has focused on differ- ent examples of concepts (Indian tribes, geographic regions, governmental forms) or gen- eralizations (population development tended to follow water transportation routes prior to the invention of motorized vehicles). Activities designed to develop understanding of sequences of causes, effects, and subsequent implications are “naturals” in teaching history, as are activities built around comparisons of historical events with contemporary events that appear to be following similar patterns.
The principles discussed in previous sections refer to the features of activities themselves. The following principles identify ways that teachers might structure and scaffold the activities for their students.
Completeness. A complete activity ordinarily would include the following stages:
1. Introduction: the teacher communicates the goals of the activity and cues relevant prior knowledge and response strategies.
2. Initial scaffolding: the teacher explains and demonstrates procedures if necessary, then asks questions to make sure that students understand what to do before releas- ing them to work on their own.
3. Independent work: individuals, pairs, or small groups work mostly on their own but with teacher monitoring and intervention as needed.
4. Debriefing/reflection/assessment: teacher and students revisit the activity’s primary goals and assess the degree to which they have been accomplished.
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Principles for Implementing Activities with Students