Page 272 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

244 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
their performance and to correct and learn from their mistakes. Ordinarily there should be a teacher-led post-activity debriefing or reflection that reemphasizes the activity’s pur- poses and goals, reflects on how (and how well) they have been accomplished, and reminds students about where the activity fits within the big picture defined by the larger unit or curriculum strand.
For teachers, post-activity reflection also includes evaluating the effectiveness of the activity for enabling students to accomplish the goals. Depending on the relative success of the activity and the apparent reasons for it, you may need to take remedial actions now or adjust your plans for next year.
Optimal format Where alternatives are possible, implement an activity in whatever format will maximize the time that students spend in active and thoughtful cognitive engagement (and thus minimize the time that they spend being passive, confused, or engaged in busywork). Many activities that involve communicating about or debating content, for example, are better done in pairs or small groups than as whole-class activi- ties that offer active roles to just a few students and require the others only to listen.
Optimal use of instructional time If the independent work phase of an activity calls for forms of work that are time consuming but do not require close teacher monitoring, these aspects of the work can be done outside of the time allocated for social studies instruction. Ordinarily, students should do activities such as reading and taking notes for a research assignment, editing initial drafts for grammar and spelling, or working on elaborate illustrations or constructions during general study periods or at home.
Learning opportunities in classrooms are necessarily limited and somewhat artificial compared to what is possible under more natural and unconstrained conditions. One way to compensate for this is to use the community as a living laboratory for social stud- ies learning, and in the process, use the diversity of student backgrounds represented in the class as a resource for promoting social studies understandings. By “out-of-school learning opportunities,” we do not mean mere homework, which traditionally has focused on practice exercises designed to reinforce in-class teaching (Cooper, 1989). Instead, we refer to learning opportunities that expand and enrich the curriculum by causing students to think and collect information about how social studies concepts learned at school apply to family and community situations, then feed their findings back into subsequent class discussions (see Chapter 13 for more about homework).
As an application and indirect test of the principles presented earlier in this chapter, we asked preservice teachers to tell us about the social studies activities they remembered from their elementary years and to state what they believed they learned from engaging in those activities. It was important to ask what the students remembered learning because curriculum developers and teachers often cite salience in students’ memories as justification for their activity selections. (“Students may not remember the everyday stuff,
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.
Extending the Curriculum through Out-of-School Learning Experiences
College Students’ Reports of Learning Activities Experienced in Elementary Social Studies