Page 317 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 14 What Is the Research Base That Informs Powerful Social Studies Teaching? 289
located in a poor neighborhood in California that during the school year immediately following mandated increases in the instructional time allocated to literacy and mathe- matics (the focus of the state’s high-stakes testing program). The school’s principal left it up to individual teachers to decide how they would restructure their weekly sche- dules to accommodate this mandate. One teacher did so by eliminating physical educa- tion, reasoning that her students had greater needs for a rich science and social studies curriculum. The changes made by most teachers, though, had the effect of reducing the time allocated to science and social studies to less than half of what it had been before. The teachers were still expected to cover the same material (in social studies, national and state history through the Civil War).
Teachers who taught a barren social studies curriculum with little or no emphasis on thoughtfulness in classroom discourse simply persisted with this approach, except that now they required their students to read and answer questions about textbook chapters at home so that they could spend most class time going over the answers. Meanwhile, teachers who understood the value of thoughtful discourse scrambled to find ways to retain this emphasis while still addressing the full range of prescribed con- tent in less than half the time. One teacher’s strategies were only partially successful. To save as much time as possible for class discussion, she cut back on less essential content and instituted shortcuts such as dividing students into small groups and jigsawing a textbook lesson in order to “get through it more quickly.” She directed stu- dents to specific pages to look for answers to questions on study sheets, requiring them to read their textbooks at home rather than during class, and substituting short films for some textbook sections. Despite these adjustments, she fell increasingly behind schedule as the year progressed, so that planned discussions increasingly were cut short or omitted in order to push on through the content. Classes became more and more recitation, less and less discussion. Even so, she never got to the last several chap- ters of the book.
The most successful teacher also covered less content. However, this was because she eliminated or reduced coverage of content she deemed less important, not because she ran out of time. Each of her social studies units included discussions, activities, and other projects that asked students to analyze, interpret, or apply their learning to address challenging problems or issues. She made time for this by skip- ping certain chapters of the textbooks and eliminating the need to work systemati- cally through the other chapters by providing her students with succinct summaries of key facts and main ideas. Although she expected her students to read relevant chapters for background and occasionally exposed them to videos or other input sources, her classroom discussions were focused on the material contained in her handouts. The difference could be seen in her unit on European exploration, settle- ment, and establishment of the mission system in California. Instead of basing it on the 45-page textbook chapter, she based it on 28 pages (including maps and illustra- tions) that briefly and clearly covered the important information she thought her students needed to know.
She also made time for student thinking in social studies by incorporating social stud- ies content into language arts lessons. The afternoon language arts period typically included 25 minutes of either silent reading or writing instruction. The teacher frequently used this time for students to read social studies information and work on writing assignments calling for them to analyze or apply this information. Her solution was not completely satisfactory, but it did enable her to sustain a focus on big ideas and thoughtful classroom discourse in social studies, despite the mandated increases in time allocated to literacy and mathematics.
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