Page 324 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

296 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
In combination, the principles calling for curricular alignment and for coherent con- tent imply that, to enable students to construct meaningful knowledge that they can access and use in their lives outside of school, teachers need to: (1) retreat from breadth of coverage in order to allow time to develop the most important content in greater depth; (2) represent this important content as networks of connected information struc- tured around powerful ideas; (3) develop the content with a focus on explaining these important ideas and the connections among them; and (4) follow up with learning activ- ities and assessment measures that feature authentic tasks that provide students with opportunities to develop and display learning that reflects the intended outcomes of the instruction.
Clear explanations of coherent content structured around powerful ideas do not always have to be transmitted from the teacher to the students at the beginnings of les- sons. Often, they can be elicited from students or developed in the course of carrying out inquiry or problem-solving activities. Also, some activities do not require much content explanation because they are designed primarily to address process goals (e.g., to develop connoisseurship through discussion of artistic or literary works, or to develop desired citizenship dispositions through productive discussion of controversial issues). However, teachers should conclude inquiry, problem solving, and process learning activities with reflection on what has been learned, by providing or eliciting clear statements of key concepts and principles.
6. Thoughtful Discourse Questions are planned to engage students in sustained discourse structured around powerful ideas.
Research findings. Besides presenting information and modeling application of skills, effective teachers structure a great deal of content-based discourse. They use questions to stimulate students to process and reflect on the content, recognize relationships among and implications of its key ideas, think critically about it, and use it in problem solving, decision making, or other higher-order applications. Such discourse is not limited to fac- tual review or recitation featuring rapid pacing and short answers to miscellaneous ques- tions, but instead features sustained and thoughtful development of key ideas. Through participation in this discourse, students construct and communicate content-related ideas. In the process, they abandon naive ideas or misconceptions and adopt the more sophisticated and valid ideas embedded in the instructional goals (Good & Brophy, 2003; Newmann, 1990; Rowe, 1986).
In the classroom. In the early stages of units when new content is introduced and devel- oped, more time is spent in interactive lessons featuring teacher-student discourse than in independent work on assignments. The teacher plans sequences of questions designed to develop the content systematically and help students to construct understandings of it by relating it to their prior knowledge and collaborating in dialogue about it.
The forms and cognitive levels of these questions need to be suited to the instruc- tional goals. Some primarily closed-ended and factual questions might be appropriate when teachers are assessing prior knowledge or reviewing new learning, but accom- plishing the most significant instructional goals requires open-ended questions that call for students to apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate what they are learning. Some questions have a range of possible correct answers, and some will invite discus- sion or debate (e.g., concerning the relative merits of alternative suggestions for solving problems).
Because questions are intended to engage students in cognitive processing and con- struction of knowledge, they ordinarily should be addressed to the class as a whole. This encourages all students, not just the one eventually called on, to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully to each question. After posing a question, the teacher needs
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