Page 83 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

CHAPTER 3 How Do I Select Powerful Goals and Powerful Content? 55
these reasons include the roles that the learning might play in enhancing the quality of the learners’ lives. In the case of social studies, students might appreciate the value of their learning for helping them understand how the world as we know it came to be and what is occurring in it now, as well as for helping them make personal and civic decisions. They also might come to appreciate their own developing understandings—to take pride in seeing how what they have learned applies to their own lives, to appreciate their attainment of new insights, or to enjoy interpreting or predicting current events or enhancing their knowledge by reading or watching pro- grams on social issues. In a unit on money and a lesson focusing on children donating money to help others, an appreciation goal might be to help students appreciate what it means to be a good citizen by learning about the what, why, and how of age- appropriate social actions that they can undertake in and out of school by actually donating time and money.
Life application goals are accomplished to the extent that students retain their learning in a form that makes it usable when needed in other contexts. Too often, the knowledge taught in social studies is not applicable in life outside of school, or if it, is the potential life applications are not made explicit. This is why we encourage you to include home- work as a part of your overall planning. See Chapter 13 for a discussion of meaningful homework. Provide life application assignments that encourage students to interact with their family and community members to enhance the meaningfulness of the big ideas/ skills that are introduced and discussed in the classroom. For example, when teaching about absolute and relative locations, design home assignments that call for students to discuss with family members how and when these big ideas apply to situations they encounter. (For example, in planning for the number of hours required for travel and the means of transportation, identifying the relative location of the destination is proba- bly all that is needed, but if you need to have a package delivered to a specific individual, the absolute location would be necessary.)
Research on Teaching for Understanding
Throughout the rest of the book, we will use the term “teaching for understanding” as shorthand for “teaching for understanding, appreciation, and life application of subject- matter knowledge.” Recently, there has been a confluence of theorizing, research, and publication of guidelines by professional organizations, all focusing on what is involved in teaching for understanding. Analyses of these efforts have identified a set of principles that are common to most if not all of them (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). These common elements, which might be considered components in a model of good subject- matter teaching, include the following:
1. The curriculum is designed to equip students with knowledge, skills, values, and dis- positions that they will find useful both inside and outside of school.
2. Instructional goals emphasize developing student expertise within an application context, emphasizing conceptual understanding of knowledge and self-regulated application of skills.
3. The curriculum balances breadth with depth by addressing limited content but developing this content sufficiently to foster conceptual understanding.
4. The content is organized around a limited set of powerful ideas (basic understand- ings and principles).
5. The teacher’s role is not just to present information but also to scaffold and respond to students’ learning efforts.
6. The students’ role is not just to absorb or copy information but also to actively make sense and construct meaning.
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