Page 84 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

56 Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students
7. Students’ prior knowledge about the topic is elicited and used as a starting place for instruction, which builds on accurate prior knowledge but also stimulates conceptual change if necessary.
8. Activities and assignments feature tasks that call for decision making, problem solv- ing, or critical thinking, not just memory or reproduction.
9. Higher-order thinking skills are not taught as a separate skills curriculum. Instead, they are developed in the process of teaching subject-matter knowledge within application contexts that call for students to relate what they are learning to their lives outside of school.
10. The teacher creates a social environment in the classroom that could be described as a learning community featuring discourse or dialogue designed to promote understanding.
These generic goals and key features involved in teaching school subjects for under- standing are implied in what we say about good teaching in the rest of this book. In addition, we emphasize the goals of powerful social studies teaching as identified in a position statement published by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) (2010).
Principle 4: Establishing Learning Orientations: Teachers can prepare students for learning by providing an initial structure to clarify intended outcomes and cue desired learning strategies. Teachers introduce students to the powerful goals and content they select for their students to motivate students to learn the content and to provide students a “roadmap” of what they will be learning. Principle 11: Goal-oriented Assess- ment: The teacher uses a variety of formal and informal assessment methods to monitor progress toward learning goals. The goals and content the teacher selects should align with the assessments used to measure student growth. Alignment of activities, goals, and assessment is critical for making valid determinations of students’ learning of the content. Please see Chapter 14 for a more in-depth description of each principle.
Establishing Learning Orientations and Goal-Oriented Assessment
Social Studies Goals: Social Understanding and Civic Efficacy
Powerful social studies teaching helps students develop social understanding and civic efficacy. Social understanding is integrated knowledge of the social aspects of the human condition: how they have evolved over time, the variations that occur in different physical environments and cultural settings, and emerging trends that appear likely to shape the future. Civic efficacy is readiness and willingness to assume citizenship respon- sibilities. It is rooted in social studies knowledge and skills, along with related values (such as concern for the common good) and dispositions (such as an orientation toward confident participation in civic affairs).
The 2008 NCSS Position Statement identifies Five Qualities of Powerful Teaching neces- sary for social studies teaching and learning to accomplish its social understanding and civic efficacy goals: meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active (NCSS, 2008).
Meaningful. The content selected for emphasis is worth learning because it promotes progress toward important social understanding and civic efficacy goals, and teaching
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