Session 5 Objective: Refine all aspects of IDM and presentation of finished products to whole group.
7. Students need opportunities to practice engaged citizenship. Social studies has long been criticized for its limited attention to civic engagement (Campbell, Levinson, & Hess, 2012; Levine, 2007; Levinson, 2014). Learning how a bill becomes a law and how individual and group rights have been addressed by examining Supreme Court cases are useful activities. But, if students’ ideas and actions are confined to the classroom, then they miss important opportunities to see how those ideas and actions play out in other public venues. One of the key dimensions of the C3 Framework and the New York State Social Studies Framework, then, is the idea of taking informed action.
Informed action can take numerous forms (e.g., discussions, debates, and presentations) and can occur in a variety of contexts both inside and outside the classroom. Key to any action, however, is the idea that it is informed. The IDM, therefore, stages the Taking Informed Action tasks such that students build their knowledge and understanding of an issue before engaging in any social action. In the understand stage, students demonstrate that they can think about the issues behind the inquiry in a new setting or context. The assess stage asks students to consider alternative perspectives, scenarios, or options as they begin to define a possible set of actions. And the act stage is where students decide if and how they will put into effect the results of their planning. In most of the Toolkit inquiries, Taking Informed Action tasks are offered as additional instructional opportunities to be implemented after students have completed the Summative Performance Task. In some inquiries, however, the Taking Informed Action sequence has been embedded throughout the supporting questions and the attendant formative performance tasks and sources. Doing so allows teachers the option of using the argument construction task or the action task as the final assessment.
8. Social studies shares in the responsibility for literacy. The New York State P–12 Common Core Learning Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy encourage social studies teachers to integrate literacy goals and practices into their instruction. We intuitively know that inquiry in social studies involves sophisticated literacy skills; after all, when we ask and answer questions, we typically read and write and speak and listen. But inquiry also requires unique disciplinary skills that enable students to work with sources (Lee & Swan, 2013). The Common Core provides a focus on the skills supporting inquiry, such as reading rich informational texts, writing evidence-based arguments, and speaking and listening in public venues, which complement the pedagogical directions advocated in the C3 Framework and the New York State Social Studies Framework (Lee & Swan, 2013). Common Core literacy skills surface in three ways through the inquiries. First, the writers embedded specific reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills throughout the inquiries. For example, different approaches to reading the featured sources and scaffolds for constructing and supporting arguments are illustrated and explained, particularly in the annotated versions of the inquiries. The second way in which literacy skills are referenced is through the chart at the end of each annotated inquiry that lists specific skills along with examples. Finally, research opportunities, while implicit in all inquiries, are noted explicitly in several inquiries to demonstrate how they might be incorporated.
9. Inquiries are not all inclusive. The use of the term “inquiry” in place of “unit” to describe the curriculum work represented in the Toolkit is purposeful in both general and specific ways. Inquiry, that is, the crafting of questions and the deliberate and thoughtful construction of responses to those questions, can inspire deeper and richer teaching and learning. Using “inquiry” as the descriptor for the curriculum topics portrayed, however, reflects a conscious decision not to produce fully-developed and comprehensive curriculum units or modules. Teachers should find considerable guidance within each inquiry around the key components of instructional design—guiding and supporting questions, formative and summative performance tasks, sources, and activities designed to engage students in taking informed action. What they will not find is a complete set of individual lesson plans. Experience suggests that teachers teach best the material that they mold around their particular students’ needs and the contexts in which they teach. Rather than scripts reflecting generic teaching and learning situations, the IDM encourages teachers to draw on their own wealth of teaching experience as they add activities, lessons, sources, and tasks that transform the inquiries into their own individual pedagogical plans. Inquiries offer teachers a curricular direction rather than an instructional script. All inquiries are published as Word documents (as well as in PDF) so that teachers can modify them to meet their particular instructional goals and needs.
One other note on the nature of inquiries: Inquiries should be planned with a clear and coherent intellectual and student-relevant purpose in mind. As a result, multiple inquiries may be useful and necessary to convey the full scope of a Key Idea. On the other hand, a single inquiry may be more coherent if it draws from multiple Conceptual Understandings. The point is that an inquiry works best when it has a cogent and well- reasoned focus.
10. Inquiries are best mediated by skilled teachers. Key to the implementation of the Toolkit in general and the IDM in particular is the belief that teacher expertise and experience are central to rich classroom instruction. Students can and do learn important lessons on their own. However, with the guidance of expert teachers, learning can become deeper, richer, and more engaging. Finding the balance between too much direction and too little in curriculum materials is no easy task. IDM attempts to strike a balance by providing key components that instructional plans require, while leaving important decisions in the hands of teachers with the understanding that they will tailor these inquiries to fit their classroom situations. Research consistently supports the idea that teachers have a powerful impact on their students’ achievement (Smith & Niemi, 2001). The best pedagogical resources, then, support and enable rather than undercut teachers’ best instructional ambitions (Grant, 2003; Lee, Doolittle, & Hicks, 2006; Shulman, 1987; Swan & Hofer, 2013; Yeager & Davis, 1996).