A few years ago, I was introduced to “Discrepant Event Inquiry” from Glenn Wiebe. (Here is another post about it from his History Tech blog). The idea is that you take an image and only reveal a little bit at a time. As I reveal a little bit of the picture, the students must guess Who is in the picture, What is happening, When was the photograph taken, and Where is this taking place. This encourages students to think outside the box and it also does WONDERS with questioning and how to ask the right questions. Naturally, I turned this into a competition. Continue reading How I use “Discrepant Event Inquiry” in my classroom
Category Archives: best practice
Guest Post: NCSS Publishes New Help for Social Studies Educators
Don Gifford, KSDE Social Studies Content Specialist, has been kind enough to provide a guest commentary on the C3 Framework published by NCSS this week. You can find a link to the Framework here.
NCSS Publishes New Help for Social Studies Educators by Don Gifford, KSDE
The National Council for the Social Studies has just released a framework for enhancing the rigor of Social Studies education. Over the past several years the Kansas Department of Education (KSDE) and a couple of Kansas teachers have been involved in crafting and reviewing this work. The September edition of Social Education, a publication of NCSS, has several articles about the process and content of this framework. The intent of my writing today is to demonstrate the alignment with the Kansas History, Government, and Social Studies Standards and encourage the use of this document writing curriculum and designing units of study. Continue reading Guest Post: NCSS Publishes New Help for Social Studies Educators
Integrating Technology in Social Studies Curriculum
Here are some happenings within the social studies department at my school:
About a year ago, my social studies department decided we wanted to step outside of the box. We were tired of sharing our building-wide computer carts and iPad cart with the other departments (especially ELA – what ever happened to hand-writing an essay?). Our administrators were totally on board and willing to support us in any way that they could.
We contemplated many different options before settling on Discovery Education’s new curriculum – the Techbook. No we didn’t spend our summer’s creating our own iBooks – that will come later, at least for me. But we were preparing ourselves for some intense professional training a few weeks before school started from Discovery Education to introduce us to this new curriculum.
However, in true eduction fashion, that training didn’t happen before school started, and our new iPad minis (One cart for every social studies teacher! I feel blessed!) weren’t placed in their new otter boxes and weren’t configured with apps that would enhance our teaching experience, hooked in to the shiny new carts placed in our classrooms, ready for students to use on the first day. Continue reading Integrating Technology in Social Studies Curriculum
10 things you can do this week that will make you a better social studies teacher
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a variety of different teacher groups in a variety of different places. But all of the conversations have somehow shifted back to the same basic compelling question:
What does an effective teacher look like?
It’s a great question to ask. We’ve always paid lip service to professional development and learning but it seems as if only recently has the question been taken seriously. The Common Core literacy standards for history and the newly revised Kansas history/government standards are demanding more from our kids – and from us.
So I started thinking about things we can do to get better as social studies teachers. Not stuff organized by our administrators. Informal sorts of things that can make us more effective. I came up with ten. There’s gotta be more.
What would you add? Subtract from the list? Continue reading 10 things you can do this week that will make you a better social studies teacher
