With Easter past us, almost all of our schools have now come back from Spring Break. This means we have entered the final stretch of the 2024-2025 school year.
For some of us that means sprinting to make up for lost ground (If that’s you in the AP space, check out our Practice AP exams to give your students a clear roadmap for crunch time studying), or moving to big research or community projects, or even just counting down the days for this year to end, knowing that next year will be a better one (This was definitely me as a first year teacher).
Regardless of what the final stretch of this academic year looks like for you, one thing that is common in all of our circumstances is an eye toward the future. Our team at Thinking Nation has already begun meeting with many of our current school partners to sketch out implementation, professional development, and assessment plans for the 2025-2026 school year. This is critical for student success.
Many of the readers of this newsletter and blog have found us through our free resources that support better protocols around teaching historical thinking. I always love hearing the stories from teachers and school leaders about how they utilize THINKS as a document analysis strategy, or have our historical thinking posters up in their classrooms, or use our historical thinking definitions and icons to guide their district PLCs. I love these stories!
But I also want to acknowledge that schools partner with Thinking Nation in far more robust, and therefore more effective, ways.
If you currently don’t partner with Thinking Nation and use our platform, consider this a re-introduction to what we do and offer. Our AI-driven platform has hundreds of historical thinking assignments and assessments that utilize the vast content areas of social studies to teach and assess the core disciplinary thinking skills that unite our discipline. Our professional development supports teachers as they empower students. Schedule a time with us to learn how we can support your unique needs.
- We’ve linked hundreds of primary and secondary sources to our THINKS protocol and thinking skill-specific graphic organizers like causation, historical significance, and historical empathy.
- We’ve developed hundreds of formative assessments on individual thinking skills like quantitative analysis, contextualization, and evaluating evidence that provide a clear common language for success for students and teachers alike.
- We have over a hundred pre-created socratic seminars and Curated Research Papers to give students extended opportunities to engage in the discipline of history.
- We have provided hundreds of hours of professional development supporting teacher professional growth and district alignment.
When students engage with Thinking Nation’s resources, they are empowered as doers of history, rather than operating as passive receivers of a historical narrative.
Student agency increases, classroom rigor strengthens, conversations are rooted in academic discourse, and literacy skills grow.
Within our platform, we also harness the power of generative AI to provide students instant feedback on their thinking and writing skills, as well as generate easy to digest data reports for teachers to track student growth and align with other teachers at their site or district.
Students who engage with Thinking Nation’s resources are better equipped to analyze information, write effectively, and make and defend robust claims. As our vision states, Thinking Nation students are better equipped to contribute to a flourishing democracy and thrive in an ever-changing world.
If you are re-thinking how your social studies program for the 2025-26 school year because you want to challenge your students, prepare them for success, and facilitate better collaboration with your department, we’d love to connect. Reach out to us and we will set up a time to talk about your school’s priorities and how Thinking Nation might be able to help you shift the paradigm of social studies education.