Back-to-school season is officially behind us and while the air is changing (at least in the Midwest), the newness of the year has worn off.
Sickness is making its rounds.
The new-school-year motivation has faded.
Classroom management has moved front and center.
Student engagement has started to dip.
It seems too early for a reset, but you need something tangible to get through the next week.
This is the sense I’m getting in my conversations with educators around the country. But that’s not always the picture we see on social media.
In our feeds, we see teachers who are going above and beyond, creating incredible simulations, transforming classroom decor for a lesson, bringing in artifacts, and more. When I was in the classroom, these posts sometimes left me inspired, but more often than not I felt like a failure. I wished I had the time and motivation to do this, but my own kids, my grad work, coaching commitments, and everything else, all kept me from becoming the “instateacher” that I dreamed of being.
But, we don’t have to do all that in order to give our students the social studies experience they deserve and they need.
What Is the Goal of Social Studies Education?
Recently, I was leading a professional development session for a group of teachers in Miami, Florida. I started by asking, “What is the goal of social studies education?” I wanted to center us on the most important objective and not lose sight of it among everything else.
None of the responses declared that imparting content knowledge was the main goal.
None of the responses stated that crafting an immersive experience in the past was the primary objective.
All the responses focused on supporting student development of skills needed to navigate the complex world they are growing up in.
When the overwhelm sets in, we need to return to this. So how do we do this in a meaningful way that doesn’t consume our time and energy?
It looks like students doing the heavy lifting of historical thinking.
It sounds like students engaging in deep historical inquiry.
It feels like tension as students wrestle with meaning.
A Low-Prep Way to Get Students Thinking
Enter Thinking Nation’s Disciplinary Skill Graphic Organizers. Each of these 1-pagers is designed to do just that - get students thinking.
The prep is low. Simply find a primary or secondary source and pair it with an aligned graphic organizer and voila! You have the heart of your lesson plan done.
Let me give you an example: I used to teach the effects of the Haitian Revolution with a slideshow. I would identify and describe them. Students would take notes. Later, they would have to determine the main effect on a multiple-choice test.
Now, here’s the swap: Use an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’s speech on Haiti at the Chicago World’s Fair on January 2, 1893. Then, provide students with the Causation Graphic Organizer on page 2. Students will need to read the source carefully to determine the effects of the Haitian Revolution. Then, they will evaluate their significance, providing a rationale statement for their primary effect.
All of a sudden, students are doing the thinking and the real work of historians, rather than the passive “sitting and getting” approach that I had been using.
One Source, Multiple Historical Thinking Skills
My choice for the Causation Graphic Organizer was heavily influenced by a predetermined learning objective from the AP® US History program which states, "Describe the global impact of the American Revolution (Unit 3: Learning Objective G).”
However, if you have more freedom to design your own objectives, this same source could be paired with several other graphic organizers, namely Contextualization, Evaluating Evidence, and Historical Significance.
Each of these graphic organizers elicits different types of analysis and subsequent conversations.
If you want to level up, have students work in groups with each group using the source with a different graphic organizer. Then, they share out their learnings in a jigsaw or class presentation.*
When you compare my original lesson plan to the swap, it is obvious how vastly different the student experience is. And I hope you can see how this keeps prep low while shifting the classroom to a more student-centered approach where the learning is perceptible.
You can also check our our free formative assessments created with a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Grant.
Do you have a lesson where you need a complex source and graphic organizer recommendation? Leave a comment below and I’ll give you my two cents!
*This strategy is called “Same Source, Different Skill.” Thinking Nation has an entire repository of pedagogical resources including PDF guides and video walk-throughs. Make sure to bookmark this as it will be getting a complete update in October!