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A Vision of Powerful Teaching and Learning in the Social Studies: Building Social Understanding and Civic Efficacy
1. Background and Rationale
A. Introduction
These are challenging times for our nation’s educators. As we approach the twenty-first century, renewal is in the air. Schools are experimenting with alternative organizational structures and educational practices. States and higher education institutions are reforming teacher education and professional development programs. Professional organizations are developing guidelines on content and methods to improve teaching.
National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) has contributed to these efforts by reaffirming citizen education as the primary purpose of social studies and by identifying the unique goals and essential characteristics of social studies programs designed to accomplish this purpose.
The NCSS House of Delegates voted overwhelmingly in November 1992 to approve the final version of the definition of “social studies” presented by the NCSS Board of Directors: “Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. Within the school program, social studies provides coordinated, systematic study drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as well as appropriate content from the humanities, mathematics, and the natural sciences. The primary purpose of the social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
NCSS recently issued position statements on curriculum, assessment, teacher education, and professional development. This document on teaching and learning complements those position statements by describing the forms of teacher-student discourse and the kinds of learning activities that can promote citizen education most effectively. Throughout the document, we use the word “powerful” to refer to those ideal forms of social studies teaching and learning.
Powerful social studies teaching helps students develop social understanding and civic efficacy. Social understanding is integrated knowledge of social aspects of the human condition: how they have evolved over time, the variations that occur in various physical environments and cultural settings, and the emerging trends that appear likely to shape the future. Civic efficacy—the readiness and willingness to assume citizenship responsibilities—is rooted in social studies knowledge and skills, along with related values (such as concern for the common good) and attitudes (such as an orientation toward participation in civic affairs). The nation depends on a well-informed and civic-minded citizenry to sustain its democratic traditions, especially now as it adjusts to its own heterogeneous society and its shifting roles in an increasingly interdependent and changing world.
1. Purpose of This Position Statement
This position statement sets forth a vision of social studies teaching and learning needed to produce the levels of social understanding and civic efficacy that the nation requires of its citizens. It also considers the teacher education programs and the community and governmental support for social studies needed to sustain such teaching and learning.
This document is broadly inclusive in its reference to “social studies.” The term is intended to apply to all courses or units in social studies, social science, anthropology, civics, economics, geography, government, history, political science, psychology, sociology, and topics such as ethnic studies, global education, and law-related education. This position statement focuses, however, on what constitutes powerful teaching and learning within a unified social studies curriculum, and not on how much emphasis each content area should receive.
Consequently, this statement does not outline a K–12 social studies program or suggest any particular curricular scope and sequence. These and other content issues have been addressed by previous task forces and committees in Social Studies Curriculum Planning Resources (NCSS 1990). This position statement complements the documents in that collection by shifting the focus from content (what is taught) to method (how it is taught). Recognizing that teacher-student interaction is the heart of education, it offers guiding principles portraying ideal social studies teaching and learning. The principles have been synthesized by organizing findings from the best available classroom research around a core of ideas that represent an emerging consensus of expert opinion about how to teach social studies for understanding, appreciation, and life application.
The emphasis is on principles of teaching and learning that have enduring applicability across grade levels, content areas, and scope-and-sequence arrangements. These principles are summarized in the statement that social studies teaching and learning are powerful when they are meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active.
This vision statement summarizes these principles without presenting detailed elaboration, numerous examples, or discussion of related scholarly literature. A larger document currently in preparation will provide an annotated bibliography for readers who wish to pursue the scholarly basis for the principles and vignettes that illustrate their application in various K–12 social studies lessons and activities.
The focus of this document on teaching and learning processes is not intended to imply that such processes are goals in themselves or that curriculum planning should emphasize process over content. What is worth teaching well must be worth teaching, and there are many connections between worthwhile content and effective process. Ideal curriculum planning combines content and assessment components so that they complement one another and constitute coherent methods for accomplishing social studies goals.
In addition to displaying the characteristics described here, social studies teaching and learning must be subsumed within a coherent curricular scope and sequence. They also must be adapted to the topics and to the students taught at various grade levels. No attempt to address these complexities is made here, although some of them will be addressed in the forthcoming larger document.
2. Intended Audience
This document has been written for social studies educators, educational policymakers and administrators, publishers of educational materials, parents, and other interested parties. In particular, though, it is intended for teachers—the pivotal actors who shape the curriculum and effect change as they work with students. Articulating enduring principles that form a foundation for powerful teaching and learning, it is intended to advance social studies education as a profession, improve social studies teaching and teacher education, recognize and validate the effective practices that already exist in many classrooms, and provide a self-assessment tool for teachers.
3. Need for a Guiding Vision
There is a need for a guiding vision to assist social studies teachers in planning their instruction and focusing their students’ learning. This need is derived from two features of social studies that distinguish it from other school subjects and provide special instructional challenges.
First, social studies is diverse, encompassing a great range of potential content. When taught well, its content is drawn not only from its most direct foundational disciplines but also from the arts and humanities, mathematics and science, current events, and students’ own interests and experiences. This content, however, is not treated simply as collections of miscellaneous information and activities, but rather is organized within a coherent citizen education curriculum.
Second, the social understanding and civic efficacy goals of social studies place special responsibilities on teachers for addressing the ethical and social policy aspects of topics. When taught well, social studies engages students in the difficult process of confronting ethical and value-based dilemmas, and encourages students to speculate, think critically, and make personal and civic decisions based on information from multiple perspectives.
B. Social Studies Purposes and Goals
Powerful social studies teaching begins with a clear understanding of the subject’s unique purposes and goals. NCSS’s statement “Essentials of the Social Studies” (NCSS 1990, 9–11) identifies citizenship education as the primary purpose of K-12 social studies. Noting that concern for the common good and citizen participation in public life are essential to the health of our democratic system, it states that effective social studies programs prepare young people to identify, understand, and work to solve the problems facing our diverse nation in an increasingly interdependent world. Such programs:
• foster individual and cultural identity along with understanding of the forces that hold society together or pull it apart;
• include observation of and participation in the school and community;
• address critical issues and the world as it is;
• prepare students to make decisions based on democratic principles; and
• lead to citizen participation in public affairs.
Curriculum components include knowledge, democratic values and beliefs, thinking skills, and social and civic participation skills. Knowledge refers to interpretations that students construct in response to their experiences in and out of school. Knowledge is not merely a fixed body of information transmitted for students to memorize. Teachers should not only expose their students to curriculum content but should also provide them with opportunities to think and communicate in ways that will help students construct a working knowledge of such content.
The content of social studies focuses on the world—near and far, social and civic, past, present, and future. Effective social studies teaching draws this content from the social studies foundational disciplines (such as geography, government, and history) and links it with knowledge that students have acquired through life experiences and the media. It builds knowledge about the history and cultures of our nation and the world, geographical relationships, economic systems and processes, social and political institutions, interpersonal and intergroup relations, and worldwide relationships among nations, races, cultures, and institutions. From this knowledge base, exemplary programs help students to: (1) develop skills, concepts, and generalizations necessary to understand the sweep of human affairs: (2) appreciate the benefits of diversity and community, the value of widespread economic opportunity, and the contributions that people of both genders and the full range of ethnic, racial, and religious groups have made to our society; (3) become ready and willing to contribute to public policy formulation; and (4) acquire ways of managing conflict that are consistent with democratic procedures.
The fundamental values and beliefs taught in social studies are drawn from many sources, but especially from the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution with its Bill of Rights. These beliefs form the basic principles of our democratic constitutional order. They depend on such practices as due process, equal protection, free expression, and civic participation, and they have roots in the concepts of liberty, justice, equality, responsibility, diversity, and privacy. Exemplary programs do not indoctrinate students to accept these ideas blindly. Instead, they present knowledge about their historical derivation and contemporary application necessary to understand our society and its institutions. Teachers model fundamental democratic principles in their classrooms, discuss them as they relate to curriculum content and current events, and make them integral to the school’s daily operations (e.g., through involving students in making decisions that affect them).
Exemplary social studies programs also prepare students to connect knowledge with beliefs and action using thinking skills that lead to rational behavior in social settings. These include the thinking skills involved in: (1) acquiring, organizing, interpreting, and communicating information; (2) processing data in order to investigate questions, develop knowledge, and draw conclusions; (3) generating and assessing alternative approaches to problems and making decisions that are both well informed and justified according to democratic principles; and (4) interacting with others in empathetic and responsible ways.
Finally, exemplary social studies programs develop social and civic participation skills that prepare students to work effectively in diverse groups to address problems by discussing alternative strategies, making decisions, and taking action: to pursue social and civic agendas through persuasion, negotiation, and compromise; and to participate actively in civic affairs (e.g., by writing opinion letters to newspapers). Participation in informed public discussion of policy issues is direct preparation for active citizenship, especially when it culminates in decisions and actions that have real consequences.
The ideas set forth in the NCSS statement on the “Essentials of the Social Studies” are elaborated in its “Social Studies Curriculum Guidelines” (NCSS 1990, 12–15). The guidelines reaffirm that social studies teaching should draw from a broad range of content sources and use varied learning resources and activities. They also emphasize, however, that planning should be guided by basic and long-range social studies goals. Instruction should keep students aware of these goals, and assessments of teaching and learning should focus on the degree to which these goals have been accomplished.
Thus, a powerful social studies curriculum is unified by its purposes and goals. All of the components of such a curriculum—not only its content, but its instructional approaches, learning activities, and evaluation methods—are included in the curriculum because they are viewed as means for helping students acquire important capabilities and attitudes. By itself, the idea of cultural literacy construed in a narrow, name-recognition sense is not considered an adequate basis for content selection. Instead, content is included because it promotes progress toward major social understanding and civic efficacy goals, and it is taught accordingly. That is, instructional methods and activities should be planned to encourage students to connect what they are learning to their prior knowledge and experience, to think critically and creatively about what they are learning, and to use it in authentic application situations. Learning activities should be introduced and developed so as to make them minds-on activities that engage students with important ideas, not just hands-on activities that may or may not have educational value.
C. Assumptions About Social Studies as a School Subject
Several basic assumptions about the nature of social studies and its place in the school curriculum undergird the vision of powerful social studies presented in this position statement. These fundamental beliefs about social studies are assumed here as given.
1. Social studies is diverse. Social studies encompasses many more potential goals and content clusters than can be addressed adequately. Among both social studies teachers and the general public, there is disagreement about the relative importance of major social studies goals and content strands. Consequently, there never has been, and may never be, agreement on a single scope and sequence as the basis for a national social studies curriculum. Recognizing this, the NCSS curriculum guidelines state that goal setting and program development should be undertaken locally in response to locally perceived needs. To inform this process, NCSS has adopted a set of criteria for assessing scope-and-sequence plans and has endorsed three plans that meet these criteria as suitable for use as models by educational agencies and school districts (NCSS 1990, 17–70). Locally developed curricula should reflect the essentials of the social studies and embody the principles in the NCSS curriculum guidelines, but their emphasis on goals and content strands can and should vary.
The same assumption applies to the principles of powerful social studies teaching described here. This position statement does not attempt to prescribe ways to teach particular content because methods must be tailored to local needs. The statement does assume, however, that both the content and the methods of instruction should be selected as means to accomplish major social understanding and civic efficacy goals.
2. All students should have access to the full richness of the social studies curriculum. A complete core curriculum should be available to all students, not just gifted students in advanced programs. Tracking arrangements should not restrict important learning opportunities. In addition to acquiring basic knowledge and skills, all students at all grade levels should experience a social studies curriculum that includes ongoing engagement in thinking about social and civic problems and policy issues. This includes students at risk of school failure, students whose interests lie in other subject areas or vocational fields, and students who do not plan to attend college.
Special education students are often mainstreamed into social studies classes. This is as it should be, because all students need exposure to a diverse range of peers and opportunities to address social problems in group settings. Curricular planning for any special education students who are not mainstreamed should include full attention to social studies as well as to other subjects.
3. Teachers need adequate time and resources to teach social studies well at every grade level. The unique social understanding and civic efficacy goals of social studies will not be accomplished if it is treated as a collection of disconnected content to be covered as time allows. Social studies must be viewed as a basic K–12 curriculum component, and teachers and students must be supplied with materials and resources that reflect the students’ needs and interests.
4. Social studies teachers need to treat the social world realistically and address its controversial aspects. To accomplish the major goals of this issue-oriented subject, teachers need both the freedom and the fortitude to address the real social world (not simply an idealized version) and to engage students in critical thinking about controversial topics. As they work to help students come to grips with social issues, teachers have both a responsibility to avoid inappropriate promotion of their personal views and a right to expect administrative and community support for their citizen education efforts.
II. A Vision of Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning
Informed by the major purposes and goals of social studies, the assumptions stated above, and the available research and scholarship, this position statement identifies key features of ideal social studies teaching and learning. These features are summed up in the statement that social studies teaching and learning are powerful when they are meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active.
These five key features are considered equally important. They are addressed in the order presented here because such an order creates a natural flow of ideas, not because some key features are considered more essential than others.
A. Social Studies Teaching and Learning Are Powerful When They Are Meaningful
Powerful social studies teaching and learning are meaningful to both teachers and students. The content selected for emphasis is worth learning because it promotes progress toward important social understanding and civic efficacy goals, and teaching methods are designed to enable students to appreciate how the content relates to those goals. Rather than memorizing disconnected bits of information or practicing skills in isolation, students learn connected networks of knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes that they will find useful both in and outside of school. This worthwhile content is taught in ways that relate to each student’s culture and assists the student in recognizing its value. As a result, students’ learning efforts are motivated by appreciation and interest, not just by accountability and grading systems. Students become disposed to care about what is happening in the world around them and to use the thinking frameworks and research skills of social science professionals to gather and interpret information. As a result, social learning becomes a lifelong interest and a basis for informed social action.
Thoughtfully planned to accomplish significant goals, meaningful social studies teaching embodies several other key features. Instruction emphasizes depth of development of important ideas within appropriate breadth of topic coverage and focuses on teaching these important ideas for understanding, appreciation, and life application. A great many facts, definitions, and generalizations are taught because understanding often-used information and ideas enhances communication within and between cultures. The most effective teachers, however, do not diffuse their efforts by covering too many topics superficially. Instead, they select for emphasis the most useful landmark locations, the most representative case studies, the most inspiring models, the truly precedent-setting events, and the concepts and principles that their students must know and be able to apply in their lives outside of school. Furthermore, teachers inform students of when and how this content will be useful to them in realistic contexts, and they follow through with activities that engage students in applying the content in simulated or real situations.
Facts and ideas are not taught in isolation from other content, nor are skills. Instead, they are embedded in networks of knowledge, skills, beliefs, and attitudes that are structured around important ideas and taught emphasizing their connections and potential applications.
The significance and meaningfulness of the content is emphasized both in how it is presented to students and how it is developed through activities. New topics are framed with reference to where they fit within the big picture, and students are alerted to their citizen education implications. The new content is developed in ways that help students see how its elements relate to one another (e.g., using diagrams of concept networks or causal chains, lists of key steps in narrative sequences, or other graphic learning aids or illustrations). Students are encouraged to process what they learn on several levels simultaneously, rather than always starting with low-level factual information and only later engaging in higher-order thinking. From the very beginning, students may be asked to relate new learning to prior knowledge, to think critically about it, or to use it to construct arguments or make informed decisions.
Teachers’ questions are designed to promote understanding of important ideas and to stimulate thinking about their potential implications. As a result, classroom interaction focuses on sustained examination of a few important topics rather than superficial coverage of many. Teacher-student interactions emphasize thoughtful discussion of connected major themes, not rapid-fire recitation of miscellaneous bits of information.
Meaningful learning activities and assessment strategies focus students’ attention on the most important ideas embedded in what they are learning. They encourage students to connect these ideas to their previous knowledge and experience, to think critically and creatively about them, and to consider their social implications. Thus, meaningful social studies teaching emphasizes authentic activities and assessment tasks—opportunities for students to engage in the sorts of applications of content that justify the inclusion of that content in the curriculum in the first place. For example, instead of labeling a map, students might plan a travel route and sketch landscapes that a traveler might see on the route. Instead of listing the amendments in the Bill of Rights, students might discuss or write about the implications of the Bill of Rights for a defendant in a selection of court cases. Instead of filling in a blank to complete the definition of a principle, students might use the principle to make predictions about a related situation or to guide their strategies in a simulation game.
This vision of meaningful social studies teaching and learning implies that the teacher is reflective in planning, implementing, and assessing instruction. Reflective teachers are well informed about the nature and purposes of social studies, and they remain current with developments in the field. They construct well-articulated ideas about their students’ citizen education needs, plan their social studies teaching accordingly, and continue to adjust their practices in response to classroom feedback and growth in their own professional knowledge. They work within state and district guidelines, but adapt and supplement these guidelines and their adopted curriculum materials in ways that support their students’ social studies education.
In particular, reflective teachers select and present content to students in ways that connect it with the students’ interests and with local history, cultures, and issues. Local history and geography receive special attention, as do local examples of social, economic, political, or cultural topics studied at each grade level. There exists a systematic effort to increase awareness and validate the diversity found in the community by involving family members or local ethnic or cultural groups, encouraging students to share their cultural knowledge and experiences, and involving students in the community.
B. Social Studies Teaching and Learning Are Powerful When They Are Integrative
Social studies is naturally integrative because it addresses a broad range of content using varied instructional resources and learning activities. But powerful social studies is both integrated and integrative in other respects as well.
First, powerful social studies teaching is integrative in its treatment of topics. It crosses disciplinary boundaries to address topics in ways that promote students’ social understanding and civic efficacy. Its content is anchored by themes, generalizations, and concepts drawn from the social studies foundational disciplines, supplemented by ideas drawn from the arts, sciences, and humanities, from current events, and from local examples and students’ experiences. Powerfully integrated social studies teaching builds a working knowledge of the evolution of the human condition through time, its current variations across locations and cultures, and an appreciation of the potential implications of this knowledge for social and civic decision-making.
Powerful social studies teaching is integrative across time and space, connecting with past experiences and looking ahead to the future. It helps students appreciate how aspects of the social world function, not only in their local community and in the contemporary United States but also in the past and in other cultures. It puts what is familiar to students into historical, geographical, and cultural perspectives, thus expanding their limited purviews on social phenomena that they may have taken for granted.
Powerful social studies teaching integrates knowledge, skills, beliefs, values, and attitudes to action. In particular, it teaches skills within the context of applying knowledge. Skills are included when they are necessary for applying content in natural ways. They are taught directly when opportunities for practice are embedded in authentic application activities. Content flow is not interrupted for practice of related skills.
Integrated social studies teaching and learning include effective use of technology that can add important dimensions to students’ learning. Teachers can provide students with information through films, videotapes, videodiscs, and other electronic media, and they can teach students to use computers to compose, edit, and illustrate social studies research reports. Computer-based learning, especially games and simulations, can allow students to apply important ideas in authentic problem-tackling or decision-making contexts. If students have access to computerized data bases, they can search these resources for relevant research information. If they can communicate with peers in other states or nations, they can engage in personalized cultural exchanges or compare parallel data collected in geographically or culturally diverse locations.
Finally, powerful social studies teaching integrates across the curriculum. It provides opportunities for students to read and study text materials, appreciate art and literature, communicate orally and in writing, observe and take measurements, develop and display data, and in various other ways to conduct inquiry and synthesize findings using knowledge and skills taught in all school subjects. Because it addresses such a broad range of content and does so in an integrative fashion that includes attention to ethical and social policy implications, social studies is a natural bridging subject across the curriculum. Particularly in elementary and middle schools, instruction can feature social studies as the core around which the rest of the curriculum is built.
These integrative aspects have the potential for enhancing the scope and power of social studies. They also, however, have the potential for undermining its coherence and thrust as a curriculum component that addresses unique citizen education goals. A literary selection, writing assignment, cooperative learning activity, or computerized simulation cannot be considered curriculum simply because it features social studies combined with some other subject or set of skills. Nor can such activities be substituted for genuine social studies activities. To qualify as worthwhile elements of social studies curricula, activities must engage students in using important ideas in ways that promote progress toward social understanding and civic efficacy goals. Consequently, programs that feature a great deal of integration of social studies with other school subjects—even programs ostensibly built around social studies as the core of the curriculum—do not necessarily create powerful social studies learning. Unless they are developed as plans for accomplishing major social studies goals, such programs may focus on trivial or disconnected information.
C. Social Studies Teaching and Learning Are Powerful When They Are Value-Based
Powerful social studies teaching considers the ethical dimensions of topics and addresses controversial issues providing an arena for reflective development of concern for the common good and application of social values. Students learn to be respectful of the dignity and rights of others when interacting socially, and to emphasize basic democratic concepts and principles when making personal policy decisions or participating in civic affairs.
Topics are treated comprehensively and realistically, with attention to their disturbing or controversial aspects. Students are made aware of potential social policy implications and taught to think critically and make value-based decisions about related social issues. They learn to gather and analyze relevant information, assess the merits of competing arguments, and make reasoned decisions that include consideration of the values within alternative policy recommendations. Through discussions, debates, simulations, research, and other occasions for critical thinking and decision-making, students learn to apply value-based reasoning when addressing social problems.
The best social studies teachers develop awareness of their own values and how those values influence their selection of content, materials, questions, activities, and assessment methods. They assess their teaching from multiple perspectives and, where appropriate, adjust it to achieve a better balance.
Rather than promulgating personal, sectarian, or political views, these teachers make sure that students: (1) become aware of the values, complexities, and dilemmas involved in an issue; (2) consider the costs and benefits to various groups that are embedded in potential courses of action; and (3) develop well-reasoned positions consistent with basic democratic social and political values. The teacher provides guidance to such value-based reasoning especially when it is difficult to discern the connections between core democratic values and the issues at hand, when various core values suggest conflicting policies, or when there is conflict between these core values and students’ personal or family values. When this is done most effectively, students may remain unsure about the teacher’s personal views on an issue, at least until after it has been discussed thoroughly. Students become more aware of the complexities involved in addressing
the issue in ways that serve the common good, and are more articulate about their own and others’ policy recommendations and supporting rationales.
Powerful social studies teaching encourages recognition of opposing points of view, respect for well-supported positions, sensitivity to cultural similarities and differences, and a commitment to social responsibility and action. It recognizes the reality and persistence of tensions but promotes positive human relationships built on understanding, commitment to the common good, and willingness to compromise and search for common good.
D. Social Studies Teaching and Learning Are Powerful When They Are Challenging
Students are expected to strive to accomplish instructional goals both as individuals and as group members through thoughtful participation in lessons and activities and careful work on assignments. To establish a context that will support productively challenging teaching and learning, the teacher encourages the class to function as a learning community. Students learn that the purpose of reflective discussion is to work collaboratively to deepen understanding of the meanings and implications of content. Consequently, they are expected to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully to one another’s ideas.
In advancing their own ideas and in responding critically to others, students are expected to build a case based on relevant evidence and arguments and to avoid derisive and other inappropriate behavior. They are challenged to come to grips with controversial issues, to participate assertively but respectfully in group discussions, and to work productively with partners or groups of peers in cooperative learning activities. Such experiences foster the development of competencies essential to civic efficacy.
Making social studies teaching challenging should not be construed as merely articulating high standards and then leaving it to students to try to meet them. Rather, the teacher models seriousness of purpose and a thoughtful approach to inquiry and uses instructional strategies designed to elicit and support similar qualities from students. The teacher paves the way for successful learning experiences by making sure that the content is suited to the students’ developmental levels and cultural backgrounds and by providing assistance that enables students to handle challenging activities. The teacher also makes it clear, however, that students are expected to connect thoughtfully what they are learning to their prior knowledge and experience, to offer comments, and to raise questions.
To stimulate and challenge students’ thinking, teachers should expose them to many information sources that include varying perspectives on topics and offer conflicting opinions on controversial issues. Questions call for thoughtful examination of the content, not just retrieval of information from memory. After posing such questions, the teacher allows sufficient time for students to think and formulate responses and to elaborate on their peers’ responses.
Many of the questions call for critical or creative thinking, suggested solutions to problems, or reasoned positions on policy issues. Such questions often produce numerous and conflicting responses. When this occurs, the teacher withholds evaluation and instead invites the students to engage in sustained dialogue and debate. This shifts some of the authority for evaluating the validity of knowledge from teacher to students.
Challenge is also communicated in the teacher’s reactions to students’ ideas. The teacher shows interest in and respect for students’ thinking, but demands well-reasoned arguments rather than opinions voiced without adequate thought or commitment. Routinely, students are asked to explain and defend their ideas using content-based arguments. Instead of always accepting students’ views or asking the class to discuss them, the teacher sometimes challenges students’ assumptions or responds with comments or questions that help students identify misconceptions, flaws in the argument, or unrecognized complications. The teacher must act with sensitivity, because some students become anxious or embarrassed when someone questions their ideas in this way. The teacher makes it clear that the purpose of such a challenge is not to put students on the spot but to help them construct new understanding through engagement in thoughtful dialogue.
E. Social Studies Teaching and Learning Are Powerful When They Are Active
Powerful social studies teaching and learning are rewarding, but they demand a great deal from both teachers and students. Thoughtful preparation and instruction by the teacher and sustained effort by students are required for students to make sense of and apply what they are learning.
Powerful social studies teaching demands that the teacher actively make curricular plans and adjustments. Rather than mechanically following the instructions in a manual, an exemplary teacher is prepared to: (1) acquire and update continuously the subject-matter knowledge and related pedagogical knowledge needed to teach the content effectively; (2) adjust goals and content to the students’ needs; (3) participate as a partner in learning with students, modeling the joy of both discovering new knowledge and increasing understanding of familiar topics; (4) use a variety of instructional materials such as physical examples, photographs, maps, illustrations, films, videos, textbooks, literary selections, and computerized databases; (5) plan field trips, visits to the class by resource people, and other experiences that will help students relate what they are learning to their lives outside the classroom; (6) plan lessons and activities that introduce content to students, and encourage them to process it actively, think about it critically and creatively, and explore its implications; (7) develop current or local examples that relate the content to students’ lives; (8) plan sequences of questions that allow for numerous responses and stimulate reflective discussion; (9) provide students with guidance and assistance as needed, yet encourage them to assume increasing responsibility for managing their own learning; (10) structure learning environments and activities in ways that encourage students to behave as a community of learners; (11) use accountability and grading systems that are compatible with instructional methods and that focus on accomplishment of major social understanding and civic efficacy goals; and (12) monitor reflectively and adjust as necessary.
Besides advance planning and preparation, active social studies teaching requires reflective thinking and decision-making as events unfold during instruction. Teachers must adjust plans to developing circumstances such as teachable moments that arise when students ask questions, make comments, or offer challenges worth pursuing. The teacher decides whether to persist with a topic or conclude it and move on to a new topic, whether to try to elicit an insight from students or to supply it directly, and how thoroughly the students will need to be prepared for an activity before they can begin work on it independently.
After the teacher launches an activity and students are working on their own or in collaboration with their peers, the teacher remains active by monitoring individual or group progress and providing assistance. Interventions are designed to clear up confusion, while enabling students to cope with task demands productively; students should be allowed to handle as much of the task as they can at the moment while at the same time making progress toward fully independent and successful performance. The teacher does not perform the tasks for students or simplify them to the point that they no longer engage the students in the cognitive processes required to accomplish the activity’s goals.
Students develop new understanding through a process of active construction. They do not passively receive or copy curriculum content; rather, they actively process it by relating it to what they already know (or think they know) about the topic. Instead of relying on rote learning methods, they strive to make sense of what they are learning by developing a network of connections that link the new content to preexisting knowledge and beliefs anchored in their prior experience. Sometimes the learning involves conceptual change in which students discover that some of their beliefs are inaccurate and need to be modified.
The construction of meaning required to develop important social understanding takes time and is facilitated by interactive discourse. Clear explanation and modeling from the teacher are important, as are opportunities to answer questions about content, discuss or debate the meanings and implications of content, or use the content in activities that call for tackling problems or making decisions. These activities allow students to process content actively and make it their own by paraphrasing it into their own words, exploring its relationship to other knowledge and to past experience, appreciating the insights it provides, or identifying its implications for social or civic decision-making.
Teacher and student roles shift as learning progresses. Early in a unit of study, the teacher may need to provide considerable guidance by modeling, explaining, or supplying information that builds on students’ existing knowledge while also assuming much of the responsibility for structuring and managing learning activities. As students develop expertise, however, they can begin to assume responsibility for regulating their learning by asking questions and by working on increasingly complex applications with increasing degrees of autonomy. The teacher still assists students with challenges they are not yet ready to handle by themselves but such assistance is gradually reduced in response to increases in students’ readiness to engage in independent and self-regulating learning.
Because what one learns is intimately linked to how one learns it, powerful social studies programs feature learning that is both social and active. The learning is social because it occurs in a group setting and includes substantial student-student interaction during discussions and collaborative work on activities. The learning is active because the curriculum emphasizes hands-on (and minds-on) activities that call for students to react to what they are learning and use it for some authentic purpose.
Effective activities encourage students to think about and apply what they are learning. Teachers may provide opportunities for students to apply their existing knowledge to questions about new content, to understand new content, to synthesize and communicate what they have learned, to generate new knowledge or make creative applications, or to think critically about the content and make decisions or take actions that relate to it.
Powerful social studies teaching emphasizes authentic activities that call for using content for accomplishing life applications. For example, critical-thinking attitudes and abilities are developed through policy debates or assignments calling for critique of currently or historically important policy arguments or decisions, not through artificial exercises in identifying logical or rhetorical flaws. Similarly, in addition to more traditional assignments, students frequently engage in cooperative learning, construction of models or plans, dramatic re-creations of historical events that shaped democratic values or civic policies, role-play, and simulation activities (e.g., mock trials or simulated legislative activities, interviewing family members, and collecting data in the local community). They also participate in various social and civic roles (e.g., discussing home safety or energy conservation checklists with parents and planning appropriate follow-up action, participating in student government activities and local community restoration or improvement efforts, or doing volunteer work for nursing homes or political campaigns).
Through such activities, students develop social understanding that they can explain in their own words and can access and apply in appropriate situations. For example, they learn to think critically as they read newspapers and magazines, watch television, or monitor political or policy debates. They learn to recognize the problematic aspects of statements, to project the probable social consequences of advocated policies, and to take these complexities into account when forming their opinions.
The teacher’s modeling, classroom management, motivational techniques, instructional methods, and assessment procedures all communicate to students that they are expected to participate in social studies classes actively and with a sense of purpose. The students learn to reflect thoughtfully on what they are learning and to ask questions, share opinions, and engage in public content-based dialogue. Through authentic application activities they develop civic efficacy by practicing it—engaging in the inquiry and debate required to make informed decisions about real social issues then following up with appropriate social or civic action.
III. Making It Happen:
Developing and Maintaining Powerful Social Studies Programs
The kind of powerful social studies teaching and learning envisioned here is realized most fully when it is encouraged and reinforced by other components of the educational system. In particular, powerful social studies teaching and learning are likely to become more common to the extent that: (1) assessment approaches at all levels focus on measuring progress toward social understanding and efficacy goals; (2) teachers benefit from effective preservice preparation and in-service professional development programs, and social studies education receives support from school administrators, parents, the local community, and government agencies; and (3) the nation successfully meets certain currently recognizable challenges, including the need for additional research on powerful social studies teaching and learning, for improvements in curriculum materials and technologies, and for improvement efforts that focus on accomplishing our most important educational goals. These systemic influences on social studies education are addressed in the following sections.
A. Assessment of Social Studies Teaching and Learning
Powerful social studies teaching and learning include assessment components designed to inform instructional planning and thus produce continuing improvements through successive cycles. The assessment mechanisms focus on the degree to which major social understanding and civic efficacy goals are accomplished, rather than on measuring acquisition of miscellaneous information or command of generic skills. Care is taken to see that testing does not place inappropriate content coverage pressures on teachers or cause them to shift their emphasis away from pursuing major social studies goals.
The NCSS curriculum guidelines (1990) call for systematic and rigorous assessment of social studies instruction that is based primarily on each school’s stated objectives as the criteria for effectiveness. Knowledge, thinking skills, valuing, and social participation are assessed, using data from many sources in addition to paper-and-pencil tests. These data provide a basis for planning curriculum improvements as well as for assessing students’ learning. The guidelines emphasize locally planned assessment of progress toward locally established goals.
In 1991, NCSS elaborated on these guidelines through a position statement on testing and evaluation of social studies students. This statement calls for transforming student assessment from an overreliance on machine-scored standardized tests to approaches that balance such measures with more authentic performance assessments. These include tasks such as speaking effectively or articulating a reasoned stance on a controversial social issue. Such assessments focus on the processes that students use, not merely on the answers they choose.
A comprehensive assessment plan for social studies includes daily monitoring of the general effectiveness and quality of student participation in lessons and activities, as well as appropriate use of both criterion- and norm-referenced tests. The primary purpose of testing should be to improve teaching and learning. To accomplish this purpose, teachers need the freedom and encouragement to select or develop assessment tasks that are suited to their students and aligned with locally adopted social studies goals. This process will involve augmenting traditional tests with performance evaluations, portfolios of student papers and projects, and essays focusing on higher-order thinking and applications. The assessment devices must be fair to all students and interpreted with sensitivity to the propriety of any norms or comparison groups that might be used to place the scores of local students into context. Teachers must have access to all data collected in their classrooms and be proficient in interpreting and reporting results.
A basic underlying principle is that assessment should be aligned with, and designed to help accomplish, the citizen education goals that drive the social studies curriculum. The curriculum’s assessment component should not drive its content and process components; instead, all three components should constitute a coherent plan for accomplishing the curriculum’s major social understanding and civic efficacy goals. To the extent that the assessment component creates content or skills coverage pressures that do not promote significant progress toward these goals, it is counterproductive to the purposes of social studies. The same may be true of test-driven coverage pressures in other subject areas if these pressures result in inadequate time allocations to social studies or loss of its coherence as an integral curriculum component.
B. Support for Powerful Social Studies Teaching and Learning
If social studies teaching and learning are to begin to approximate the vision outlined here, more support for social studies education at every level is necessary. Such support includes internal support from the profession itself (emphasizing improvements in preservice and in-service teacher education) and external support from parents, the local community, and government agencies.
1. Preparing Preservice Teachers
In 1987, NCSS developed a position statement and guidelines on the preparation of social studies teachers. The guidelines refer to admission and continuation of students in teacher education programs, characteristics of these programs, and characteristics of the sponsoring institutions. Social studies professionals should lobby for state staffing policies that reflect the NCSS teacher preparation standards.
Academic and continuation requirements should ensure that candidates possess sufficient knowledge and skills, as well as appropriate personal and ethical qualities. Programs should include: (1) general education preparation in the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, the natural sciences, mathematics, and computer science; (2) special emphasis on foundational disciplines for the social studies, approached within a global perspective and with attention to value conflicts and policy issues; and (3) a professional education component that includes courses in social and philosophical foundations, human growth and development, psychology of learning, needs of exceptional students, gender and ethnic perspectives, use of media, and a range of planning, teaching, and assessment skills.
Social studies methods courses should prepare prospective teachers to select, integrate, and translate knowledge and methodology from the social studies into curricula suitable for the grade levels at which they expect to teach. Programs should include both information and clinical experiences designed to prepare prospective teachers to teach social studies in a variety of settings to a variety of students using a variety of approaches to curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Student teaching experiences should span complete school semesters, not just college quarters, and they should be supervised by appropriately qualified cooperating teachers and college or university personnel.
Institutions sponsoring teacher education programs should vest responsibility for managing those programs in the head of the college, school, or department of education and should staff the program with faculty members who have experience in K–12 schools. These faculty members should excel as teachers or field supervisors, not just as scholars. They should observe and interact with their student teachers in school settings often enough to assess the student teachers’ progress accurately and to model or suggest improvements adapted to the settings.
Effective preparation of social studies teachers requires close cooperation between the social science specialists and the teacher education specialists, as well as between the university personnel and school personnel involved in clinical and field experiences. All of the participants in teacher education programs should understand and be committed to major social studies goals, should be knowledgeable about powerful social studies teaching, and should model such teaching in their classrooms. This implies use of a broad range of teaching and learning methods. Prospective teachers need coaching and structured opportunities to develop their skills at using approaches such as lecture and discussion, cooperative learning, panel discussions, debates, games, simulations, community participation expericnces, and computerized data bases and learning programs. Besides learning the procedural aspects of these varied approaches, prospective teachers should learn to shift their managerial and instructional roles appropriately and to prepare students to assume additional responsibilities for managing their learning. Teachers need to function comfortably not just as experts but also as guides.
Learning to plan, implement, and assess powerful social studies teaching on a consistent basis will require years of guided in-service and self-assessment experiences in addition to good preservice preparation. At a minimum, however, preservice programs should equip new teachers with a basic understanding of social studies purposes and goals and a vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning that they can use to guide their subsequent professional development.
2. Supporting In-Service Teachers
The vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning outlined here assumes local planning and decision-making in which teams of teachers identify and clarify goals, plan the social studies program, monitor it reflectively, and make necessary adjustments. To make this possible, school districts and building administrators need to allocate sufficient in-class time for social studies teaching and provide sufficient out-of-class time for collegial planning and professional development. Although social studies is rich in opportunities for connecting content from other subjects, it features important purposes and goals of its own and must be taught with frequency and coherence for these goals to be accomplished. Throughout grades K–12, all students should receive daily instruction in a carefully planned social studies program.
Teaching staffs need collegial planning time and in-service staff development activities to ensure that all teachers develop a shared understanding of the broad goals of social studies education and thus approach them with an emphasis on building social understanding and civic efficacy. Guided by these major goals and a knowledgeable social studies coordinator, collegial planning should yield a coherent social studies program for the entire school. All teachers should know what their colleagues are doing and understand how the components assigned to their grade level fit into the big picture. Planning should be guided by the NCSS collection of curriculum planning resourccs (1990) and should incorporate the instructional principles outlined in this position statement. The program should include an assessment component that aligns with goals and complements the other program components (the value and attitudinal aspects as well as the knowledge and skills aspects).
Teachers need support for acquiring and receiving social studies information, resources, and teaching and assessment strategies. All teachers need opportunities to obtain information about and assistance in using social studies resources from competent consultants, opportunities to visit other classrooms to see demonstrations of powerful teaching and learning, and involvement in decision-making concerning adoption of curriculum materials or other changes in the school’s social studies program. New teachers need mentoring from accomplished teachers. Teachers with special interests or assignments need release time and support for attendance at state and national conferences, activity in professional organizations, local networking, and the opportunity to help develop curriculum materials or program plans. Teachers should be encouraged to identify their group and individual professional development needs relating to social studies, and arrangements should be made to address these needs.
F.xperienced teachers interested in doing so may apply for assessment and NCSS advanced professional certification of the quality of their social studies teaching (NCSS 1991). Whether or not they seek council certification in addition to their state certification, however, teachers who have continuing responsibility for social studies education should strive to meet NCSS’s standards for certified professionals. In particular, they should: (1) continue their professional development through formal course work, attendance at conferences, professional reading, and collaboration with peers on action research or staff development projects; (2) analyze their and their students’ work products; (3) keep a journal on practice; and (4) take active roles in professional and community organizations.
Social studies education should receive vigorous support as a vital curriculum component responsible for accomplishing uniquely important purposes and goals. A social studies coordinator should be appointed for the district as a whole and for each building. The district should provide appropriate instructional time, materials and resources, facilities, and equipment for all teachers. They will need access to carefully selected textbooks and the many types of data sources that are used in powerful social studies teaching, including auxiliary texts, multimedia kits, reference materials and text supplements at various reading levels, maps, globes, physical artifacts, films and tapes, computer equipment and software, content-correlated literature selections, and equipment for simulations or special events.
Districts should encourage their social studies teachers to participate in active curriculum committees that have decision-making as well as advisory responsibilities. Finally, a district-wide policy statement on academic freedom and responsibility should be in place. Social studies teachers should be able to rely on this statement and on administrative support for their efforts to model civic participation and assist their students to confront social issues.
3. External Support from Communities and Governments
Several forms of community and governmental support will be required to sustain powerful social studies programs. Most fundamentally, communities and governments need to recognize the subject’s vital purpose for citizen education and thus prepare to support accomplishment of its social understanding and civic efficacy goals and the powerful forms of teaching and learning necessary to accomplish them. This commitment implies sustaining teacher education and professional development programs and forms of support for social studies in schools as described in previous sections. These aspects of powerful social studies programs require funding and leadership support from local school districts and state governments.
Corporate and business interests can be supportive as well. Sponsoring cooperative programs, hosting field trips, supplying guest speakers, and supporting local heritage preservations that serve as school resources are just some of the ways local businesses and communities can support their schools’ social studies programs. Parents can help by donating or lending cultural or historical artifacts, acting as chaperones on field trips, and visiting classes or resource people (e.g., to provide information about their occupations or their ethnic heritages).
C. The Challenges for the Future
The vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning set forth here has been informed by a growing knowledge base about the ingredients for teaching social studies for understanding, appreciation, and life application. This position statement, however, is just a beginning. The future holds many challenges that must be met if the vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning outlined here is to be developed in more detail and become the basis for standard practice in the schools.
More research on socal studies teaching and learning is needed, especially research that focuses on teachers’ efforts to develop social understanding and civic efficacy in their students. Studies that document the effects of powerful social studies teaching and describe it in detail as it unfolds across a lesson or curriculum unit would be especially valuable. Also needed are studies of what students at the various grade levels know (or think they know) about the content taught in those grades and how instruction affects their thinking. This information then can be used to develop ways to adapt instruction so as to build on students’ valid knowledge and address their misconceptions.
As the knowledge base develops, it will need to consider the situational characteristics of various teaching contexts. The general principle that social studies teaching and learning become more powerful when they are meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active applies to all social studies classes, but the specifics involved in bringing this principle to life will vary according to individual students and content areas. More information is needed about the particular forms of powerful social studies teaching that best suit various grade levels and content areas, how to adapt these forms of instruction to meet the needs of diverse learners, and what constitutes effective pre-service and in-service social studies teacher education.
Improved learning resources, along with research on how to use them effectively, are also needed. Textbooks need to be structured coherently around powerful ideas developed in depth, and they need to be supplemented with a wide range of learning resources and activities. In the early elementary grades, multimedia kits, picture books, simplified maps, collections of artifacts (or realistic reproductions), and other instructional tools and data sources designed for students who have not yet become sophisticated readers are needed. Across the grades, computerized data bases, simulations, and games, laserdiscs, hypermedia, scanners, electronic mail connections with classrooms in other states or nations, and production and use of videotapes as teaching and learning devices have potential for social studies applications. These applications will need to be developed and studied to determine how to make the best use of their unique capabilities in the most cost-effective ways. Research and development also need to attend to the changes in the teacher?s role entailed in many of these innovations. Along with access to new resources and technologies, teachers will need guidance on how to manage these multiple resources and help their students learn to use them more effectively.
Certain systematic changes in education in the United States are needed to support fully powerful social studies teaching and learning. Most of these are changes that would improve the quality of instruction across the curriculum. Critics of textbooks and learning resources in all subjects are voicing similar concerns about the need to shift emphasis from breadth of coverage to depth of development of important content, to shift from fill-in-the-blank worksheets to a broader range of activities, and to replace tests that create counterproductive content coverage pressures with authentic, varied, and goals-driven assessment components. School restructuring efforts have stressed teacher empowerment and collegial planning, although more emphasis should be placed on articulating major goals and on developing local networks of teachers who share similar teaching assignments.
Some of the current assessment reform movements are encouraging, especially those calling for authentic tasks. If these efforts are to support powerful teaching and learning, however, test users will have to be willing to accept the costs of authentic assessment. Also, social studies assessments will have to shift from a focus on generic skills to a focus on social understanding and civic efficacy goals, including those relating to the teaching of democratic values.
IV. Summary
Complementing position statements on social studies curriculum, evaluation, teacher preparation, and advanced certification published previously by National Council for the Social Studies, this position statement sets forth a vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning needed to accomplish important social understanding and civic efficacy goals. It briefly considers assessment approaches that will complement powerful social studies teaching and learning; preservice teacher preparation programs, in-service professional development programs, and forms of support for social studies education in the schools that are necessary to sustain such powerful teaching and learning; and some needed developments in research, instructional resources, and educational reform. In putting forth a vision of the ideal, this position statement emphasizes that social studies teaching and learning become powerful when they are meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active.
V. Conclusion
Thomas Jefferson, among others, emphasized that the vitality of a democracy depends upon the education and participation of its citizens. If the nation is to develop fully the readiness of its citizenry to carry forward its democratic traditions, it will need to support progress toward full attainment of the vision of powerful social studies teaching and learning outlined here.
Task Force on Standards for Teaching and Learning in the Social Studies
Margit McGuire, Co-chair, Seattle University, Seattle, Washington
James F. Marran, Co-chair, New Trier HighSchool, Winnetka, Illinois
Silvia Alvarez, Albuquerque Public Schools, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Susan Austin, Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
Jere Brophy, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan
George Mehaffy, San Diego State University, San Diego, California
Pat Nickell, Fayette County Schools, Lexington, Kentucky
Linda Preston, Burlington, Massachusetts
Michael Young, Elkhorn, Nebraska
Responses to the statement on powerful teaching and learning in the social studies were received from:
James Akenson, Michael Hartoonian, Virginia Atwood, M. Gail Hickey, Buckley Barnes, Kristi Karis, Allan Brandhorst, Lillian Katz, Jean Claugus, Linda Levstik, Paul Cohen, Tedd Levy, O. L. Davis, Peter Martorella, James Donlevy, Mindy McMahon, Jean Fair, Jack Morgan, Darlene Fisher, Isidore Starr, Ann Fleener, Tina Thuermer, Jackie Fuller, Mary Jane Turner, Jim Garretson, Huber Walsh, Jeanette Groth, Leo West, Teri Harper
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National Council for the Social Studies
