Tag: Essential Questions

Resources

Three Economics Essential Questions For Your Social Studies Class

Picture of a castle with the title, "Is the Economy Fair? And Other Essential Questions About Economics."

It’s a common complaint today that people don’t know how the government works and that they don’t learn anything about civics in schools. One reason for that is that we often misuse social studies courses – setting them up as history courses dominated by facts and chronology. Instead, we should organize these classes around a […]

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Methods

Using Themes and Essential Questions to Bring Out the Civics in Social Studies

Pile of old books with one in focus and the rest blurred.

Part of the reason we’re so bad at teaching civics is curriculum – and for two reasons. When it comes to social studies, we try to teach way too much history and we almost always insist on organizing it chronologically. The two problems are self-reinforcing. When you orient the entire curriculum around time periods, you […]

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