I’m a big fan of using essential questions and themes to organize my social studies class. If you’ve looked around this site, you probably know that already. If not, check out a few of these posts and then come back: Use Themes to Make Social Studies More Civics Oriented Civic Spotlight: Redesigning a Thematic World […]
It’s not news that civic knowledge and civic engagement throughout the country is pretty low. Recent polls show that a lot of people can’t even name the three branches of government. One reason for this is that our social studies classes are often not living up to their purpose. In a lot of cases, they […]
It’s no secret that the general public is pretty ignorant about the political process. There are any number of data points that you can cite to show what people don’t know. And one of the reasons for this is that at times we aren’t fulfilling our purpose with social studies classes. They are often structured as […]
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 […]
If we’re going to do a good job of preparing our students to be citizens, then we can’t let social studies be driven by facts and chronology. Instead, it should focus on important themes and essential questions. By placing the emphasis on these themes, we turn facts into tools by which we can understand the […]
One way to help prepare our students to be better citizens is to ensure that social studies is not driven by facts and chronology. It should instead be anchored on important themes and essential questions. Placing the focus on these themes turns the facts into tools by which we understand the world. We learn to […]
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 […]