Historical Thinking Bringing SS in line with College, Career, and Civic Life Success David. A Johnson Social Studies Consultant Northern Michigan Learning Consortium January 2013

Welcome!  Overview of the day  Opening Icebreaker  C3 Vision Document  Historical Thinking

The Purpose of Social Studies  Provide students with the knowledge and skills to understand humanity.  Enable students to solve problems, make decisions, and analyze issues from multiple perspectives  Read, write, listen, and communicate ideas to others  Apply knowledge and skills from various disciplines to daily life.

The New Standards  Disciplinary and multi-disciplinary ideas to enable investigation  Focus on inquiry  Do not prescribe content

Standard 1  Developing questions and planning investigations  SS has been criticized as being a “parade of facts”  Facts are important, but unless made meaningful, are soon forgotten.  Teachers and students together draw on disciplinary content to create questions and discover the answers.

Standard 2  Applying disciplinary concepts and ideas  Once you have the “question” now you go about finding the content to plan and address the question.  Disciplinary content must be delivered but must not be automatically giving the “answers” to students.

Standard 3  Once you have a question, and you grasp the concepts and ideas, it’s time to find evidence.  If the question is “was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s a success?” you look at the concepts and ideas and realize…a Wikipedia entry isn’t enough. There are a range of primary/secondary sources to gather and sot through  Develop explanations and support their arguments.

Standard 4  No man is an island.  Developing shared understandings by collaborating and communicating.

Presented in Grade Bands  K-2  3-5  6-8  9-12  Overlap between bands intentional…some concepts transcend grade levels.  Overlap with Common Core also intentional.

Turn and Talk  What is one thing that excited you about the Vision Document walkthrough?  What is one thing you’re feeling a little shaky on?

Break Time!  Be back in 15 minutes

Historical Thinking

Historical Thinking Is… Reading Writing Analysis Necessary to tell the stories we study in History It’s what we know, and how we know it Helps us get closer to the past

Multiple Accounts and Perspectives  Accuracy comes from analyzing multiple accounts  No single account captures accurately the past

Primary Sources  Original artifacts written during the time under study  Read-question-contextualize-analyze  Ask questions:  Who wrote this?  Why did they write it?  What did they write it for?  When did they write this?  Where did they write this?

Sourcing  Identify and ask questions about a source  Author’s purpose and perspective  Is it trustworthy? How do we know?  What else can we learn?

Context  Ask questions  Who is being addressed?  What is the historical context of the world under study?  Ideology of the day  Words before/after

Claim-Evidence connection  Stories must be supported w/evidence  History isn’t fiction

What the C3 Vision Document Says about “Thinking History”  What connections do you notice?  Sample Lesson Overview

The Writing Process  Set context for you and them…what is your Unit’s compelling question? A “thinking history” lesson is a supporting question that fits underneath.  Identify your standards (What do you want them doing CCSS/C3, What are you supposed to be studying GLCE/HSCE)  Identify some primary sources. (Secondary too if you need to build context…i.e. have not built background knowledge in class yet)

The Writing Process  Walk yourself through a study of these texts. Now think about your students needs. What do you need to explain to them, model for them, demonstrate, etc.  I Do, We Do, You Do… will this work?