1. Conceptual Teaching in Social Studies

2. Would you rather your students…
be able to list all of the compromises made at the Constitutional Convention OR
be able to explain the role of compromise and conflict throughout history using examples from the Constitutional Convention?

3. Would you rather your students…
be able to tell you the populations, natural resources, and climates found in Latin America OR
be able to explain the impact of population, natural resources, and climate on Latin America’s role in the contemporary world?
Concepts include:
Global connections
People, places, and environment
Production, distribution, and consumption

4. Comparison Topic Based
Facts and activities center around specific topic .
Objectives drive instruction.
Focus learning and thinking about specific facts.
Instructional activities use a variety of discrete skills.
Concept Based
Use of facts and activities are focused by conceptual lens.
Essential questions, drawn from concepts, drive instruction.
Facts are learned to understand transferable concepts and ideas.
Instructional activities call on complex performances using a variety of skills.

5. Points to consider
Both models value foundation of specific fact-based knowledge and skills
Difference is in culminating focal point of instruction
Topic-based: learning specific facts about a given topic
Concept-based: learning conceptual understandings drawn from the facts
Learning about the relationship between things rather than JUST FACTS.

6. Enduring Understandings

7. Enduring Understandings
Conceptual understandings drawn from and supported by critical content (Erickson, 71)
Basis of conceptual teaching
Provide scaffolding
Standards provide specificity to concepts
This is essence of what students should take from the unit/course

8. Enduring Understandings
Units will have multiple EUs
Intended to be broad
Apply to many situations
Apply to different units
Apply to different courses/grade levels
Written in present tense
References theme and is easily tied to specific knowledge from the unit.

9. Enduring Understanding Example
Students will understand that movement of ideas, people, goods, and culture have both positive and negative impacts on the development of societies.
Students will understand that distribution of power in government is a result of existing documents and laws combined with contemporary values and beliefs.
Can be generalized widely across social studies!

10. What do standards have in common?
Look at standards for common THEMES or CONCEPTS
What do we mean when we say “history repeats itself?”
Think cause and effect relationships
What causes wars? Why do people create governments? How does location impact a society? What’s important about technological innovations?

11. Frameworks: Unit 1 First unit is key!!!
MUST teach the themes to the student
Relate themes to ideas/experiences students already have
EVERY LESSON should got back to one of those themes
Every element in a course is tied to a theme

12. Unit 1
Review of the Enduring Understandings and unit connecting themes for the course
Focus on helping students see the relationship of EU’s to their own lives
Make the EU’s relevant to students
Have them give examples from personal experience
Socratic like discussion
Develop examples from :
Historical events
Current events
Course related topics

13. Unit 1 Brain learning Previous knowledge Organizing structure
New knowledge builds upon previous knowledge
Organized according to some structure
Previous knowledge
Students experience
What they already know about topic
Organizing structure
Enduring Understandings
New knowledge
Standards and elements

14. Unit 1 Goal: student understanding of EU’s before starting the course
Provide schema for course material
Up front students know where the course is going
Start with the end in mind (Covey)
Acceleration (Max Thompson, Learning Focused Schools
How Students Learn History in the Classroom National Research Council
Course ceases to be set of units with info to be memorized for a test

15. “If you study to remember, you will forget, but, If you study to understand, you will remember”
- Unknown
“It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.” - Alec Bourne