SRTrainingSummer09 / Chapter 6- Group 1 - 0 views
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They need you, the teacher, to break the work into steps and stages, and to give them tools and activities and work habits that help.
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Josh Yost on 07 Aug 09Scaffolding, vocabulary strategies really work well with breaking up text into manageable chunks for students.
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Like the social studies teachers at Stagg High School, you could try to identify the 12 or 16 absolutely key, “fencepost” concepts in every course you teach. You might agree in principle that kids would do better to understand a dozen key ideas deeply, that to hear 1,000 ideas mentioned in passing. But what are the right fenceposts for your subject, your course?
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Finding these fencepost ideas is always difficult in a department where each person feels different topics require more coverage than others.
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This newer kind of test tries to determine not just whether students retain factual information, but whether, given an authentic problem, they can reason effectively.
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Don’t leave kids alone with their textbooks We can harness the social power of collaboration, having kids work in pairs, groups, and teams at all stages of reading to discuss, debate, and sort-out ideas in the book.
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I find this works well in social studies, especially with topics that apply to events in the world today.
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Many books couldn’t be studied this way because information in earlier chapters is crucial for understanding later ones. But textbooks frequently can be easily subdivided.
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Another way to subdivide the chapter is to have students divide in groups and present their information in a creative way to their classmates.
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With jigsawing activities, when kids sit down to find the links between movements like abolitionism and worker’s rights, they are coming pretty close to “doing history,” not just dutifully accepting what the textbook says.
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This does require students to be trained in how to do effective jigsaw strategies.
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