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- It will provide students with an engaging, stimulating, interesting, and fun social studies experience. It will be hard fun, but it will be fun – students will have a chance to argue, to construct counter-interpretations, to re-shape and re-think the past, present, and future.
- It will allow social studies to go beyond – the skills developed in social studies (specifically spatial reasoning and computational thinking) will be novel additions to the K-12 curriculum. Some students experience these already in computer science class or art class...but most don't. Social studies' universality – which I've always felt but haven't been able to bring to light for others – will be visible, established, and accessible.
History Education, Enhanced
| Spatial reasoning | Computational thinking |
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Understanding & interpreting spatial data
| Problem-solving strategies that integrate with computational tools
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INTEGRATED WITHIN
| Decision-focused social studies | U.S. History curriculum |
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Per Engle, 1960: decision-making is "the heart of social studies"; takes place at "two levels: at the level of deciding what a group of descriptive data means… [and] at the level of policy determination” (p. 301). | ...Partially-worked examples include:
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Elements of the instructional design model:
- Engaging, decision-focused history instruction in alignment with the existing curriculum;
- Explicit instruction on both spatial reasoning and computational thinking;
- Application of these thinking skills in the context of learning a curriculum-aligned history topic;
- Student examination and/or manipulation of accessible data; and
- Guided note sheets and other learning materials that integrate the critical thinking skills, the history education content, and the decision-focused framework.
Theory of change model
The ask from BASD – will pay for time, subs, etc.
- Time to work with a collaborating teacher during Year 1-2-3.
- Develop instructional materials
- Develop assessments
- Feasibility study with 1 teacher in Year 2
- Implement instruction, conduct assessments
- Participate in fidelity of implementation development
- Pilot study with 2 or more teachers at Freedom, 2 or more teachers at Liberty during Year 3
- Professional development with participating teachers; open to others as interested (summer)
- Implement instruction, conduct assessments – note that this include data collection from control classrooms
- Participate in fidelity of implementation measure