TLT 412, Fall 2011 - Course record
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Session 1 - Tuesday, 30 Aug
Before class
DO NOT buy a copy of the textbook (Lee, 2008, Visualizing Elementary Social Studies Methods). You'll be getting a free digital copy during the first class session. If you do want to get a paper copy: The library has one on reserve. If you want to own a paper copy: The bookstore has it (I think?); Amazon has it; used copies are fine.
Cruise this wiki and the CourseSite.
I have paper copies of the syllabus (well, the second half where all the info about assignments is to be found); you don't have to print out a copy yourself.
During class (ppt)
Housekeeping
Introductions
Looking at our toolbox: CourseSite, wiki, bookmarks, etc.
What is up with the textbook?
Guest presenter: Jean Johnson, librarian to the COE
Beginning-of-semester survey regarding your background with digital texts & readers.
Reviewing syllabus
Co-mingling of "old" and "new" programs.
Assignments and grading
Questions thus far?
Conceptual work
What is social studies?
Jigsaw(-ish) / LGL activity
Form SEVEN groups
Group A: NCSS materials, publications
Group B: PA standards, textbooks; other-content area groups' materials. Use the paper materials plus this link.
Group C: "Education market" materials
Group D: "Heritage market" materials--paper items plus these links: A, B, C.
Group E: Re-purposed non-educational materials
Group F: Internet links .
Group G: Discussion: What do you remember from your elementary social studies experiences? If you can't remember any, feel free to move up to middle level. What topics did you do? What did you read? Watch? Discuss? What sorts of tasks or assessments did you complete?
Group work for 10 minutes
Report out: Describe what you looked at, what you discussed. Instructor will make a list.
Group: Look over the list and create GROUPS of items that seem to be similar.
Label: Identify each group by a short (1-4 word) label.
What is social studies methods?
Content?
Techniques?
Lesson planning?
Notes on the "silent partners" in the class
Social studies / methods class and arts integration
Methods class and portfolio updating
Who am I as a social studies educator?
Closure
Review of what's due next week
Review of what's where (wiki, CourseSite)
Any questions?
After class
Reading
Lee, Ch. 1 (What is?) & 2 (Reflective)
Crocco, 2004 (as an overview and critique of the field)
NCSS, 2008
Lovorn, 2009 (as an example of arts integration)
Assignments
WTL
Update your profile in CourseSite to include your picture
Starting planning out your upcoming assignments: Original Instructional Materials product #1, who you'll interview for HTCE, etc.
Session 2 - Tuesday, 6 Sep
Before class
Complete reading: Lee Ch. 1 & 2, NCSS 2008, skim Crocco, 2004, and briefly consider Lovorn, 2009 (as an example of arts integration).
During class (ppt)
Very first thing we're doing: Going outside!! (Actually, we'll be doing a pre-test first, then we'll go outside.) Once outside, we'll be using a variety of technologies to measure some trees and do some calculations. We're having an experience as adult learners, but I was able to do this (in a slowed-down format) with a group of 5th graders at William Penn Elementary.
Once we're back inside: This webpage contains lots of calculators that will help you do the necessary number-crunching; I'll walk you through. (Page credit: Yuanyuan Zhang.)
De-briefing our Trees, Cars, and Carbon activity
What did we learn? Could you repeat those steps on your own?
What surprised you? Had you used these technologies before, or used them in this way before?
What content area(s) did you work with? Was this 'social studies,' or something else, or a mixture of things?
Think about your intended target learners -- how could/should you adapt this activity to work with these students?
Think about students with learning disabilities or language-learning needs -- how could/should you modify this activity to make it more inclusive and help these students achieve their learning goals?
Overview of the sequence: learning lat-lon & GPS, doing a scaffolded geocache, then doing local inquiry (e.g., sewer survey, Trees-Cars-Carbon)
And here are the sources that I worked from.
Conceptual work: Two items for tonight: Ways of organizing social studies education and schema. We'll tackle the latter first
Schema
What is/are schema (schemata? schemes?)? What do we already know about it? What do we know about the origins of the idea?
Metaphors for schema: Umbrellas, birds' nests, wasps' nests
Social studies and schema: What's your schema for latitude and longitude? Look at your pretest; edit/improve each of your answers, based on our activity. How does this show a change in your schema from the beginning of tonight's class?
Ways of organizing social studies
Most common: Expanding environments. Students exploring the world; logical progression.
Most 'respected' by adults: Disciplinary. Students behaving like miniature adults, learning what specialists do.
De facto curricula
'I do chapter one and then I do chapter two'
'At our school, we do it this way' -- thematic? Integrated? We-teach-holidays?
Curricular designs from within the social studies community
Research-based: Cultural universals (Brophy & Alleman)
Mission-driven: Towards the Common Good (Wade)
Your task, as an emerging social studies educator: Sift through, live through these approaches, decide what matters to you. What will you aspire to do? What is critical for your students to know / understand / be able to do? What are you willing to fight for?
Housekeeping
Looking at upcoming assignments
Discussion of original instructional materials assignment #1 & #2
Discussion of curriculum map
Any problems with accessing the textbook? Did everyone fill out the survey for the library? If not, here are the instructions for activating and the survey.
Digital portfolio reminder/clarification: These are required for TLT but not for SpEd (yet). Accordingly: TLT students, you're doing this for 5% of your grade; SpEd students, you're not doing it (but you'll have to do whatever you do on paper to be ready for your end-of-program review...), and you'll be graded out of 95 points, not 100. (I.e., if you earn 95/95, that's 100%; if you earn 85.5/95, that's a 90%, etc.)
Arts integration experiences discussion.
Placemarker / activator: Social studies and September 11th.
Closure: Stop and consider: What is in your toolbox of social studies methods now?
We're going to break some additional ground with Google Earth via an activity called Weaving the Globe. To do this, I need to know some info about two items of clothing that you own: a pair of shoes and a shirt. Input your info and I'll show you something cool next week! (Disclosure: This isn't original to me; it's a lesson I first saw in Social Education and then adapted to my own preferences. So: Please consider joining NCSS and subscribing to Social Ed!)
After class
Reading
Lee, Ch. 3 (Inquiry; connect this to our outside activity) & Ch. 4 (Standards; connect to discussion of frameworks)
Re-visit NCSS, 2008 -- do you share these same interests? Could they be achieved via expanding environments? Disciplinary framework?
Brophy & Alleman, 2002 (critique of expanding environments & disciplinary; make the case for their own Cultural Universals framework)
optional: Wade, 2002 (Towards the Common Good)
skim: Keeler & Langhorst, 2008 (to get ideas for original instructional materials assigns)
Assignments
WTL
Complete instructional product #1
If you didn't already, input your clothing info for next week's activity
Session 3 - Tuesday, 13 Sep
Before class
Complete reading -- note that I changed the Keeler & Langhorst link
Come to class ready to share instructional product #1!
During class (ppt)
Housekeeping
Keeler & Langhorst link
Clothing survey problems? Anything to discuss there?
Tonight's sequence of activities
Conceptual work
You and your social studies materials
Opening example: Dr. H's 'Weaving the Globe' overlay in Google Earth. (BTW, depending on your browser, this may just open up in the browser as a bunch of text. In that case, save the file to your computer, then open it in Google Earth.)
Prompts for discussion
How to share your materials: Attach to a comment in the WTL forum
And now you: Pair and share your materials, follow the prompts for discussion. If you wish, share your materials via the WTL forum.
Discussion of planning: standards -> curricula -> units -> lessons -> activities
Let's get into the content of social studies: Teaching geography
Let's look at standards
PDE: there's old...and new. Thoughts?
Things to attend to
Mis-match of grade levels.
Sequence of understandings...does this add up?
Note attention to 'tools' of geography. This is something we can work with, yes?
Other concepts (and for whatever reason, this is clearer to me in the old standards: physical vs. human geography, interactions between people and environment. Do we know these concepts? Can we give examples?
Content-area associations: the National Council for Geographic Education has standards: NCGE standards.
Other ways of approaching this: NCGE and AAS used to promote the 'Five Themes' of geography -- they aren't 'current', but many, many teachers and materials still follow them.
Back to the mothership: NCSS - they have ten THEMES (other terms they use: standards, strands...sigh) that cut across all fields of social studies.
And how do any of the above relate back to the mission of social studies? (And do you recall what this mission is?)
Were the standards helpful? Can they guide instruction? Will this instruction be powerful? Aimed towards the preparation of democratic citizens?
In the absence of any other sense of direction, where will teachers turn? The textbook. Let's take a look.
Let's live out a little of this stuff: Let's do some sketchmaps: World, western hemisphere, USA, PA, Lehigh Valley? Iacocca Hall, this classroom? Your neighborhood? Your bedroom?
Connections:
Sketchmaps and schema
Sketchmaps and the tools of geography. For example: A map should four elements (or sometimes five or even six!)...how many did you include?
And here's the distinction that I'd like to make - meaningless vs. meaningful geography. We'll do by contrasting two activities
Naming states (game). There's a million variations of this online.
'What's in a (Place) Name'
Contrast these two. The first is unavoidable, but...what schema is being built? What will endure?
Geography as the 'Whys of Where'
Re-visit your sketchmap -- add a note that either ASKS 'why is this here? Why is it called this? How does this relate to (some other thing)?' or else ANSWERS a question such as this.
Closure
Catching up from last week
Discussion of curriculum map, unit plan, and microteaching assignments
Discussion of arts integration experiences, expectations
Discussion of 9-11 observances, reflections
After class
Reading
Lee, Ch. 6 (Geography) & Ch. 9 (Interactive Teaching)
Preview Chimamanda Adichie video.
Assignments
WTL
Work on original instructional materials assignment, product #2
Finalize classroom observation / field work opportunities
Session 4 - Tuesday, 20 Sep
Before class
Complete reading, preview video (see above)
Work on original instructional material #2
Work on upcoming assignments
During class (ppt)
Housekeeping
Conceptual work
Checking in on your toolbox of methods
Teaching and learning social studies: Inquiry vs. didactic models
Demo lesson: Mapping an orange (Map projections) -- see one version of the plan here.
Follow-up #1: Inquiry vs. didactic -- I'm trying to give you a simple, intuitive way to think about selecting social studies methods
Discussion of inquiry vs. didactic models of instruction
Suggested framework: Giving, prompting, & making (Hammond & Manfra, 2009)
In textbook: direct instruction (Ch. 8), active learning / inquiry (Ch. 3, 9, 11)
Follow-up #2: More info on maps and globes, starting with projections
Mercator map.
Peters map.
"Dymaxion" map or Fuller map (Buckminster Fuller).
Popular contemporary projections include the Winkel Tripel ... it's a more satisfying trade-off between spatial accuracy / distortion and readability.
Non-pedagogical application of the issue: Airline route maps--I'll use an NWA map. Note the arc. A little more dramatic version from Cathay Pacific. (More where that came fromairlineroutemaps.com. Who knew such a thing existed??)
Static maps & globes -- you can find a wealth of static maps online. Feel free to start here.
Dynamic
Globes -- Google Earth is of course the kingpin here. See a blog of teaching ideas for using Google Earth.
Maps
Flickr map. Search for a term in a region. For example, look for "checkpoint" in "Israel" (or pick any other topic that you think students might hear about and need more context on)
Groups within Flickr can have their own maps -- I'm partial to the map from theIslam\ group.
National Geographic's Map Machine can be used for many activities
Google Maps can be customized to do interesting things, especially for projects on your local environment or other places where the geography / spatial relationship is very important. Here is a Google Map I made to plan a trip to Washington, DC. (Not very interesting, sorry -- just demonstrates potential of the tool.)-
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are also powerful tools for using and making dynamic maps.-
Now let's focus on human geography, starting with another demo lesson. It's drawn from "What the world eats," and I call it "Families and food"
Captions -- match these with the images in the ppt; Countries -- locate these countries on the map.
Family food images taken from TIME magazine photo essay about the book, Hungry Planet. Note the parallel to the book Material World. Both seem like great resources
Extensions:
Pop the images onto a map! Someone has done this using Microsoft's Live Maps. I would have done it with Google Maps or as a Google Earth overlay.
One of the things I like about this image set is the level of contextualization: We have some info about the family and their location, not just their country. So: Could you locate not just the country but the location (e.g., Tingo, Ecuador)? What resources could you use to do this?
Teaching geography and world cultures: "Them" is "We"
Model lesson: Video study & population density enactive
Video via YouTube. They disabled the embeds (Gah!), so just what what I present.
Additional visuals (note that plenty more can be found in, among other places, flickr).
Enactive -- note that this will require some tweaking for younger learners...more scaffolded math process (or eliminate it altogether). The technique, however (i.e., giving an EXPERIENCE of a topic) is invaluable for all learners, but particularly younger ones.
Extension
(FYI: The non-YouTube visuals and the enactive are adapted from the Geography Alive! materials from Teachers Curriculum Institute. Amazon link here. If you liked these materials, definitely consider buying this. If you're not sure, ask to borrow my materials. And if you want to watch Geography Alive! in a Live! format, I believe Saucon Valley uses it, or at least some SV teachers do.)
"Them" vs. "We"; "Othering" vs. identifying
Let's view a clip from a speech by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie given at Oxford, July 2009. The title is "The danger of a single story" . We'll just watch the first 4:14; then we'll skip ahead to 10:57-11:57 (thank YOU for the interactive transcript!!!)
Sample instructional challenges
How did the previous activities ("What the World Eats", YouTube clips, population density enactive) reinforce or challenge a Single Story about different cultures / places?
Consider a sample material: Haitian voodoo flag. Poses many possibilities (e.g., combine with writing or math activities), but is also a complex, easily misread artifact. Assuming you had one in your possession, what's one GOOD idea you might have for designing instruction? What's one DANGEROUS line of instruction, one that would lead to "othering" / stereotyping / a Single Story?
Put it into action: Where in children's lit can we find multiple stories / perspectives on cultures? On historical events?
Re-visiting your methods toolbox. Can we put our methods to date into some sort of a categorization? Consider the following:
What we've done in class thus far: List-group-label, sketchmaps, looking for patterns in the names on maps, mapping an orange, Weaving the Globe, What the World Eats
Take a look at what's in the textbook reading thus far (each lesson concludes with a sample lesson--how would you characterize the methods in each?)
What other methods do you know? (E.g., a WebQuest, a simulation or role-playing activity.) How might they fit into your categories?
Closure
After class
Reading
Lee, re-visit Ch. 3 (Inquiry), read Ch. 8 (Direct Instruction) & Ch. 12 (Diverse Society)
optional: Hammond & Manfra, 2009
Assignments
WTL
Complete original instructional materials assignment, product #2 (and reflection)
Keep working on other assignments: Curriculum map; fieldwork...remember: If you have opportunities to observe, follow them up, but work through Carla Kologie in A-108
Session 5 - Tuesday, 27 Sep
Before class
Complete the reading.
Complete original instructional material product #2. Don't forget the reflection!
During class (ppt )
Housekeeping
A little re-arranging tonight in the interest of shortening class....
Conceptual work
Opening up history ed--let's do an activity using images from the Looking into the Past group on Flickr (group map).
Wait -- what does history ed mean in the elementary context, anyway? Let's take a look at some of our sample materials from the good folks at Scott Foresman...
What's so hard about history? For now, let's just take a development lens, following Keith Barton's work.
Schema & history ed
Let's first try a little picture-sorting via this Smart Notebook file.
Let's look at someone else's schema of events emerging from the French Revolution.
Pedagogical options, re-framing: trivial / interactive / authentic, doing more methods with images
Hide-and-seek within an image. (The image I used came from the Library of Congress' American Memory project--a great source for getting photos PLUS contextual info. Lots of lesson plans, etc.)
Slow reveal of an image. (Image source is National Archives and Records Administration, child labor activity. Browse their list of activities, heuristics for working with various primary sources.)
Photo analysis (again, image and scaffold are from NARA)
Zoom-in / shifting focus. Note that this requires (a) a very high-quality image, such as a TIFF, and (b) an image viewer that will allow you to move around in the image without too much hassle. I got this TIFF out of the Library of Congress – they often give you a choice of formats, from large / high-res (e.g., TIFF) down to more compact, lower-res (e.g., JPG)
What was authentic, interactive, or trivial about what we just did?
Compare to earlier examples (of assessment, above)
Consider earlier demo lessons – are we receiving thick or thin samples of students' schema?
Connecting to giving-prompting-making
And a peek back into your methods toolbox. BTW, much of tonight's image work could fall into an expanded definition of CONCEPT FORMATION. See a simple definition, see a more extended definition.