The Final Post

This will be my final post on this blog, as my SSED 307 class is coming to a close. Throughout this class, I have learned so much and I have learned what it truly means to be a meaningful, purposeful, and powerful social studies teacher- which has been the purpose of this blog. As my final post, I want to sum up everything that I have learned this semester and take a look at the many teaching techniques and styles explored throughout this class, highlighting some of the key points.

At the beginning of the semester, we learned the five strands of social studies- history, geography and environmental literacy, civics and government, economics, and culture. As future teachers, we must teach all five of these strands. Then, we discussed how social studies is viewed in the public school system today and this was very shocking to all of us. We learned that schools do not focus on social studies as much or make time for social studies because it is not a tested subject. Even though reading and mathematics dominate the school system because they are tested subjects, social studies is still just as important to teach. We learned that social studies is an essential subject to teach because it prepares students to be active, engaged, and participating citizens of the 21st century.

For the first two weeks of class, we learned about a new way of teaching social studies that we, as a class, had never heard of before. Our professor told us that we had to unlearn the way we were taught social studies in the past, this being a memorization of facts, and relearn this new way of teaching social studies, this being concept-based instruction. Concept-based instruction focuses on the teaching of universal, timeless, abstract, and broad concepts. Concept-based instruction has much more benefit for the students as students are able to learn concepts that can be applied to anything and relate to their lives, versus memorizing facts that they will soon forget. We also learned the building blocks of CBI: facts, topics, concepts, and generalizations.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we broke down concept-based instruction and what it means to teach these concepts in the desire of becoming meaningful, purposeful, and powerful social studies teachers. We learned about generalizations, performance tasks, learning experiences, and guiding questions. Generalizations are sentences that incorporate and relate two or more concepts, and are sentences that the students should be able to understand and possibly derive themselves. Performance tasks are the summative assessments that sum up everything learned in the unit. These performance tasks need to be created before the learning experiences as the learning experiences need to reflect the performance tasks in order to ensure valid assessment. Learning experiences are formative assessments usually that are activities designed to prepare students for the performance tasks. Finally, guiding questions are questions created that you want your students to be able to answer and understand, reflecting your generalizations. These questions can be factual but also need to be conceptual and provocative. Provocative questions result in the highest level of thinking.

During this class, we also learned about the importance of technology integration in the classroom and tools to incorporate this technology. We learned about the SAMR model and TPACK model. The SAMR model shows the different levels of technology integration in the classroom and stands for: Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition. Substitution and augmentation just use technology to support learning, but modification and redefinition transform learning and alter the original task (where true, deep learning takes place). TPACK is a model designed to show what should be implemented in the classroom and stands for: technological, pedagogical, content knowledge. Al three of these things need to be used equally and a successful and intentional teacher should master all three aspects.

Other techniques and areas that we focused on included literacy in the 21st century, the flipped-classroom model, assessment of and for learning, and the NCPTS and their importance. We learned that literacy did not just mean reading and writing but includes environmental, economical, digital etc. The flipped classroom method was a teaching method that we used and describes the flip of a classroom from teaching the content at home and doing the homework in class. We explored the many benefits of the flipped method and got our flipped classroom certification. Assessment of learning describes summative responses (after learning) and assessment for learning describes formative assessments (during learning).  As a class, we examined every NCPTS and understood what was required of teachers to master proficiency in every category.

As I have reflected and debriefed on some of the main techniques, topics, skills, and styles that we have learned this semester, I realize just how far I have actually come and how much I have actually learned in this class. All the things mentioned above all describe and define what it means to be a meaningful, purposeful, and powerful social studies instructor. After this class, I feel like I can be this effective and impactful social studies teacher, and it has been great to be able to share what I have learned in this class with the rest of the world through my blog. I have truly enjoyed this class and have found it so important and essential to my teaching journey. Thank you for reading this blog, and I hope you have learned things as well through the sharing of my posts. Goodbye.

I leave you with a summary of what it means to be a meaningful, purposeful, and powerful social studies instructor, according to NCSS: http://www.socialstudies.org/positions/powerfulandpurposeful