Consider the Following
1. Know your students. We teach students, not content.
2. Design with the developmental needs of the age group you are teaching in mind. If students want to socialize more than anything else, be sure your lessons afford them opportunities to interact with their peers as part of the pedagogy.
3. Consider students' prior knowledge. The best prediction of who will learn the most in your lesson is who already knows the most about the topic you are going to teach. Help everyone have the background information needed to interpret and retain the lesson content by teaching the needed prior knowledge (VISUALS) OR, better yet, figure out how your materials can connect to prior knowledge students already have (student funds of knowledge/interests).
4. Begin with the end in mind: Students who can succeed on meaningful tasks will inherently be more compelled to stay engaged. Success does lead to more success.
5. Balance the use of strategies and time.
- Does your lesson offer students equal time for Reading/Writing/Listening/Speaking?
- Does your lesson allow for some Moving/Creating/Rehearsing/Collaborating?
6. Recognize the nature of specific lesson content.
- Interesting content can and should stand "on it's own."
- Boring (but necessary) content needs to be made fun.
7. Scope and sequence the skills, activities, and objectives.
8. Design for differentiated instruction/universal design. Class is SO much more fun for everyone when no one is bored--or lost.
9. Technology can be the Social Studies teachers' friend.
- Why just talk about it when you can see it?
- Why read a secondary source when students can analyze the primary source?
- Why listen to lectures by you if a brilliant podcast or streamable documentary can be listened to or watched from home?
10. Repetition, rehearsal, and review will solidify student learning. Design classtime to afford for these activities in playful ways to ensure long-term learning.
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How should you approach each discipline in Social Studies? Where can you go for best practices within each discipline?
When you need to get discrete knowledge or skills across to students, what are the most fun, most efficient, and most effective ways to do so?
Students like to connect with one another and they may learn and retain more information when they do. How can you design instruction so that this happens naturally and productively in your Social Studies classroom?
Just for good measure, a catch all for ideas on how to teach Social Studies that might fall into all or none of the categories above!
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