Let's face facts: social studies has an image problem. I can count at least half a dozen times I've attended PD where the old "Saturday Night Live" skit with Jerry Seinfeld playing the stereotypical history teacher is trotted out. Even though it's a parody of our work, it also resonates with mainstream perceptions. When I tell people what I do, they frequently respond by telling me how much they hated their history classes— memorizing all those names and dates and enduring lectures and questions from the end of the chapter.
Yet, in an increasingly globalized society, social studies matters more than ever. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, himself a former social studies teacher, said, "It is no exaggeration to say that the future of this fragile but essential thing called democracy rests in no small part on those who teach it, explain it …" (2011, para. 85). For the good of our democratic society, we need to fix social studies' image problem, and quickly.
According to the National Council for Social Studies, a great social studies education "engage(s) students with significant ideas, and encourages them to connect what they are learning … and to apply that learning to authentic situations" (2008).
The idea that authentic experiences in social studies are important isn't a new one. In an ASCD Educational Leadership article published in 1993, Linda Biemer wrote,
<P STYLE="normal">Authentic learning and assessment are highly compatible with the nature and purpose of social studies. Adults use the intellectual skills that social studies encompasses in their daily lives. Children, too, want real-world activities that enable them to influence the world that they will inherit (para. 8).
So why aren't we all making social studies instruction more authentic? For one, high-stakes testing and a dizzying array of standards (like those we have in Texas) drain teachers' time and attention. A deeper issue is that many people don't know what authentic social studies education looks like. In mathematics, students can use their skills to solve real-world problems. In language arts, students can write like "real" authors. In science, students recreate laboratory settings. What can students do in social studies?
The work of professionals in social studies–related fields is to gather information from a variety of sources; analyze, aggregate, and interpret it; and then disseminate their finished products to a variety of audiences. How can we help students improve their ability to use analysis and interpretation skills to gather information? One of the quickest ways is to improve questioning techniques.
John Hattie classifies skillful questioning as being in the "zone of desired effects," meaning that doing this regularly and well will help students gain more than a year's worth of growth in a single year. He recognizes that teachers ask questions all day; it's one of the primary things teachers do. However, he differentiates among the effects of different types of questions. In other words, "surface-level questions can enhance surface knowing and higher-order questions can enhance deeper understanding." (Hattie, 2009, p. 182)
Getting to deeper thinking in social studies is simple. If you want your students to think like historians (or like geographers, economists, policy makers, sociologists, archaeologists, and so on), then ask them authentic questions with which these professionals might grapple. These authentic questions are higher-order by nature, provoke deep thought, and pique curiosity. Here's an example:
Subject: World History
Topic: Worlds Collide—European Exploration and Colonization of the America
Authentic Questioning in Social Studies-table
Typical Social Studies Questions | Authentic Social Studies Questions |
|---|---|
| "Who was Hernán Cortés? What did he accomplish? What is the significance of the following years: 1492? 1517? What factors led to European dominance in the New World? Define encomienda." | "What do we know about the effects of exploration and colonization on the Americas? How do we know what we know? Why does this topic matter? What changed for Europeans, Indigenous Americans, and Africans after exploration and colonization? What stayed the same? If Columbus had never found the New World, how would life be different now? Who are the heroes and villains in this story?" |
Coming up with these questions on the spot isn't easy. If you Google "question stems," you'll get hundreds of results with dozens of different lists matching this taxonomy or that. The problem with all of them is that they're typically three to four pages long, printed in tiny font, and too broad to be of use in the immediacy of the classroom. These are fine for poring over in PLCs or referencing when writing lesson plans, but when a teacher is live in front of students, a handful of content-specific, open-ended questions is a better reference.
Teachers need to selectively edit reference sheets and customize them to their own needs. The following shows a handout I created that includes stems targeted toward different categories of social studies content—geography and culture, the past and the present, government and economics, society and the future, and overarching stems that have broader appeal.
Figure
Incorporating project-based, in-depth, authentic experiences for students is an ambitious goal for any social studies educator, but through adjusting questioning techniques, teachers can encourage more authentic thinking in their classes every day.