Social studies training

Area social studies teachers met at the Northwest Arkansas Education Service Cooperative in Farmington on July 12 for training called “Developing Inquiries in Social Studies.”

The training session was guided by Sarah Pugh-DeWitt, the social studies instructional specialist in the Bentonville School District.

When it comes to learning history in school, let’s be honest here. For some people, the history classes in junior high and high school were fascinating, either because of a very dynamic teacher who made history come alive, or because they simply loved history.

For many other individuals, however, learning history was drudgery. They were not interested in occurrences of 100-200 years ago and they certainly didn’t care about anything that happened in 2000 B.C. They saw no relevance and no connection between history and their current state of affairs. And they had no interest in what appeared to be the pointless activity of memorizing names, dates, or events.

Most social studies teachers are among those who loved history when they were in school. But many of their students are not exactly enamored with it; they just don’t see the point.

To reach those students, social studies teachers are increasing the interest level in history classes by giving learners the opportunity to do research projects or to use historical information to answer questions that are relevant to their lives today.

And that was one of the themes of the July 12 training. The social studies teachers who were present seemed to understand that students are more motivated to learn lessons from history when they are more engaged in applying historic information to the current day.

In short, when students listen passively to a lecture about history every day, they are not as interested as when they are given the chance to use history to address compelling and relevant questions.

In the latter classroom scenario the social studies teacher, rather than simply dispensing information in

a lecture format, helps the students design questions that are intriguing. In Mrs. Pugh-DeWitt’s words, the questions should be “intellectually meaty, worth spending time on, or debatable.”

Guiding students in research projects requires that teachers do things differently, and because it is a departure from some traditional forms of instruction, it can be difficult. (Change can be uncomfortable for anyone, teachers included).

Inquiry-designed instruction requires that teachers allow students some latitude in how they go about finding information to address a question or find solutions to a problem. It may even require that they allow students to pursue their own interests within a unit of study.

This is a departure from the traditional approach, in which social studies teachers are accustomed to covering all the content.

Mrs. Pugh-DeWitt spoke about this.

“Sometimes,” she said, “we [teachers] are our own worst enemy in terms of not giving up content so we can allow our students to explore.”

So true. Teachers today must make every effort to make sure learning is relevant and meaningful to the students. It must be connected to the world in which they live, and that means we must take more time in certain areas of the curriculum, perhaps at the expense of something else in the curriculum.

But the good part is that as student engagement goes up, student achievement will go up as well.

One of the teachers present on July 12 spoke of the benefits of students doing research projects rather than getting all of their information in a classroom lecture. “They are inquisitive enough,” he said, “to really get after it once they get into it. I find they ask more questions when they’re digging into it themselves.”

A school administrator I worked with in recent years often said, “We can’t just teach, test, and hope for the best,” and he’s right.

Schools must make lessons and units of study more interesting to students. That doesn’t mean that they make it easier and it doesn’t mean that the students don’t work hard. It simply means that schools everywhere should make the learning process more engaging.

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