Factors to consider when teaching Social Studies

In order to foster civic competency, social studies integrates the social sciences and humanities. The social studies curriculum in schools offers coordinated, systematic study that incorporates relevant material from the humanities, mathematics, and natural sciences as well as the following academic fields: anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology.

The main goal of social studies is to support young people in becoming citizens of a multicultural, democratic society who can reason and make decisions for the common good in a globally interdependent society.

Teachers are finding it hard to teach social studies especially when they’re beginners. With this, teachers should look over some factors that are important when teaching social studies, and one of these is the learning preferences of the learners. Learning preferences describe how much a learner favors some forms of education over others, for example watching a video online as opposed to receiving instruction in person. They differ from learning styles in that they are not predicated on the idea that a student must receive all of their instruction through one sense—visual, aural, or kinesthetic—in order to learn effectively. Teachers can observe their learners first before discussion, they can also conduct simple and quick surveys for the learners.

Teachers should also consider the level of difficulty of the lesson. Teachers will have a hint if the topic for the day is not really within the learners range of learning. Given this, if teachers are aware that the lesson is kind of difficult for the learners, then they can find different learning strategies to make the topic seem easier.

Teaching social studies is really not that easy and most teachers can testify to that. Effective teachers however, will not easily give up especially when it comes to delivering knowledge to the learners.(