I realize that we reviewed this topic for practical reasons but I feel it's important to comment on this since I've been thinking about designing my own lessons for students at MHS for the past few days. I know that we cannot plan lessons arbitrarily or assess students for rote learning or what we just think they should know. There's a distinct need to understand what it is you want students to know, find the process of getting there and make sure they know it. I feel that I've had this process drilled into me fairly well at this point and while I definitely have a conceptual grasp of UbD, I still have yet to really have a functional understanding of the process in making a real live lesson plan and seeing its effects firsthand. This seems like a much harder process and one I will only understand through practice, usage and reflection.
That said, this week's class helped distill a few thoughts for me and I think the overarching questions are an important diagnostic to have for ourselves while we design our own lesson and unit plans. Throughout the editing and planning process, we can always go back and be able to ask ourselves those questions. In fact, I've written them down on a desktop sticky note so I can always have them to check on. As important as it is for us to design our own diagnostics for students, we need these diagnostics for ourselves, as well. In proving ourselves to be dynamic within ourselves and toward our students' strengths, self-diagnostics are something that should always be considered while designing a useful lesson plan.
So how do we determine what's useful in social studies? This question kind of gets to the heart of what I think about when I think about social studies and teaching history and social studies as a chosen profession. Why is this important and what do we need to know about it? The simple answer for me is because I have always been interested in it. I get excited about the stories of people who came before us because to me it fills in small parts of a proverbial jigsaw puzzle. To go further, I feel that history education in particular helps inform us about the world around us and what our potential roles can be in this world. It is not only information for the sake of information but knowledge that can be useful about humanity, institutions and essentially why the world is the way it is. I think it's important to understand that nothing is prescribed and that history is not some sort of teleological process or chain of inevitable events. History and the social sciences can inform students that their decisions matter and that they are part of something larger than themselves. So which side of that process do we want to be on? Social studies can help students develop reasoning, research, writing and analytical skills, of course. Those are all incredibly important. However, having an understanding of the world and our place within it is extremely powerful and can act as a positive force in our society.
This is what I'd like my students to eventually understand and articulate in their own way. This may be just a haphazard mission statement for teaching history but I think it's at least partially adequate in having behind my own lesson designs. This is something I'll be working on for awhile, I think but it's as good a place to start as any.
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