Tonight's class began with a journal question from
Daily Spark. We discussed the current ways of creating a more chivalrous society. From practicing good karma (& '
carma') to showing respect for the oldest and youngest members of our communities we found many aspects of everyday life that could use a good dose of thoughtfulness. This lead in to our discussion of social skills, ethics and civics in our social studies classrooms. As we've moved from homes with a parent as full-time caregiver, to households with two working parents or a single parent, the burden of social skills training has shifted towards the classroom. We can lead by example, creating classrooms that promote problem solving skills, treating each other with respect and operate with clear expectations and goals.
We tackled the large question, "What is social studies?" while examining
Inspiration and working with the Taba Teaching strategy. Our brainstorming session created an exhausting list of things we think of when we hear the words, "Social Studies". Our responses ranged from history, political science, and economics to things like sociology, dance, culture, and war. We then began to categorize them in our web, adding color coding and related images.
Reflecting back on our own social studies memories yielded very meaningful and positive learning experiences as well as negative or less productive studies. Many remarked on the power of project based learning and how that made learning more meaningful. With this we examined units that we can still remember many years later. Classrooms that were student centered and responsive in nature stood out. Times when we were problem solvers seeking out our own information and connecting it to our prior knowledge made information stick. In this discussion we also noted the importance of social responsibility in the classroom and the power of utilizing our resources of our extremely historical geographic location. Those classes that left us with negative feelings were lacking in personal connection and featured a lot of rote memorization and little explanation or depth to the lessons.
