21st Century Social Studies

Beth RatwayKCSS 2009

beth.ratway@learningpt.org

When the question: 'What's new?' is pursued at the expense of all other questions, what follows in its wake is often an endless flood of trivia and fashion. I wish to be

concerned with the question: 'What is best?' for this question cuts deeply, rather than broadly sweeping over everything."

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

MY MANTRA

Who are you

Please introduce yourself:• Name• Where you work• What is your role at work

(teacher, administrator, student etc)

• Why you chose this session?

Our goals

• To think about the purpose of social studies

• To examine a 21st century framework for learning

• To discuss and analyze the critiques and supporters of the work

• To engage in strategies you can use in the classroom

• To learn about some classroom resources

Where are we now?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRBchZLkQR0

What is social studies?

Write down your definition of social studies…

What do our students need to know and be able to do

in the 21st century?

“This is a story about the big public conversation the nation

is not having about education… whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t

think their way through abstract problems, work in

teams, distinguish good formation from bad, or speak

a language other than English.”

How to Build a Student for the 21st Century, TIME Magazine,

December 18, 2006

Overview

9

Current National Debate

10

Core Subjects & 21st Century Themes

Standards & Assessment

Information, Media, and Tech Skills

Curriculum & Instruction

Professional Development

Learning Environments

Learning and Innovation Skills

Life & Career Skills

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

21st Century Skills Maps

• http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/ss_map_11_12_08.pdf

Core Content Maps

The maps are designed to:– Raise awareness about the intersections

between core subjects and 21st century skills

– Provide examples of what it looks like to teach these skills in a core subject classroom

The audience for the maps:– Educators– Administrators– Policymakers

Creativity and Innovation

HS students create a simulation, role play, or webquest on a current or historic event (e.g., global climate change, Battle of the Little Bighorn). Product can be presented to a local school with analysis of most creative and innovative elements in each of the products.

Mike Schlotterback, Fisheye Photography

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

• MS students use online databases (www.census.gov) to determine immigration patterns and compare to changes in community demographics

• HS students use county voting patterns, demographic & socio-economic data from US Census bureau to predict outcomes of upcoming election. Display election projection & supporting information on a digital map. Create a podcast that suggests election strategies that political parties might use for their candidates.

Communication

• MS - Research information on the local implications of a global issue of concern (e.g., child poverty, hunger, homelessness). Students organize their information and a possible solution and write a persuasive letter that is to be proof-read, peer edited, and finally sent via e-mail to a local public official.

Collaboration

• Working in small groups, elementary students encourage and engage other classmates to assist with a group service-learning project. Using digital media, students demonstrate the need to raise the awareness of their classmates on an issue within their community, (e.g., students create a digital poster that persuades classmates to participate in a school fundraising project).

Information Literacy

• Students will examine information about federal tax policy from various sources. Focusing on the federal income tax, excise tax, and other forms of federal taxation, students will compare opinions as presented through several information outlets including popular digital and print media, online communities (e.g., district-approved blogs, online interest groups), and community resources, and articulate why some opinions are more compelling or effective than others.

Media Literacy

• MS students analyze how media format influences media messages.– Use history

websites & primary sources to compare & contrast historic & current presidential election campaigns.

– Hypothesize how 19th & 21st century media influence political campaigns

ICT Literacy• Elementary students examine interaction of

human beings & physical environment, land use, towns, local ecosystem changes (e.g., mining in Lead, SD) – Compare dated aerial photos of the local community

to recent satellite images. – Compare and evaluate the changes.

• HS students use search engines, online data bases, identify and join a list serve to access national, and international media to examine an international conflict. – Examine interactions of ethnic, national, or

cultural influences on the conflict.– Create an online document with hyperlinks to help

MS students understand the conflict.– Embed evaluation questions in the online document

to encourage students’ critical thinking

Current Debate

Two column notesCritics/Supporters

Critics

Common CoreEducation is a crucial resource that determines our children’s future and

our society’s well-being. As America’s citizenry grows more diverse, we must reach out to include all of our children in the promise of America. As the global economy matures, it requires increasing levels of knowledge and deep understanding of the forces that shape our lives and our future. For these reasons, we must intensify our efforts to improve education. This is the historic challenge facing American education in the twenty-first century.

Skills are important and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has identified skills that all children need such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. But P21’s approach to teaching those skills marginalizes knowledge and therefore will deny students the liberal education they need. Cognitive science teaches us that skills and knowledge are interdependent and that possessing a base of knowledge is necessary to the acquisition not only of more knowledge, but also of skills. Skills can neither be taught nor applied effectively without prior knowledge of a wide array of subjects.

Education policy and practice should be based on sound research and informed by an understanding of what has worked and what has failed in the past. Attempts to teach skills apart from knowledge have failed repeatedly over the last century because they do not work. Unless it is fundamentally revised, the program put forth by P21 also will fail. In the meantime, it is undermining the quality of education in America.

RavitchFor over a century we have numbed the brains of teachers

with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills. We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries.

But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.

Until we teach both teachers and students to value knowledge and to love learning, we cannot expect them to use their minds well.

Diane Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and co-chairman of Common Core

FinnThere's nothing new about 21st Century skills. Those

qualities of mind, behavior, temperament and interaction have long been in demand and good schools and teachers have long helped youngsters to acquire them-- in addition to core knowledge and basic skills. Where I fault the P-21 folks is in deflecting attention from the latter to the former and ignoring the painful tradeoffs inherent in a 6 hour school day. I also note that, while traditional knowledge and basic skills are relatively easy to assess (and thus to hold schools and educators accountable for imparting), that's not true of "creaitivity" or "communicating" or "working well with others". I fear that more than a little of the P-21 push is an effort by educators to abjure results-based accountability by changing the emphasis from those things that can be assessed to those that cannot be.

Supporters

KayCertainly the Partnership for 21st Century Skills has experienced

some success to date. Most notably, we have worked with practitioners to create a critical set of 21st century objectives for K-12 education and raised the importance of critical thinking, problem solving and communication skills for every child. In addition, we have elevated the importance of other critical subjects such as global competence, financial literacy and information, media and technology literacy.

Rather, there is still incredibly important work left to do, starting with clearly articulating the relationship of 21st century skills to standards, assessments, curriculum and instruction and profession development. Educators, researchers and other stakeholders agree that we have to intentionally combine knowledge and skills into all aspects of the education system in order to give our students the education they need to thrive in today’s world. Currently 13 states are working toward making this reality a success.

NEAHas the P21 movement succeeded?  It has helped to bring

attention to an essential dimension of quality teaching and learning.  The 21st Century Partnership—of which the NEA is a founding member—has been a consistent reminder that we should not succumb to the drill and kill of a narrow, test-driven curriculum, an unfortunate legacy of No Child Left Behind.  All stakeholders—education reformers, policymakers, business leaders, frontline educators, parents—have an opportunity to work together to continue to encourage positive, timely and necessary change for the nation’s schools.

Along with education leaders across the nation, NEA realizes that we need to make changes in our schools. Schools have to work better for all students, not just some. And changing our schools includes focusing students on learning rich content while mastering critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.  Schools can and should offer that kind of rich education. It has been done, but not systematically and intentionally, nor reflecting the scope of the Partnership vision.

P. Johnson (Intel)The Partnership for 21st Century Skills was created to garner deeper

understanding of and support for the connection of content knowledge and performance skills. Why? Because currently too many of our students are no longer seen as potential winners in a workforce that demands more of them than just factual knowledge. If others truly believe that this work is not important or that the issue is not a significant one – I ask that they please direct me to evidence that proves all of our students are critical thinkers, able to solve complex issues, financially literate, understand and respect diversity, and manage themselves and others while working in team situations. Show me the statistics that prove that any student can step forward and be a future leader. 

 The work of the Partnership is founded on the belief that all students need and deserve both knowledge and accompanying performance skills if they are to be successful citizens in a rapidly changing global society. Over the last decade, our education system has been test-focused and teachers and administrators are under pressure to demonstrate student success on single measures of accountability that do not include or reward application of knowledge to real-life experiences, problem solving or innovation. Intel is collaborating with others to help develop assessments that will be more meaningful measures of a student’s skills, capabilities and content knowledge.

We need to move beyond a decade of singular emphasis on “minimum proficiency” and “adequate progress” in basic skills.  We must have greater hopes and dreams for our youth and move toward a broader and more ambitious set of learning expectations.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ Framework

is a move in the right direction for education…

Structured Academic Controversy (SAC)

• Continuum – Agree/disagree• Prepare statements as common

groups (5 minutes)• Present statements (2 minutes

each side)• Prepare statements for other side

(3 minutes• Present statements (2 minutes

each side)• Find the common ground

Finding the common ground

CONTENT LITERACY

Thinking Like A…

Historian Economist

Psychologist

Behavioral Scientist

Geographer

Political Scientist

Anthropologist

Sociologist

HSI

• Historical Scene Investigation Project

• http://web.wm.edu/hsi/?svr=www

DDG

• Digital Director’s Guild• http://www.ddguild.org/• http://www.digitaldocsinabox.org

/

Econcast

• http://econocast.org/index.htm

What does this look like in WI?

Economic literacy is the ability to identify economic problems,

alternatives, costs, and benefits; analyze the incentives at work in economic situations; examine the

consequences of changes in economic conditions and public policies; collect and organize

economic evidence; and weigh costs against benefits.

Global literacy is the ability to understand and appreciate the

similarities and differences in the customs, values, and beliefs of one's

own culture and the cultures of others and the recognition and

understanding of interrelationships among international organizations,

nation-states, public and private economic entities, sociocultural

groups, and individuals across the globe.

Civic literacy is the ability to understand, analyze and

participate in government and in the community, both globally and

locally and the ability to make decisions that reflect an understanding of historic

implications, the role of leaders and a broader sense of political

awareness

“Stop asking me if we’re almost there!We’re nomads, for crying out loud!”

Next Steps

• What are the steps we need to take to move forward?

Go to the SS Wiki for more information and resources:

http://wisconsinsocialstudies.wikispaces.com/