Clabough When the Lion Roars Everyone Listens

Scary Good Middle School Social Studies
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56090-288-1
Verlag: Association for Middle Level Education
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Middle school students need meaningful opportunities to explore the world around them by being actively involved in every step of the learning process. An effective social studies curriculum challenges students to think critically about their place in the world and provides for active discussion and exploration of the content through inquiry-based activities. This change to the classroom dynamic holds students accountable for their own learning and equips them with the skills to collaborate with others, both of which are important to their future success.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Clabough, Jeremiah

Leseproben

02 Discovering and Nurturing the Inquiring Spirit of Middle Schoolers In This We Believe: Keys to Educating Young Adolescents, the position paper of AMLE (NMSA, 2010), we are reminded that learning “the right answers” is not enough for contemporary society. Middle school students must be empowered to be “successful in a global society.” This means that students have to become lifelong learners who are able to “apply sophisticated skills in a variety of situations and to solve complex problems individually and in collaboration with others.” The approach to learning that best fits this description is called inquiry. In this chapter, we will look at the importance that inquiry can have in social studies at the middle school level, describe some of the salient features of inquiry, and speak to the development of key inquiry skills. These skills include questioning, hypotheses-making, and drawing conclusions. We also suggest a typology for inquiry. Finally, we will share a series of classroom strategies based on this typology. The Essential Features of Inquiry Martin-Hansen (2002) describes the essential features of inquiry as engaging the learner in scientifically-oriented questions, giving priority to evidence in responding to these questions, formulating explanations based on the evidence, connecting explanations to existing knowledge, and reconciling the explanations to existing knowledge. Stephenson (2007) looks at inquiry from the learners’ points of view. He argues that inquiry involves learners in a series of processes, which we have adapted below: • Tackling real-world questions, issues, and controversies • Developing questioning, research, and communication skills • Solving problems or creating solutions • Collaborating within and beyond the classroom • Developing deep understanding of content knowledge • Participating in the public creation and improvement of ideas and knowledge (Stephenson, 2007, p. 1) Inquiry, once begun, is like an avalanche, growing in size, momentum, and power into something mighty and unstoppable. The best working definition of inquiry has to be based on the critical elements of the process. However, a list of these elements should not be seen as a series of distinctive individual steps. Rather, the analogy that seems most apt is that of a musical melody line mixed with an occasional chord. Each element is a different note on the scale. The melody line leaps back and forth on that scale. Here then are some of the identifiable elements from the authors’ perspectives: • Developing skills in planning and asking insightful, probing questions. • Shifting the role of the teacher from being the major knowledge provider to being a guide. • Developing sensitivity to problems along with the ability to clearly describe and identify them. • Acquiring skills in hunting for, identifying, and weighing and evaluating information for relevancy, importance, accuracy, and pattern. • Building the ability to compare, contrast, and reconcile new learning with past knowledge. • Finding alternative sources to corroborate or contradict hypotheses. • Developing the ability to weigh and compare competing hypotheses. The soul of inquiry is insatiable, intellectual curiosity. That curiosity, in turn, inspires a need to ask questions and solve problems and the unstoppable desire to discover answers and solutions for them. The questions and problems themselves create an ache for better questions and clearer definitions of the problems. At that point, the entire process is so ingrained, fundamental, and strong that there is no force on Earth that can stand in its way. Now if that is not what we want our middle schools to do for our students, what is? Better Questions and Better Questioning Strategies This We Believe (NMSA, 2010) notes that the “Changes in the patterns of thinking become evident in the ideas and questions that middle school students ask about the world and how it functions.” AMLE goes on to point out the importance of the questions students pose to each other and to trusted adults. The teacher’s role is not to be merely a sounding board but to help guide the students. The truth is that middle level students need to be taught how to ask questions that move inquiry forward efficiently and purposefully. This is neither easy to accomplish nor quickly achieved. It takes time and planning. To use questions as a learning tool, students need to develop new skills and more analytical ways of thinking. To become efficient, effective questioners, students need to ask questions that are imaginative and move the inquiry forward. We believe that good questioning strategies have at least five features. The first three of these have to do with the individual questions themselves being appropriate, relevant, and important. All three qualities have to be present in each and every question. The fourth and fifth features involve how the questions relate to one another. Good questioning strategists focus all of their questions on a single purposeful direction and that focus becomes increasingly narrow. One major precept of questioning is that questioning strategies need to be thought out and prepared in advance. This does not mean that there is no room for spur of the moment impromptu questioning. Inspiration is an essential part of a good questioner’s portfolio of skills. Even so, impromptu questions are best formed when the inquirer has filled up his or her mind with information and ideas and something serendipitous that the questioner comes upon triggers a new line of inquiry. Inquiry as Prophecy: Becoming a Good Guesser Students often find it hard to understand exactly what a hypothesis is. In How We Think, the great American educational philosopher, John Dewey, made the curious and oft quoted statement, “A problem well put is half-solved” (Dewey, 1910, p.2). Among the conclusions that can be reached from reading Dewey is that guessing, or drawing hypothetical conclusions to be examined, is an important, if not essential part of the inquiry process. However, Dewey does not want us to limit ourselves to a few hypotheses. He suggests making good guesses, making lots of guesses, making many of these guesses as wild and unusual as possible, and then deferring judgment and decision making until you have as much information and data as possible. The better an inquirer becomes at hypothetical thinking the more likely he or she is to consider all possible solutions to a problem, even the most unlikely. Skill in hypotheses making requires combining prior knowledge, personal experience, broad understanding of how things work, logic, intuition, and openness to serendipity. Practice helps. There is also an element of chance or luck that enters into the picture, whether scientists want to admit it or not. The best hypothesis makers plug in time and effort to the formula. This includes a constant examining of evidence and past experience. To help us understand one way that this works, let us look at an example. Suppose I want to know why some urban areas have grown rapidly and regularly while others have grown sporadically or not at all. I might hypothesize that transportation was a factor and look for major railroad lines, highway crossings, and locations where cities are on rivers or are major ports. Other possible factors might be natural resources in the area, events in history like gold strikes, and manufacturing plants being founded. Another source of hypotheses might be to look at analogies like fads and trends or the transforming power of inventions. Looking at individual cities in order to examine how their history has affected their growth might help identify some possibilities. Factors such as climate and inventions (air conditioning or faster and cheaper travel) should also be considered. Somewhere in the process, I might particularly attune myself to making far-fetched guesses like sudden climate change and increases in early retirement or life expectancy. The “Smoke and Mirrors” of Inquiry Inquiry is both problem centered and evidence based. This dovetails beautifully with several of the goals of middle level education as outlined in This We Believe (NMSA, 2010). These goals include developing the abilities to think rationally, to ask relevant and significant questions, to independently gather, access, and interpret information, and to use digital tools to explore, communicate, and elaborate. Not coincidently this dovetails with the vision shared by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) in its C3 Framework related to inquiry-based teaching (NCSS, 2013). Inquiry is not a simple process. Inquiry means living in that uncomfortable space where we do not know the answers (Quillen, 2013). There are definitive elements in inquiry that may be identified and, to some degree, described. However, to try to find a single consistent order in which these elements may be arranged to solve problems is like trying to organize smoke. Any attempt to teach such an order to middle school students only impedes their understanding. That was exactly what many social science teachers did in the 1970s and 1980s...