TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ARTS & HUMANITIES
PROGRAM IN SOCIAL STUDIES
This course will give you an opportunity to begin considering, analyzing, and critically examining the “nuts and bolts” of your teaching career. It provides an introduction to some of the key teaching methods utilized in social studies classrooms, providing in class modeling of and discussion about these methods. The course is organized around the following topics:
- what it means to teach and learn social studies;
- what robust and rigorous learning looks like;
- how we decide what to teach;
- models of disciplinary, issues-centered, and interdisciplinary lessons, and
- how to assess student learning.
The objectives for this course are twofold: first, to provide you with practical knowledge and skills that will help you teach on a daily basis and second, to present you with a theoretical framework behind progressive social education so that you can develop effective curriculum and lessons and focus on the “big picture.” The struggle between the practical and the theoretical is difficult, although it’s not one that’s simply a dichotomous relationship. They overlap in myriad ways. This course, then, will force participants to think about the ways in which practical teaching methods and theoretical frameworks for teaching intersect and influence each other.
To achieve our goals for this class, this fall we will:
- explore a variety of instructional techniques, which will include in-depth modeling and debrief sessions for each class meeting;
- become proficient at lesson and unit planning using the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework;
- examine and analyze the ways in which constructivist learning occurs;
- define, discuss, contrast, and analyze the New York State and National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) curricular frameworks and standards;
- define, discuss, contrast, and analyze the Common Core State Standards, and
- compare different forms of assessment, giving particular attention to inquiry learning and alternative assessment.
Effective teaching involves critical reflection on what to teach and how to teach to the needs of one’s students. My goal is not to mold you into “perfect teachers”; instead, this course offers you various frameworks and methods of instruction to encourage you to constantly reflect on your teaching practice. In this way, you will continually improve your teaching while remaining lifelong learners.
I will also be using methods that, at times, seem somewhat forced. The nature of this course dictates this, as my goal is to expose you to a wide-range of methods over the course of a few number of weeks. For this reason, I don’t promise “perfect” lessons, although I challenge you to ask questions about why I did something the way I did.