1. Mastering the Common Core
A Social-Studies Centered Approach

2. Today’s Schedule Time Activity 8:30 – 9:30
Introduction to the Common Core
9:30 – 9:45
Break
9:45 – 10:45
The Common Core Learning Framework
10:45 – 11:00
11:00 – 12:00
Strategy #1 – Bulls Eye
12:00 – 12:45
Lunch
12:45 – 1:30
Strategy #2 - ARTIST
1:30 – 1:45
1:45 – 2:30
Strategy #3 – Dueling Documents

3. Our Goals For Today
Examine the Common Core and where Social Studies fits into the grand scheme.
Discuss the thinking and literacy skills necessary to address the Common Core.
Analyze the Common Core Learning Framework © as a way to implement literacy and thinking skills
Utilize three discreet teaching strategies for implementing Common Core compliant lessons in the classroom
One is student-based
One is teacher-based
One is a collaborative effort

4. What is Common Core?
An effort by 48 states to create the next-generation of K-12 standards in Literacy and Math.
Designed to ensure that students are college and career-ready by the end of high school.
The focus is on learning expectations.
The standards are research-based and aligned with current and future college and work expectations.

5. What is Common Core?
Designed to provide a consistent and clear understanding of what students are expected to learn and be able to do.
Are rigorous and relevant to the real world in terms of content knowledge and skills.
In essence students will be required to read, think, and express themselves in written form.

6. Where Social Studies Fits?
Teachers use content expertise and skills to help students meet the challenges of reading, synthesizing and writing.
Focus on reading comprehension and analysis of increasingly complex informational texts.
Students must be able to:
Read, comprehend, and analyze documents
Compare and contrast documents
Identify common thematic threads
Synthesize information and express thought in writing

7. What We Can Do In setting up our courses:
Use as many exemplar documents as is possible
Consistently use primary and outside secondary sources
Focus on developing historical skills
In our lessons:
Regularly require the analysis and interpretation of various types of sources
Teach with conceptual understanding as a key outcome of instruction
Systematically teach and embed analytical and interpretive skills in each lesson
For information on Exemplar Texts and Documents for Social Studies, please see:

8. Reference Material
Combines thinking like a historian, and reading like a historian to meet the Common Core State Standards.
What I am going to do today is based on part of the information in the book.

9. Skills
Two kinds that we need to be concerned with in the Social Studies classroom:
Content Literacy
Historical Thinking
The Content Literacy skills and Historical Thinking skills synergistically help students learn, assimilate, and synthesize the information that they are taught

10. Content Literacy Skills
Contextualization
Establishing time, scope and Sequence
Understanding the big picture
Establishing the values and beliefs of the time
Craft and Structure
Identifying and defining key terms
Determining the main idea
Identifying the Author’s bias or point of view
Key Ideas and Details
Assessing the reliability of the information
Evaluation of argument and reasoning
Comparing ideas within and across texts
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
Analysis of multiple sources and perspectives
Understanding multiple perspectives
Assessing different interpretations over time
These skills coincide TREMENDOUSLY with thinking like a historian!

11. Historical Thinking The Common Core Standards require students to:
Analyze documents
Compare and Contrast multiple documents
Interpret documents and readings
Synthesize the information into a written product
Thinking Like a Historian provides students with many of the discreet skills that are absolutely necessary to successfully navigate the requirements mandated by the Common Core Standards

12. Richard Hofstadter
…what animates the most feverishly committed historians is that our continual rediscovery of the complexity of the social interests, the variety of roles and the motives of political leaders, the unintended consequences of political actions … may give us not only a keener sense of the structural complexity of our society in the past but also a sense of the moral complexity …
Wood, Gordon (2008). The Purpose of the Past. New York, New York. Penguin Press.

13. Gordon S. Wood
We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it.
What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we became what we are.
Wood, Gordon (2008). The Purpose of the Past. New York, New York. Penguin Press.

14. Building Step by Step
The ten skills are divided into three major steps or tiers
Each tier serves as a foundation for those that come afterward
The tiers build from the broadest and more general to the more specific

15. A Scaffolded Approach Tier 3 Context and Interpretation of the Past
Analyzing and Evaluating Historical Material
Tier 1
Building a Foundation to Acquire Historical Knowledge
A Scaffolded Approach

16. The History Jigsaw
Where do the pieces fit?

17. Tier 1
Tier 1
Building a Foundation to Acquire Historical Knowledge

18. Seeing the BIG Picture of History
Establishing time, scope, and sequence in which the events of an era take place
Establishing the location at which events happened
Associated events with contemporary actions throughout the world

19. Determining the Main Idea
Eliminate details and information that is non-essential
Establish the crucial elements of events, documents, or other material

20. Avoid Historical Presentism
Establishing the values and beliefs of the time as a lens to analyze the past
Using the values of the time to analyze historical meaning
Compare and contrast the values of the past with those of the present

21. Bias and Reliability of Sources
Determination of bias and unique point of view of historical sources
Establishing and assess the degree of reliability of historical sources

22. Tier 2 Tier 2 Analyzing and Evaluating Historical Material Tier 1
Building a Foundation to Acquire Historical Knowledge

23. Establish a Personal Connection to the Past
Seek and utilize personal or local connections to history whenever possible
Seeing history as the story of people and their voice rather than dry and disconnected events

24. Analyzing Causation and Consequence
Studying the differences between single-causation and multi-causation of the events of the past
Assessing the degree of causation
Impact of the consequences of events and decisions of the past, including those that were desired, and those that were unintended

25. Analyzing Change throughout the Past
Determination of different types of change that took place in the past, including political, economic, and social
Analysis of the impact of the different types of change at the time
Examine the impact of change across periods of time

26. Tier 3 Tier 3 Context and Interpretation of the Past Tier 2
Analyzing and Evaluating Historical Material
Tier 1
Building a Foundation to Acquire Historical Knowledge

27. Utilizing Historiographical Approaches
Examining the differing interpretations of historical events that have been developed in the past
Compare and contrast the differing interpretations of historical events
Evaluating the accuracy of current and previous schools of historical interpretation to develop a personal philosophy of the past

28. Using Counterfactual Arguments
Utilizing counterfactual arguments to deepen student understanding of specific episodes of history
Developing carefully constructed series of “what if?” questions to guide students through alternate historical outcomes

29. Understanding History through common Themes and Ideas
Establishment of the essential themes of history and determination of their presence
Foundations of Freedom
Creation of an American Culture
Conflict and Compromise
Political and Social Movements
America on the World Stage
Analysis of the essential themes in different periods of history and across history

30. Problems With Trying to Think Like a Historian
Roadblocks to Building Student Understanding

31. Historical Thinking is Unnatural
Goes against the grain of the way that we ordinarily think
We are taught to see a harmony between past and present
The next slides are an example of how we are taught to see the harmony between the past and the present.
Yerxa, Donald (Ed.). (2008). Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

39. Thinking Historically is Foreign
Too many students see the study of history as amassing information and not as a way of thinking or being.
Many teachers continue to treat History as a compilation of facts, dates, events, and people
Because that is the way they were trained
Yerxa, Donald (Ed.). (2008). Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

40. Thinking Historically is Hard
Historical reasoning should create a kind of caution where the mind does not automatically leap to conclusions or emotional reactions
Have to get rid of the notion of a fundamental, timeless past
Must focus on context, change, continuity, and meaning
Yerxa, Donald (Ed.). (2008). Historical Thinking: Historians in Conversation. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

41. So What?
The focus on thinking skills is a shift from the way that a lot of instruction is focused.
Failing to focus on essential understandings usually results in focusing on fact-based outcomes.
Lack of skills emphasis combined with fact-based instruction leads to an inability to address the requirements of the Common Core assessments.
A skills-based, student-centered approach will result in higher level thinking and the ability to address the Common Core assessments.
McCoy, J.D., & Ketterlin-Geller, L.R. (2004). Rethinking Instructional Delivery for Diverse Student Populations: Serving All Learners with Concept-Based Instruction. Intervention in School and Clinic, 40(2).