Nancy P. Gallavan

Eight Types of Graphic Organizers for Empowering Social Studies Students and Teachers

Graphic organizers offer visual models that equip teachers and students with tools, concepts, and language to organize, understand, and apply information. Many teachers, concerned that social studies tends to overwhelm students, feel social studies is viewed as a complex and confusing subject unrelated to the contemporary world. Graphic organizers help students sort, show relationships, make meaning, and manage data quickly and easily before, during, and after reading and discussion. They are useful for reading difficult material, highlighting information, valuing cultural diversity, meeting needs of special populations, and supporting language learning. In this article, the authors present eight types of graphic organizers with descriptions, vocabulary, and examples applicable to citizenship and government, economics, geography, and history in pre-K-12 settings. Teachers should modify and extend the examples so learning is student centered, student directed, developmentally appropriate, active, challenging, and productive.

Constructing Rubrics and Assessing Progress Collaboratively with Social Studies Students.

When social studies students have a role in the processes of designing assignments, constructing rubrics, and conducting assessments, they participate in authentic democratic principles relative to their own learning. When given voice, choice, and ownership in their education, social studies students gain opportunities to strengthen their depth of engagement, expand their breadth of responsibility, and increase their degree of satisfaction. Concomitantly, incorporating genuine collaboration helps social studies teachers enhance their teaching effectiveness and improve their overall classroom assessment systems. Ultimately, these techniques help social studies teachers empower their students to live the social studies they are learning in class and apply the concepts to the contexts of their lives. Thus, the learning process becomes more meaningful, productive, and rewarding.

After the Reading Assignment: Strategies for Leading Student-Centered Classroom Conversations

NANCY P. GAUAVAN is an associate professor of teacher education at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she specializes in social studies and multicultural education. She serves on the editorial boards of Theory and Research for Social Education, Multicultural Perspectives, and Annual Editions in Multicultural Education. ELLEN KOiTLER is a lecturer in secondary education at California State UniversityFullerton. She is the co-author of three books: Children with Limited English: Teaching Strategies for the Regular Classroom (2002), Counseling Skills for Teachers (2000), and Secrets for Secondary School Teachers: How to Succeed in Your First Year (1998). cussions about an assigned text. With student-centered responses, teachers can engage learners in meaningful classroom conversations that improve enduring comprehension and academic achievement. To engage students in learning experiences that are active, challenging, integrative, and value based (NCSS 1994, 11-12), teachers need a variety of dynamic teaching strategies. According to researchers, social studies lessons that integrate innovative literacy tools increase students’ attentiveness, critical thinking, and intellectual skills (Risinger 1987). In this article, we present eight strategies that integrate social studies and literacy by connecting assigned readings to students’ contemporary knowledge and concerns. Each strategy supports national and state social studies standards and frameworks, can be easily adapted across the preK-12 curricula, and can be readily incorporated into current instructional practices. The strategies stimulate social studies classroom discussions through studentcentered speaking and writing responses. Each strategy begins with a reading assignment and is followed by an activity that connects students to the reading a second time by requiring them to go beyond comprehension as they process what they have derived from the text. The repetition serves as a reinforcement to increase retention and provides a structure for students to personalize the information and engage cooperatively in higher levels of thinking. The strategies prepare students for any culminating activity that the teacher may plan for a particular unit. In the eight strategies, the students can work individually, in a small group, with the whole class, or in a combination of the three.

Advancing Social Studies Learning for the 21st Century with Divergent Thinking

Social studies teachers of all grade levels are responsible for (a) connecting students with standards-based content, (b) engaging students in their own learning, (c) expanding students’ levels of understanding by co-constructing new knowledge, (d) motivating students to express and exchange ideas with one another, and (e) incorporating social studies across the curriculum and into their students’ lives. To achieve powerful learning that is meaningful, active, challenging, valued and integrative as well as to demonstrate 21st Century Skills more efficiently and effectively, social studies teachers are urged to feature divergent thinking. Using divergent thinking, students deconstruct a topic into parts and then generate as many creative, original, and varied productions as possible. This article provides ten classroom-tested strategies with specific examples in civics, economics, geography, and history that can be easily adapted along with guidelines and checklists for classroom implementation. Additionally, ten benefits of implementing divergent thinking strategies that make learning informative, critical, creative, and rewarding are described.

Connecting Content, Context, and Communication in a Sixth-Grade Social Studies Class through Political Cartoons.

Sixth-grade students are challenged in understanding social studies content relevant to particular contexts, then connecting the content and context to their contemporary lives while communicating new knowledge to peers and teachers. Using political cartoons published after September 11, 2001, one sixth-grade social studies teacher designed probing questions and developed meaningful learning experiences relating historical events to current concerns of the students supplementing their curriculum and textbook. Through verbal and written interactions, the students demonstrated in-depth understanding of September 11, 2001, and consequential global ramifications. Subsequently, this teacher used the same strategy to engage learners in additional historical events effectively integrating social studies and literacy to introduce conflict analysis, increase critical thinking, expand text connections, and enhance literacy skills.

Getting on the Same Page: Expanding Student Support Services to Increase Candidate Success and Educator Accountability.

Today’s teacher candidates frequently exhibit confusion and express discouragement while navigating the expectations of their educational journeys and career goals. Characteristically, many candidates tend to be first-generation college students limited in universal knowledge, global travels, diverse experiences, and multiple perspectives. Contemporary candidates continue to live at or near home, work full- or part-time, and intend to seek teaching positions in their local communities. Overall, they appear restricted in individual ingenuity and academic acumen contributing to personal, professional, and pedagogical competence and confidence. Thus, faculty specializing in middle and secondary education customized a College of Education student support system to assist their candidates. This article describes the department services, candidate interactions, faculty growth, and program benefits through narrative enquiry addressing thematic, structural, dialogic, and visual aspects of their student support services and educator accountability.

Cultural Competence and the Recursive Nature of Conscientization

The journey to cultural competence encompasses traveling an ever-expanding path increasing in size with the addition of each of five stages of development: conscientization, self-assessment, self-efficacy, agency, and, finally, critical consciousness as the unifying body within the educational enterprise. The increasing stages create a spiral following the Fibonacci sequence enveloping one another throughout the journey. In this study, one teacher educator conducted a self-study of her cultural competence from which recommendations were revealed (1) cultural competence is an ongoing transformational journey; (2) teacher and leadership educators benefit from insights for infusing the possibilities and parameters associated with cultural competence with their candidates; (3) school leaders become valuable conduits for establishing and reinforcing the responsibility for cultural competence within the profession; (4) professional developers glean guidance for supporting and advancing the levels of cultural competence with classroom teachers; and (5) all educators grow exponentially by reexamining their own cultural competence recursively for modeling and ensuring the presence and power of cultural competence as process and product.

Visualizing the Life and Legacy of Henry VIII: Guiding Students with Eight Types of Graphic Organizers

Delving into the life and legacy of Henry VIII is both complex and captivating. People seem compelled to learn more abut his critical contributions and controversial conduct that range from the significant to the scandalous. Reflecting on the history of the world would be incomplete without investigating the events and escapades associated with Henry VIII, whose impact of 500 years ago resonates through todays society and into the future through literature, music, politics, and religion. To view the many facets of Henry VIII, classroom teachers and their students are encouraged to use graphic organizers to provide easy-to-understand visualizations. Eight types of graphic organizers engage learners in student-centered activities that help students make meaning from and show relationships among the diverse attributes of Henry VIII. When combined, the eight graphic organizers equip learners with valuable tools to construct a holistic examination about the history of Henry VIII.

Four Facets of Classroom Assessments: Obstacles, Obligations, Outcomes, and Opportunities

Today’s classroom teachers are expected to optimize the teaching, learning, and schooling so the educational experience is learner centered, standards based, achievement oriented, data driven, and culturally competent. These expectations require teachers to intensify their awareness, expand their understanding, reconfigure their techniques, and modify their outlooks related to classroom assessments. As teachers begin to shift their approaches so their classroom assessments become the focus on their practices and assessments are more closely aligned with the curriculum and instruction, teachers encounter challenges and rewards. This article describes four facets of classroom assessments—obstacles, obligations, outcomes, and opportunities—and the characteristics of each facet identified by teacher educators specializing in classroom assessments. The findings of this research make visible the value of examining the presence and power of each facet as individual and integrated influences on teacher self-efficacy, emphasizing benefits for classroom teachers and teacher candidates in their transformation to develop classroom assessments that matter.

Section IV. Global Connections

Our contemporary global society appears to have few boundaries; information is sent and received almost spontaneously to seemingly unlimited numbers of people around the world. Most countries have open access, eager for world travelers and new residents. Opportunities to learn about one another, experience cross-cultural interactions, and expand one’s horizons become quicker and easier every day. Concomitantly, today’s interdependent global society has become more closely connected and caring. Weather events, economic markets, government decisions, and so forth in one part of the world immediately affect the physical, human, and cultural geography in the rest of the world. As attention to an issue increases, so do people’s interests and participation. Many of today’s young people see themselves as world citizens and have developed a much broader global perspective than their parents and teachers. From research conducted in 2008 (Gallavan), a teacher candidate reported that