I am liking this book more and more.
Schmoker makes a lot of great points about social studies instruction and continues his less is more philosophy in this chapter. While the chapter focuses on social studies, any subject area could be substituted. Schmoker says literacy is the key to effective social studies instruction (as well as all instruction, in my opinion). He discusses the fact that history should be taught with a heavy focus on making connections and that both literature and history help us to understand ourselves better by understanding the influences around us.
Social studies as well as other content areas are extremely important because they are literacy in use. In language arts and reading classes, the students get the fundamentals and strategies, but literacy is at the core of the other subjects. The same strategies and basics need to be discussed, modeled and implemented to get further into the content.
Social studies is extremely important because it is a place where students have many opportunities to argue and dissect written and spoken arguments. Students need more reading, discussion, analysis, writing. Often in content area classes there are "too many activities to keep students engaged, but illiterate." (p. 135) I feel that if we focus more on less standards, going deeper into the few standards we decide upon, we will eliminate the possibility for that problem and more authentic assignments and more authentic literacy will take place. Students would be given more opportunities to analyze and argue through writing and discussion, which would increase more knowledge as well as modeling of this by reading more.
Other things worth mentioning:
On page 138, Schmokers gives a detailed process for reducing standards. I like this approach much better than the process outlined yesterday at the 90/90/90 conference by Cathy Lassier.
There are great examples on pages 140-161 of task, text, and talk. I think it would be beneficial for our staff to read certain chapters (language arts, chp 4, social studies, chp 5, etc) and discuss them in their departments (with our DRT team??).
There are good ideas of a scaled back rubric for social studies on page 145. I think there could be a place for this, but I do think we should look closely at the rubric from Lead and Learn they presented on Wednesday as a building-wide rubric.
Modeling, modeling, modeling. Again Schmoker mentions the importance of modeling and explicit examples of expected tasks.
My favorite quote from the chapter is on page 153: "To those who say there isn't time, I can only say: Yes, there is." Perhaps they are trying to teach too many standards, or assign too much busy work or ineffective tasks.
