If you’ve been watching the 8th-grade Social Studies STAAR results for the last few years, you already know the story: the line is flat. Not collapsing, not climbing — flat. And flat is its own kind of frustrating, because it’s the result you get when a lot of real effort goes in and nothing comes out the other side.

I dug into three years of statewide results alongside the redesigned test itself to figure out why. The short version: the scores aren’t stuck because kids don’t know enough history. They’re stuck because the test stopped rewarding knowing history and started rewarding reasoning over sources — and most instruction hasn’t made the same shift. I’ve spent years training Social Studies teachers and consulting in classrooms, and this is the gap I keep seeing.

The problem in one picture

Across the state, the average scale score moved about nine points over three years. On a scale where district scores spread out by more than 200 points, that’s noise, not progress. Underneath the flat average, districts rose and fell in almost equal numbers — a coin flip that cancels itself out. There’s plenty of motion; there’s just no shared direction. High performing districts dropped and lower performing districts grew… leaving flat results statewide.

Meanwhile, the redesigned test tells you exactly where students are losing ground. On the foundational, most heavily weighted standards — the causes of the American Revolution, unalienable rights, the Bill of Rights, core constitutional principles — students are answering correctly only 15 to 30 percent of the time. Those aren’t trivia items. They’re the load-bearing walls of the entire course. When the foundation sits at one-in-five, there’s a ceiling on everything built above it.

So why isn’t more teaching fixing it? Because of what the test now asks students to do. Here are the two conclusions I keep coming back to — the ones that follow most directly from the data, and that shape how I think every 8th-grade course should be built.

Conclusion 1: Build the course around source analysis, not content delivery

The items on this test are not recall questions. They live at Depth of Knowledge levels 2 and 3: students have to interpret primary documents, figure out where a principle actually comes from (is this Marbury v. Madison or the Bill of Rights?), and reason through cause and effect. A student who memorized that the cotton gin existed still can’t answer an item asking them to analyze its effects.

That gap is the whole problem in miniature. “Knowing the content” and “passing the item” have become two different targets. Class time spent on recall — timelines, vocabulary lists, lectures students copy down — builds the first target and barely touches the second. The knowledge doesn’t transfer to a test built on reasoning, so the effort is real but the score stays flat.

What transfers is practice that looks like the test. That means daily work with primary sources and two relentless questions: What does this show? Why does it matter? Put a primary source in front of students, ask them to say what it tells us and why it’s significant, and do it often enough that analysis becomes a habit rather than an event. The content still matters — but it should arrive through sources students reason about, not in lectures they memorize and a test they then reason on cold.

Conclusion 2: Treat reading proficiency as part of the Social Studies plan

There’s a second bottleneck hiding underneath the first, and it’s easy to misread as a history problem when it isn’t one.

These items are reading-heavy and source-heavy. To answer them, a student first has to decode dense stimulus text and unpack academic vocabulary — before any historical thinking even begins. That means a meaningful chunk of the social studies score is gated by reading ability. For your lower-performing students especially, the thing standing between them and a correct answer may not be that they don’t know the history. It may be that they can’t get through the passage.

If that’s true, then treating a flat Social Studies score as purely a content problem will keep producing flat results, because you’re solving the wrong problem. The more productive move is focus on content reading instruction in your own classroom. Students need explicit work on academic vocabulary, the specific language of sourcing and documents, and the plain reading stamina it takes to work through a dense primary or secondary source without giving up. Social Studies and reading aren’t separate projects on this test. The score lives at their intersection.

How we built socialstudies+ around this

Everything above is the reason Social Studies+ exists. When Jodi and I built the program — a partnership between Social Studies Success® and lead4ward, designed for the redesigned 8th-grade course — we didn’t organize it around covering content faster. We organized it around the two things the test actually rewards.

Take one of our lessons on the Declaration of Independence. It doesn’t ask students to memorize a date and move on. It opens by having them analyze two period paintings, then walks them through the document itself in six primary-source excerpts they have to read and reason about, returning again and again to what does this show, and why does it matter? It closes with a short constructed-response task scored on a two-part rubric — one point for explaining the idea, one point for explaining why it mattered. That’s the exact move students lose points on when they answer only half of a two-part STAAR item. We make them rehearse it.

The same lesson treats reading as part of Social Studies rather than someone else’s job. It front-loads the academic vocabulary the document depends on — grievance, consent, tyranny, unalienable rights — builds in guided reading and structured partner talk, and provides read-aloud supports for students who can’t yet decode dense founding-era language on their own. That’s the bottleneck we keep coming back to: a student who understands the history but can’t get through the passage looks, on a test score, exactly like a student who doesn’t know the content. We design so that reading is scaffolded, not assumed.

I want to be straight about evidence, because this whole post is built on reading data honestly. Across campuses that used the program over multiple years, the most encouraging signal is at the Meets level — the deeper-learning indicator — where the cohort moved up over two years, with a number of campuses posting sizable gains. What I’ll say is narrower and, I think, more useful: the test changed, and these materials are built for the test it became.

The bottom line

The flat line isn’t a mystery and it isn’t a verdict on anyone’s effort. It’s what you’d predict from a redesigned test that rewards reasoning over sources, layered on instruction still organized around delivering and recalling content, layered on reading demands we haven’t fully accounted for.

The encouraging part: both fixes are within reach and neither requires new content. Teach students to reason over documents the way the test asks them to, and make sure they can actually read the documents in the first place. Move those two things, and the line that’s been flat for years finally has somewhere to go.

Check out socialstudies+ here, and if you are interested in short online PD sessions, you can find them here.

The post The Stagnant STAAR – Why Your Test Scores Aren’t Moving appeared first on Social Studies Success.

There’s a seductive logic to putting an AI in front of a history class. History, the thinking goes, is mostly facts—dates, names, treaties, battles—and an AI can recall more facts than any human who ever lived, instantly, patiently, and without ever losing its temper at the back row. Why pay a salary when a chatbot can answer every question about the French Revolution before the bell rings? Why staff a classroom with an expert when you can just tell your student to click “Next”?

The problem is that this logic misunderstands what history is, what teaching is, and what AI actually does. And we are not proposing this experiment in a vacuum. We’ve spent two decades running a quieter version of it already—handing every child a laptop or tablet—and the results are now coming in. They are not encouraging.

We already tried the smaller version of this experiment

Before we get to AI specifically, it’s worth sitting with what the neuroscientist and educator Jared Cooney Horvath lays out in his 2025 book The Digital Delusion. His argument, drawn from international assessments and a large body of cognitive-science research, is blunt: today’s children appear to be less cognitively capable than the generation before them. For most of the twentieth century, IQ scores rose steadily, generation over generation. Around the year 2000, in much of the wealthy world, that rise stalled and reversed. Tellingly, Horvath notes that in places where traditional, low-tech schooling stayed largely intact, the decline didn’t show up. And Horvath isn’t the only one reporting this research – it is backed by classroom teacher after classroom teacher, all who state how technology has impacted their classroom, and how by going back to pen and paper – it has improved.

The most ambitious technology we’ve ever pointed at a classroom is about to be the most persuasive, most authoritative, and most autonomous one yet. If the milder tools already correlate with falling attention and rigor, putting an AI in the teacher’s chair is not a careful next step. It’s flooring the accelerator.

Problem: AI will lie to you with a straight face

The most immediate AI-specific danger is the one the industry has a polite word for: hallucination. Large language models generate text that is statistically plausible, not text that is true. They have no internal mechanism that distinguishes a real event from a convincing fabrication.

In most subjects a wrong answer is at least checkable. In history, the errors are insidious because they look exactly like the truth. An AI will invent a quote and attribute it to Lincoln. It will shift a date by three years, conjure a treaty that was never signed, or describe a meeting between two figures who never met. It delivers all of this in the same calm, authoritative tone it uses for the things that are correct. Expert classroom teachers can identify and remedy these errors. An AI that isn’t sure says nothing different at all—because it is never sure, and never unsure, in the way a person is. For a fourteen-year-old who can’t yet tell a real source from a fake one, that confident wrongness is poison.

Problem: History is not a pile of facts—and treating it as one is the deeper failure

Even setting aside outright errors, the bigger danger is philosophical. History is not fundamentally about what happened. It’s about how we know what happened, whose account we trust, what counts as a cause, and why reasonable people interpret the same evidence differently. The actual skill a history class is meant to build is critical thinking: reading a primary source skeptically, noticing whose voice is missing, weighing rival explanations, and being willing to say “the evidence here is genuinely ambiguous.” Historians argue constantly. That argument is the discipline.

An AI, by design, tends to flatten all of this into a single smooth, consensus-flavored narrative. Ask it “what caused World War I” and you’ll get a tidy paragraph that sounds definitive—precisely the opposite of the messy, evidence-weighing critical thinking required of a real historian.

Many teachers and students are swayed by the “Bells and Whistles” of a computer program. A related failure Horvath called “Duolingo learning”—the confusion of engagement with education, where a slick interface keeps you tapping while very little is retained. A history bot that feels productive and answers everything instantly is the perfect machine for producing students who feel they understand the past and have actually learned to look things up.

Problem: Computer screens impact learning

Computer use in the classroom changes the way the brain functions. The first is attention. The brain can hold only one set of rules at a time; what we call multitasking is really rapid switching, and every switch costs time, accuracy, and memory. Digital environments are engineered for exactly that switching—Horvath’s framing is that learning requires stillness while the business model requires capturing your attention. He notes that students are off task for a startling share of every hour they spend on classroom devices. History, of all subjects, demands sustained attention: following a long argument, holding several causes in mind at once, reading a dense primary source to the end. It is uniquely ill-suited to a medium optimized for the next notification.

The second is transfer. Where you learn becomes part of what you learn; context gets encoded alongside content. Skills built in the narrow, uniform world of a screen don’t reliably survive the jump to a different, harder context.

There’s also a stark, concrete finding here worth flagging: reading comprehension is measurably worse on screens than on paper, especially for the kind of dense, expository text that history runs on, because the physical page gives memory a spatial anchor a scroll bar can’t. Handwritten notes likewise beat typed ones, because handwriting forces the brain to condense and process rather than transcribe. In every case, reading on paper, annotating the reading, writing and interacting with the text, improves learning.

Problem: Bias hides inside the text

An AI’s view of the past is a statistical average of its training data, and that data is wildly uneven. It overrepresents recent, English-language, internet-heavy perspectives and underrepresents nearly everyone else—colonized peoples, oral traditions, non-Western scholarship, the poor and illiterate who left few documents.

The result is a subtle but persistent skew. Marginalized perspectives get smoothed away; contested interpretations get presented as settled. And because the prose is so fluent and even-handed in tone, the bias is far harder to spot than it would be in an obviously slanted textbook. A flawed textbook can at least be criticized, revised, and replaced through a public process. A model’s biases are buried in billions of parameters that no teacher, parent, or school board can inspect.

Problem: AI doesn’t care

History deals in the heaviest material humans have: genocide, slavery, war, famine, the deliberate cruelty of people toward other people. Teaching it well means handling a student’s distress when they grasp what really happened at Auschwitz, fielding a charged question about their own family’s past, knowing when to push and when to sit in silence.

This is the point where Horvath’s research and the case against AI fuse most tightly. He argues that empathy in the classroom isn’t a soft extra—it’s physiological. When two people genuinely interact, their brain activity, heart rate, and breathing begin to synchronize. The relationship between a teacher and a student is one of the most powerful effects in all of education research. A machine has no biology to synchronize with; the connection simply can’t form. He points to the brutal dropout rates of purely online learning, and to the pandemic’s remote-schooling wreckage, as what happens when that human channel is severed. Relationships matter, teachers matter to learning the most.

An AI can generate sympathetic-sounding words about the Holocaust. It does not care that it happened. It cannot read the room, notice the kid who’s gone quiet, or take responsibility when a sensitive topic lands badly. There is no accountable adult—just an interface that will, with equal cheerfulness, narrate an atrocity and recommend a pizza recipe in the next breath. The moral weight of history requires a human who actually carries it.

Problem: The authority problem—and who profits from it

There’s the matter of how students perceive the machine. A textbook is obviously a fallible human artifact. A good teacher openly says “I might be wrong.” But a sleek AI that answers instantly and never hesitates radiates an authority it hasn’t earned. Children are primed to trust it precisely because it never falters—exactly the wrong instinct to cultivate in a subject whose entire point is learning not to trust any single source uncritically.

It’s worth being clear-eyed about why this keeps happening. Education technology generates billions of dollars. Are the engineers creating the technology educational experts? Do they understand the Science of Reading? Critical thinking? Teaching empathy? AI in the classroom is the same bet placed with much higher stakes.

Why does this matter?

Can AI help instruction? As a tool in the hands of a knowledgeable teacher, AI can draft quiz questions, suggest discussion prompts, translate a primary source, or help a student rehearse an argument. Used that way—supervised, double-checked, kept firmly in the role of assistant—it can genuinely help.

Lets be honest – most classroom teachers do not have the autonomy to determine programs that are purchased for them by school districts. Most classroom teachers have to either create their own resources or rely on a textbook driven program.  Teachers need to become thoughtful consumers of the resources they are given and examine materials with the same lens they would examine history; with critical thinking, checking for bias, and noting that relationships matter. Teachers cannot be replaced with a computer program, and learning cannot effectively happen with students sitting in a silo in front of a computer. History, of all subjects, is the one that should teach us to distrust an authoritative voice confidently telling us what to think. We should extend that suspicion to the machine, too—and keep a human in the room who knows why it matters.

The danger is specific and worth naming clearly: it’s the move from tool to teacher. The moment we hand a class over to a system that fabricates confidently, flattens interpretation into false certainty, fragments the attention the subject requires, hides its biases in fluent prose, feels nothing about the suffering it describes, and projects an authority it cannot back up, we haven’t upgraded history education. We’ve quietly abolished it and replaced it with something that only looks the same from a distance.

The post The Dangers of AI in a History Classroom appeared first on Social Studies Success.

Guest post by Vicki Tobias

Imagine your students gently flipping through a century-old yearbook, spotting their great-grandparent’s photo. Or scrolling through microfilmed or digitized newspapers and seeing their neighborhood mentioned in a headline from 1920. There’s a spark of recognition, “this is about me, my family, my community,” that often transforms history from a dry textbook subject into a more meaningful personal journey. This connection not only fuels curiosity, but it also makes history more fun and memorable, the kind of learning that hopefully sticks long after the school year has ended.

Why Local and Family History Resonates

Kids want to see themselves in the stories they study. When history connects to their own identities and communities, it starts to feel real. Local history can ground big national or global events in familiar settings. A lesson on immigration, reviewing passenger lists or naturalization records, for example, takes on new meaning when students find names from their own town or people who share their cultural background. Family history works the same way. Exploring the experiences of relatives through census or vital records can open the door to larger themes like migration, labor, civil rights, education, or military service.

The Role of Archives and Local History Organizations

Too often, students equate research with “Googling” or a Wikipedia search which is a fine starting point. But primary sources may exist just a few blocks away or even online. Local public libraries, county historical societies, and small museums are treasure troves, packed with historic maps, photographs, diaries, scrapbooks, city directories, artifacts or oral histories that document local and family history. They may also provide public access to digitized collections. Partnering with these organizations not only enriches social studies curriculum but also builds valuable relationships between schools and community organizations.

Practical Project Ideas with Specific Resources

Looking for classroom inspiration? Here are a few project ideas, each matched with specific resources, to make history and research come alive for your students.

Historic Photo Detectives

Explore local photo collections, either online through state/local digital archives or in-person at a historical society.

• Ask students what they notice about clothing, hairstyles, or home interiors. What everyday objects appear (telephones, farm tools, kitchen stoves)? How have things changed, and what’s stayed the same?
• Dig deeper to uncover hidden stories. Encourage students to look closely at the background including signs, posters, furnishings, or bystanders. What’s going on outside the frame and what does it reveal about the place and time? Tell a story about the photo.

City Directory Time Travelers

Introduce students to old city directories (often found in public library collections). These are like the phone books of the past (you might have to explain phone books).

• Pick a handful of addresses. Using Google Street View, ask students to research what’s there now. What’s changed?
• Encourage them to flip through the advertisements in the back of the directory. What products or businesses existed that no longer do? Which ones survived? How were products or services marketed through these ads? Look at the language compared to modern advertisements.
• Ask students to choose one business or service that no longer exists (a livery, a millinery shop, a confectionary, etc.) and research what it was, who their clientele was, why it mattered, and what type of business might have replaced it.

Yearbooks Across Decades

School yearbooks are a time capsule, offering a fascinating lens into youth culture and educational experiences.

• Students can compare hairstyles, clothing, sports teams, or clubs across decades.
• This can spark discussions about their typical school day, slang, jokes, popular music, dancing or television. What did they do for fun? How did they interact with each other or their teachers?
• A more serious discussion might ask students to think about who’s missing from the yearbook. Talk about community demographics, segregation, gender imbalance in activities, or economic barriers to education.

Community Mapping Projects

Use historic maps or Sanborn Fire Insurance maps to compare how neighborhoods have changed over time.

• Ask students to compare historic maps with Google Maps to see what buildings, businesses, or landmarks remain. Think about why certain neighborhoods changed over time? What factors contributed to that change?
• Identify factories, mines, mills, farms or other businesses or industries on the map. Think about what types of jobs people in this community have? How has this changed?
• Creative time travel. If you lived on [Main Street] in [1900], walk me through your day using what’s nearby on the map.

Objects from Daily Life

Partner with a local museum or society to plan a visit or bring in everyday objects (a lunch pail, sewing kit, typewriter, or farm tool).

• Students can analyze the objects. Can you guess its purpose? Who used it and why? What does it reveal about work, leisure, or family life during that era?
• Compare historic items with their modern equivalent, e.g. washboard with a washing machine or an ice box with a freezer. List the similarities and differences. Ask them to consider how the object changed daily life for people using it.

Tips for Educators

1. Start small: Even a single class visit to a local museum or library can make a big impact. Reach out to the organization in advance so staff can help tailor the visit to your students’ needs. Prepare students by connecting the visit to your curriculum or to questions about their own community and family history, and bring it closer to home by asking, “What do you have at home that might be considered historic?” or “What do you know about your own family history?”
2. Collaborate: Local history organizations are often excited to partner with schools and can offer free programs, tours, traveling exhibits, age-appropriate curriculum, or even digital resources the public can access.
3. Balance digital and physical: While many archives now have digitized collections, there’s something different about handling the original materials or seeing them in person—it creates a more tangible, personal connection to the past.
4. Encourage reflection: Ask students to link what they find back to larger historical questions, “What does this tell us about change over time?”. Reflection helps students see that history isn’t just a list of facts, but an ongoing story of change and continuity that connects directly to their own families and communities.

When students see that history isn’t just something that happened “back then,” but is woven into their families, neighborhoods, and daily lives, they become historians themselves. And when teachers connect with local historical organizations, they unlock powerful resources and community partnerships that keep history vibrant, relevant, and most importantly, FUN!

Genealogy and Local History Resources for Educators

1. National Archives – https://www.archives.gov/
   1. Educator Resources – https://www.archives.gov/education
2. Library of Congress Digital Collections – https://www.loc.gov/research-centers/newspaper-and-current-periodical/collections/digital-collections/
   1. Education Resources – https://www.loc.gov/education/
3. Digital Public Library of America – https://dp.la/
   1. Education Guide – https://dp.la/guides/the-education-guide-to-dpla
   2. Family Research – https://dp.la/guides/the-family-research-guide-to-dpla
4. FamilySearch – https://www.familysearch.org/
   1. WIKI – https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Main_Page

***

Vicki Tobias, founder of Tobias History Research, brings 25+ years of experience in genealogy, archival consulting, and historical research—find her at tobiashistoryresearch.com or on LinkedIn.

The post History Where You Live appeared first on Social Studies Success.

For Texas teachers, preparing students for the U.S. History STAAR exam means more than covering content—it means teaching students to analyze, evaluate, and apply their knowledge in rigorous, STAAR-formatted tasks. That is why I combined forces with lead4ward to create socialstudies+. When used with fidelity, socialstudies+ offers a powerhouse combination of instructional support, content mastery, and STAAR readiness.

Social Studies Success®: Interactive, TEKS-Aligned, and STAAR-Focused

• Engaging formats like gallery walks, history labs, and interactive notebooks
• Primary source analysis and practice that mirrors STAAR stimulus-based questions
• Reading strategies that prepare students for the rigorous level of STAAR
• Vocabulary and critical thinking scaffolds that support struggling readers and EBs

lead4ward: Structure, Support, and STAAR Strategy

• Cluster-based lesson planning for TEKS clarity and pacing
• Short instructional videos explaining key subclusters and strategies
• Intentional vocabulary development with LINC terms and Vocabulary Windows
• Focus on process standards and analytical thinking—essential for open-ended questions and evidence-based reasoning

Tools for All Learners

These features are especially helpful for Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) and struggling readers who need accessible ways to engage with rigorous content. socialstudies+ supports differentiated instruction with:

• Graphic organizers to help students organize their thinking
• Scaffolded primary sources to improve comprehension
• Visuals and strategies to reinforce academic vocabulary

Engagement that Sticks

STAAR success is built on engagement. That’s why Social Studies Success® incorporates:

• Strategies to bring history to life
• Interactive notebooks and station rotations
• DBQs (Document-Based Questions) that teach students how to write with evidence—key for Part B questions

Students don’t just memorize facts, they process their learning in a variety of challenging ways.

socialstudies+ program is designed to support Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) by providing structured resources that help educators:

• Break down content into manageable clusters and subclusters.
• Analyze student performance data to identify areas of weakness in TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills).
• Develop and implement targeted interventions to address identified gaps.

Learn more under the membership tab.

The post Winning at STAAR appeared first on Social Studies Success.

Start off by finding pictures that represent the content that matches the reading. I love to use a combination of stock photos, political cartoons, and if you want, you can also use images from your Word Wall.

Begin a lesson by passing out the images and having your students analyze and annotate with bullet notes of what they see in each image.  This step is so important.  If you just pass out the images, and then ask the students to match, they may get overwhelmed with the different pictures.  Giving your students time to examine the images also helps build schema prior to their reading.

Next, pass out the reading. As students read, they will need to find the image that best describes each paragraph. Periodically stop the activity and check student responses.  You can also support reading comprehension by asking your students to highlight the sentence they think corresponds to the picture.  If you choose this route, also add numbers to your images and they can annotate the text with the number as well.

As they continue reading, your students will need to put the images in order. Once they have finished reading and putting all of the images in order, take away the reading and have them discuss a summary based solely on the images.  You can extend the activity by having  them write a summary or take notes. Let me know what you think of this reading strategy

The post Visual Summary Reading Strategy appeared first on Social Studies Success.

But what is a History Lab? It is exactly what it sounds like…students examine artifacts and not only infer information from the artifact, but also draw conclusions from a multitude of examples.

Let’s take a look at a History Lab in action.  In this lesson, students are learning about the battles and key individuals involved in the Civil War.  After learning the content, they will examine artifacts in Battle Stations that consist of primary source images and quotes. Once your students examine the images and quotes, they will draw a conclusion – What is all of this information telling me? What battle are these artifacts referencing?

Once your students have analyzed the artifacts, they will write their conclusions citing their evidence.  Model your expectations for how to cite evidence. You can use a piece of evidence that is not in one of your Battle Stations for a model.  Demonstrate how to pull out key information from a source, and then use that source, as well as multiple others, to draw a conclusion.

The beauty of the History Labs comes with the opportunity to expose your students to a variety of primary sources in an engaging format – they will want to read to figure out the clues to support their answer.

Once your students have analyzed the evidence for a Battle Station, allow them to move to another to analyze new artifacts.  Also, add tangible artifacts to your History Labs if you can! A pair of army boots, a feather and an ink pot, blue and gray fabric, can all add interest to a station.

This History Lab is a part of the socialstudies+ membership with lead4ward, but look for other examples soon!

The post History Labs appeared first on Social Studies Success.

So how do reading challenges work? First you need your “supplies” – informational text, a map, clip art, and puzzles.

Examine your reading and pull out the key ideas you want your students to understand and remember.  Create a series of puzzle-like questions for the reading.  For each puzzle, a number will be revealed that will indicate where to glue on a specific piece of clip art on a map.  They can include true / false questions where the correct answer will reveal a word:

Or you can do puzzles that focus on specific Social Studies skills as well as content. With these, the answer choices reveal a specific letter, building up to unscrambling the letters to reveal a word.  The word is again a number directing where to glue the clip art.

Some of your puzzles can be multiple choice questions.

Or you can use fill in the blank questions with a variety of answer choices.

Once the map is complete, add a layer of complexity by requiring students to find the best summaries to glue on their maps.

When students are finished with the reading challenges, their map should look something like this!

You can find reading challenges in my Texas History membership and my new partnership with lead4ward here.

The post Reading Challenges appeared first on Social Studies Success.

Teaching students academic and content vocabulary is one of the most important components to mastering social studies. There is nothing more deflating than thinking you have done a great job teaching a lesson only to discover that students missed a question on an assessment because they did not understand an academic or content vocabulary term.

One excellent strategy for vocabulary is the Vocabulary Pyramid, which is found in Dawn Vinas’ manual entitled, “Vocabulary Strategies for Social Studies.” The vocabulary pyramid is an efficient and versatile way to ascertain student mastery of a term or concept effectively and efficiently.

With this strategy, students are given a pyramid divided into five horizontal lines representing five levels of difficulty. Each line of the pyramid is numbered top to bottom with the number one at the top and five at the bottom of the pyramid. Each numbered line of the pyramid represents the number of words students must use to define the vocabulary term. For example, if students are given the word “liberty” for level one at the top of the pyramid, students must define “liberty” in one word. Students could define the term “liberty” in one word using the term “freedom.”

Based on the students’ definitions, an educator would immediately be able to determine whether students have mastered the terms given and be able to reteach the words students struggled with. The pyramid is also good for achieving a high level of rigor and engagement. An educator can “scaffold” vocabulary by selecting words that have increasing levels of difficulty, which benefits English Language Learners (Emergent Bilingual), special education students, advanced or on-level students. One could select five words related to a particular concept, unit, or theme, which would help students understand the relationship(s) between those words.

The pyramid also provides a myriad of choices for implementation and engagement. A teacher could randomly assign the words to the levels, purposefully assign more difficult terms to the higher levels of the vocabulary pyramid or allow students to decide which words will be used for each level. Students could complete the activity individually or in small groups.

Within groups, students could compare their pyramids, justify their definitions, and explain why they put certain words at certain levels.

One could choose one vocabulary term and ask students to define the word in decreasing order from five words to one word, increasing the level of difficulty and reinforcing the term or concept. Furthermore, students could also draw a picture of each term, adding an additional layer of interaction and rigor.

The vocabulary pyramid is an excellent strategy and an effective assessment tool. It is efficient, engaging, diverse, and rigorous. It is appropriate for all ages and types of learners and is an effective tool for instruction, intervention, and review.

The post Using the Vocabulary Pyramid in Social Studies appeared first on Social Studies Success.

Secondary Social Studies Interventionist

As any good teacher does, I often eavesdrop.  During my fourteen years of eavesdropping,  I’ve heard social studies teachers lament that they are “not reading teachers”.  Whenever I hear this my French alter ego says  “Au contraire, mon frere”.  Social studies teachers are charged with helping students build the background knowledge required to read and comprehend social studies primary and secondary sources, identify cause and effect relationships, and draw inferences and conclusions.

Why is background knowledge important in social studies?

Students inherently come to school with valuable background knowledge, however, how many 12- year- olds have background knowledge of European Colonization? Research has shown that students are more successful learning new content when the new information is tied to their background knowledge. Teachers must be strategic when building background knowledge to help ensure students understand social studies concepts such as federalism, net-worth statements, modern genocides, and terrorism.

Strategies for building background knowledge in social studies.

Picture Walk

A picture walk is a pre-reading activity where students will take a look or a “walk” through the documents of a unit. These documents can include images, maps, charts, diary entries, or other primary and secondary sources.  Students “walk” the documents and make predictions about the unit based on the who, what, when, where, and why of the items. A great example of picture walks can be found in my resource on earthquakes.  Students examine the different images of the impact of the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1864 prior to reading about the impact of an earthquake. 

Tea Parties

This strategy not only helps students to activate background knowledge by anticipating what they will cover in the unit, but it also encourages students to participate in discourse.  The teacher simply writes statements on an index card and students’ job is to mingle and read as many statements as they can in an allotted time.  After the time is up, students will discuss what they surmise about the text from the statements found on the index cards.  This requires students to sequence, make connections, collaborate, and move! This is a really fun strategy to see your students try to figure out their clues.  I have a version of this strategy called “Book Bits” in my Early English Colonies lesson on Jamestown and Plymouth. 

Word Webs 

Word webs are visual organizers to help students organize background knowledge.  The teacher will create categories for a unit and the students work together to list as many things that they already know about the subject.  This strategy is also referred to as mind mapping.

Social Studies teachers must use strategies to help students build background knowledge.  Students need a way to organize the new information with what they already know.  This approach will help students acquire content knowledge to succeed in Social Studies.

Kydra Hubbard is an Instructional Coach with over 14 years of experience in social studies education.  Kydra has taught a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Geography, and International Baccalaureate History of the Americas. Kydra has used her classroom experience to prepare for presentations at the Texas Council for Social Social and Fundamental 5 National Summit.

Recently earning a specialization in organizational leadership from Abilene Christian University, Kydra believes that continued success in social studies education requires leadership that focuses on advocacy to organize programs that engage everyone in a community.

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Geography, World History and Early High School Teacher

Littleton High School

“Why is starting class so difficult each day?” I recently reflected after a tough week. My 9th and 11th grade students alike kept forgetting to make the pencil and binder they recently shoved into their backpack reappear on their desk.   I got tired of droning, “Hey guys…it’s time to start class…you need to take out…” You get the picture.

Considering this, I noticed that each of my classes started out with a different task each day.  I didn’t have a consistent, classic “Bell Ringer” to generate routine and transition to learning.  Enter CNN10 Student News (https://www.cnn.com/cnn10).  Many middle school teachers are aware of the strength of this “straight down the middle” current events news source, and show it religiously.   Historically, I had my 9th grade World history classes watch it occasionally, but never would I show it to my 11th grade IB European history classes  My rationale:  1) It will take too much class time, and we have lots of content to cover, and 2) It might feel “too juvenile” for upperclassmen.  This year, I decided to gamble against both of those doubts.  I decided to take the plunge and commit to showing CNN10 at the beginning of class EVERY DAY, WITH EVERY CLASS.

I created a note catcher that has students record both FACTS and REFLECTIONS. At the end of ten minutes, I can choose to have them turn and talk about their reflections or move on.  When they arrive at class, they instantly get out their note catcher and record the headlines.  I press play, they take notes, I get attendance done, pass out papers, and all is well with the world.  This routine has served as a wonderful regulator…a chance for both teacher and students to transition into the day’s agenda with content that is relevant and trustworthy.  And my juniors are just as engaged in the content as my freshman!

CLICK THIS LINK if interested in purchasing a CNN10 note catcher.

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