One of the realities that we have encountered in virtual teaching is that we often need to adjust the pacing and overall scope of courses to ensure that students are mastering the concepts. This year we have shared three frameworks that can help with this process as teachers plan for the remainder of the year. Below is a summary of how these frameworks could work together in helping you plan for student success.

The Big Ideas and Overarching Essential Questions

The Big Ideas provide students with a clear vision, purpose, and focus for social studies instruction across all courses. This year, all CCS social studies courses are mapped to the Big Six Ideas: Change, Democracy, Diversity, Evidence, Justice, and Power. As you unpack content in the second semester, select the people, places, events, and ideas that best illustrate these Big Six. Revisit content addressed earlier in the year and connect it to new content via the Overarching Essential Questions. Synchronous and asynchronous class discussions allow students to wrestle with the ideas and questions.

Visible Learning

The Visible Learning framework demonstrates that learning is not an event, but rather a process in which students move from surface-level learning to deep learning, and then onto the transfer of concepts, skills, and strategies. With the Big Six Ideas in mind, establish some transfer goals for the second semester. What are some of the most important take-aways (content and skills) that students can apply beyond the specific unit of study and course? Determine the key conceptual understandings to unpack at the surface and deep level that will help students meet these transfer goals.

Clarifying Content Priorities

The Clarifying Content Priorities framework is a helpful tool in planning standards-based instruction. Under constraints, and with high stakes, it is imperative to focus on Priority 1 and 2 content. Priority 2 content consists of paths to mastery of Priority 1. Priority 3 may helpful to add some additional context or enrichment, but it should not be the main focus of instruction. Priority 1 content will flow from the Big Ideas, transfer goals, and key conceptual understandings.

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From the College Board:

The guide for your subject can help you assign the AP Daily videos and topic questions necessary for student-led learning each week, using the reports generated by these topic questions to focus your limited, direct class time on the areas where students need more help to develop their knowledge and skills by May. It is designed for classrooms that have only completed approximately 25% of typical course content by January.

The guide shows how students can make up the pace by completing approximately 30 minutes of AP Daily videos and topic questions per night, in lieu of or in addition to teacher-led learning and other class assignments.

Download the 2021 Pacing Guides here.

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Recognizing the challenges involved with addressing large volumes of content this year, we can turn to some of our review resources in the coming months to help fill gaps. These resources are located on the Social Studies Assessment webpage.

The Quick Review Guides are designed as a 1-page (front/back) bullet-pointed review of the standards. These documents are updated and aligned with the current standards. If we return to some form of in-person learning, we will take orders for hard copies card stock versions. Please discard all previous hard copy card stock versions. In the meantime, you can download the digital version of American History here and American Government here.

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A detailed schedule will be available later this month. This schedule will be posted on a custom website that allows viewers to see all sessions by department and by start time.

For social studies, we will continue our discussion from October on Visible Learning for Social Studies, with a focus on the Transfer phase of learning. Additional session information will be forthcoming by email and the February newsletter.

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This collection of over 30 graphic organizers was created by CCS Social Studies to align with many of the suggested organizers in the curriculum. Click on the link below to access.