What does high-quality K–8 social studies instruction actually look like in the classroom? We were joined on our webinar by Elisabeth Ventling Simon (Chief Academic Officer and Co-Founder, inquirED) and Sarah Milo Hoskow (Head of Partner Experience, inquirED) to examine inquiry-teaching practices and classroom tools for district leaders, coaches, and teachers to help them identify and explore the components of high-quality social studies instruction.
Key Takeaways
Inquiry-based teaching practices foster engagement and curiosity in students, inviting them to leverage their prior knowledge and make inferences and predictions.
Challenge and scaffolding are crucial in managing the cognitive load of students during inquiry-based instruction, ensuring that they have the necessary background knowledge to carry them through investigations.
Inquiry-based teaching promotes complex thinking and the application of foundational knowledge by encouraging students to add nuance, classify evidence, and consider cause-and-effect relationships.
Collaboration and investigation play key roles in inquiry-based teaching, as students debate, explain, and provide rationales to one another while grappling with evidence.
Learning walks and classroom visitations can be valuable tools for reflection and growth, allowing teachers, coaches, and instructional leaders to identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement in inquiry-based teaching practices.
How can inquiry-based teaching practices support and enhance learning in social studies?
We know that teaching practices are really important for rigorous and inquiry-based social studies. If we want students to engage in sustained inquiries, building knowledge over time, we need to have inquiry-based teaching practices in place. These practices can have a profound effect on the classroom environment. Teaching practices don’t just affect what teachers do, but also how they support a rigorous and inquiry-based classroom. These practices will be reflected in both the actions of the teacher and the students, as well as the classroom environment.
How do you begin to talk about these practices with teachers?
The teaching practices reflect what we expect to see in a rigorous and inquiry-based social studies classroom. And we know that teaching practice is not automatic. It's something we work towards, that is developed over time. One thing we like to do when we first introduce these to partner coaches or partner teachers is to ask them to skim the practices and see if they can identify one that feels familiar. Maybe it's something that's part of their practice – or if they are a coach – it's part of the practice of the teachers they support. And then, see if they can identify one that feels a little more like a stretch. Either for themselves or the folks they support.
We often see questions about how Design works as a teaching practice. If you are a teacher not using a curriculum, that design falls entirely on you. As a teacher using a curriculum, there is an art in finding your space within the design. You're not designing from scratch, but you're really understanding your content. You're digging into it. You're internalizing lessons, and you're making sense of something that has come to you. So whether or not you're actually designing your curriculum, there is work in that practice for you to be doing.
Do the teaching practices provide more details about what the practice actually looks like?
After reviewing the high-level practices, we like to delve deeper by exploring what we call "look fors." You can find the teaching practices along with their corresponding look fors here. Look fors help us identify the evidence we would observe if a particular teaching practice is being implemented. Often, when we share the look fors, teachers realize that each practice comprises various components. They often recognize that in their stretch practice, they are already doing certain things, providing a foundation for growth. Similarly, in their familiar practice, they identify areas where they can still improve. We believe that this mindset is crucial when developing your teaching practice, as it is not a static process. In our most familiar practices as well as those that are a stretch, we all have strengths and areas for growth.
Can you provide examples of how these might show up in the classroom during a lesson?
A little bit of context before we dive into the teaching practices in action: it's important to understand, especially since Design is one of our teaching practices, that we'll be looking at a really small slice of instruction, just a snapshot within a larger inquiry unit.
In Inquiry Journeys, inquirED’s K-5 social studies curriculum, the following structure frames each inquiry unit: a large compelling inquiry question drives students' learning. The unit launches with a hook activity that engages students in the investigation and gets them to generate their own questions and spark their curiosity. Then, the unit moves students through a sustained investigation throughout several modules and culminates when students use their knowledge to take an informed action that has an impact on the world.
So, we're going to zoom in on just a few learning experiences across two lessons from the "Natural Resources of the US" unit, which is often taught in 4th grade in our partner districts. To kick off this module, the teacher is going to initiate the investigation by facilitating a See, Think, Wonder activity. We ask teachers to consider:
What observations can the students make from this primary source historical photograph?
What inferences might they make?
How are they leveraging their prior knowledge to make those inferences, predictions, and even ask those questions?
As we think about this phase of instruction, "Inspiration" is the first teaching practice that jumps out at us. The teacher is truly engaging students, focusing their attention, inviting their prior knowledge, and sparking their curiosities. It's not the only practice, but it's essential. New knowledge can't even enter our brains if we are not engaged—if we aren't paying attention.
So next, in this inquiry sequence of instruction, the teacher is going to facilitate some really foundational knowledge-building: establishing vocabulary and understanding what the Dust Bowl was. What were the economic, political, social, and environmental conditions and events that occurred? They're gathering some basic evidence and making meaning: engaging with an oral history, listening to an interview, and watching a short documentary animation.
The teaching practice that resonates with us at this phase is Challenge. Not just that the task is challenging, but that the teacher is thinking about managing that challenge and scaffolding the learning. And this gets back to design as well; making sure that the learning experiences are cohesively designed so that they build upon each other. So when students are engaging in investigation, they have sufficient background knowledge from the prior lessons to carry them through. It's critical to make sure that teachers - through digging into design and challenge - are helping to ensure that students are carrying the appropriate amount of cognitive load.
Once students have built a foundation of knowledge, they can apply it by adding nuance, classifying evidence, and considering cause and effect relationships. This promotes significantly more complex thinking and leverages their previous learning.
And of course, the teaching practices that stand out at this phase are Investigation and Collaboration. As students grapple with evidence, they debate and explain their understanding, providing rationales to one another. We should also note here that the teacher is performing various types of work: monitoring, circulating, facilitating, and supporting. However, the teacher is not guiding the task in the same way as they did the previous day or before. Students are now working much more independently.
How can teachers, coaches, and instructional leaders work together to develop these practices?
Lots of ways! But we wanted to make sure folks left with some tools for reflection and some tools to help themselves as educators (or their school system) collaborate, reflect, and grow. I know that for many folks, when they see some of these modes of reflection, such as lesson observation and learning walks, there's a feeling or an association with evaluation. We believe that school systems do need to have rigorous standards for teaching and learning, but that is not what we're proposing here. We are not suggesting these as a mode of evaluation. We really want to talk about learning walks and classroom visitations as opportunities for growth, personal reflection, and the development of practice.
The first kind of protocol we are sharing is a learning walk. Download the tool here. The purpose of it is to inform school or district-wide development, to take stock of where instruction is and where we'd like it to be. It's not about any one individual, but the system. Where would we like to push instruction for the best outcomes for our students? So it can be used to establish goals and to identify both opportunities for growth and areas of strength that you can build on.
One thing to emphasize when you're doing a learning walkthrough: you're observing the on-stage practices and look-fors. just because something can't be seen doesn't mean it's not being done. What you see is dependent on the moment of instruction. Because if you're popping in and out of classrooms, there's no guarantee of what you're going to see on any given day. However, it's the collection of all of it together that can help identify trends and set goals.
We also want to share a tool for classroom visitations. Download the tool here, We see them as serving a very different goal. Again, we're not thinking of these as evaluative at all. The purpose of this is to facilitate a collaborative opportunity to reflect on instruction and think about how we might instruct in the future. We often see teachers, coaches, and instructional leaders participate in these together, but I love these as a peer-to-peer to teachers. From the beginning of my teaching experience, the first time I ever did one of these was with another teacher who was also developing in their practice, and that was a really great, safe way for me to reflect on my own teaching and to help my peer reflect on theirs.
For both of these protocols, we want them to be rooted in the teacher's own goals and how they manifest in practice. Often, it starts with a teacher who may have goals, but by brainstorming practice strategies together, we can move them closer to those goals. We can also reimagine goals that align with the chosen practice. I also want to acknowledge that inviting others into your instructional space, whether they are peers or supervisors, is a vulnerable step. We are deeply committed to our craft, and building a culture of trust is crucial. However, the rewards of this commitment are truly significant.
Keep Exploring: View the Webinar Recording
To gain a deeper understanding and access further insights, we highly recommend watching the full recording of the webinar. Click below to watch the recording now.
About inquirED
inquirED was founded by teachers with the mission of bringing inquiry-based social studies to every classroom. Inquiry Journeys, inquirED’s elementary social studies curriculum, is used in schools and districts across the country to help students develop deep social studies content knowledge and build the inquiry skills that are essential for a thriving democracy.
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