Social+Studies+Team

Thoughts:

Divergent education ties in very nicely with differentiated instruction.

Divergent thinking can and should lead to activities and assignments that give students choices and allow them to focus on their learning modes at their ability level while still learning the eligible content. This is NOT the same as cooperative learning, where a group all does the same thing for the same grade (which lends itself to social loafing).

Social studies very much lends itself to the teaching of reading and writing's eligible content (but particularly writing). We can use the eligible content of writing but use it to better understand the disparate content of our various classes.

Since kids take a while to wake up in the morning, wouldn't it make sense to hold PSSA tests later in the morning, perhaps on a 2 hour delay schedule? Would this pass muster with the state? Why do we make such a big deal of midterms and finals in terms of schedule changes, and yet we do nothing to highlight the importance of PSSA tests?

Why not start up departmental exchange student programs? Inside the Social Studies Department, for instance, we could have 11th grade 20th Century History students (say, five at a time) attend a class in 9th grade Western Cultures where Mr. Gianelli would make sure to connect what he is doing can connect with what Mr. Reddish is doing (for example, connect the mistakes the Athenians made in the Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War with the mistakes the U.S. made in Vietnam). This would help remind students of material they went over in previous classes (to remind them, and to encourage them by showing them how much they have progressed since they were in 9th grade). It would also help reinforce that every one of our departments are teaching content that is interconnected and should not be forgotten at the end of every year.

Why not have departmental blogs, where students (say once a semester) blog about a theme that can encompass material across many classes? For example, students from 6th to 12th grades can be discussing how societies change over time, but do so using evidence from their different classes.

Divergent thinking should be used to allow students some freedom and choice in how they undertake a required assignment on important and/or eligible content. It should not be used as a goal in and of itself. Just because a Kindergartner can think of 200 uses for a paperclip does not make them MacGuyver. It just means that they are able to tell lots of whimsical stories involving flying paperclips that are friends with invisible pink unicorns. In other words, divergent thinking is a useful skill that should not be pounded out of existence by regimentation, but that doesn't mean that imposing requirements and reality of kids is a bad thing.