Planning for Delivery & Implementation in Social Studies

Inquiry-Centered Classrooms

Planning for Inquiry

The  Inquiry in Social Studies Poster (312.75 KB) .pdf  highlights the following stages in planning for inquiry in the social studies classroom.

• Explore Standards
• Develop Questions
• Gather Resources
• Communicate Conclusions

Developing Questions

• Right Question Institute - Provides several resources on the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) in order to help students create better questions.
• Developing Student-Driven Questions - An article from Edutopia provides ideas about how to get students to ask their own questions.
• The Power of Asking the Right Questions - An article from Edutopia provides ideas about how asking good questions can be a powerful learning experience in the classroom.

Designing Rigorous Curriculum

Karin Hess has designed the Hess Cognitive Rigor Matrix for Social Studies/Humanities applying Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) Levels to Bloom’s Cognitive Process Dimensions. Check out more resources on Karin Hess' website.

Unit & Lesson Planning Templates

Templates to use when thinking about course, unit and lesson planning.

• Unit and Lesson Plan Template (67.91 KB) .docx
• Unit and Lesson Plan Template with Directions (69.01 KB) .docx
• Course Plan Template (55.8 KB) .docx
• Course Plan Template with Directions (56.63 KB) .docx

Alignment Tools

• Aligned Instructional Practice - This resource from Achieve the Core outlines what aligned instruction looks like.
• Achieve - This includes a toolkit for alignment of instructional and assessment materials to the Iowa Core. Although predominantly designed to look for alignment of the Literacy standards, these tools can also be helpful to examine alignment with any standards.
• Open Educational Resources (OER) Rubric - These rubrics help teachers determine the degree of alignment between OER materials and standards.
• Ed Reports - A resource that rates instructional materials aligned to the Iowa Core Literacy and Math standards.
• The  Rubric to Evaluate the Quality of Units in Social Studies (184.44 KB) Archived .pdf  helps teachers and districts evaluate the quality of instructional units in social studies and is modeled after the EQuIP rubric in ELA/Literacy, Mathematics, and Science.

Reflective Tools

Best Practices in Social Studies Rubric (58.06 KB) .pdf  - A reflective tool for classroom teachers to use to gauge how they are thinking about and implementing research-based practices in social studies.