Teaching Social Studies in

Elementary Grades
John Ronnel Arbis
PART I. Understanding Social
Studies as Inquiry and Student
Thinking
Social Studies as inquiry & investigation:
Historical significance, personal history,
and culturally responsive pedagogy
Chapter 1
Introduction
• Interviews with children from first grade through middle
school, found that all of them know something about how
things were different in the past.
• Do they have a clear idea what history means.
• Students don’t encounter the subject at school before 4th
grade, those who have heard it may link it with the past
generally (“antiques and old stuff”), or may associate it with
famous people or events.
But rarely . . .
• do they realize that they are part of history, or that they have a
history of their own.

• Students do not always see themselves as part of history.

• Developing a sense of what the subject is all about and

how it relates to them must be one of the teacher’s first and most
important goals.
• A teachers tells students they are going to make their own time lines
to show the most important things that have happened to them, and
that they will use these time lines to create a “History of Me” to
share with the class.
Asking Historical Questions
Lesson 1
History as students’ own pasts.
Understanding history begins with students’ own pasts.
• Students can’t remember everything that had ever happened to
them, but to select the five most important things—those that had
the greatest influence on their lives today.
• This seemingly simple assignment thus introduced students to what it
means to ask historical questions.
• History examines the effect of the past on the present.
• Students are interested in history that focuses on people. Barton &
Levstik (2004)
• History is concerned with explaining how we got to be where we are
today, and knowing the story of one’s own life is the most basic form
of historical understanding.
• Students became most interested once they moved away from a
general and abstract discussion of history and began talking about
specific people they knew.
• Making a list of important events, however, was not something that
came easily; it didn’t seem to be the kind of question students had
ever been asked. Many had trouble deciding what to include on their
lists
• Students benefit from collaboration among themselves and with
their teacher.
• What to include in the lists? A major part of a teachers’s
responsibility was to help them think about how to answer the
question;
• The collaborative nature of a teacher’s classroom also helped
students consider the question: Although they worked individually,
students shared their ideas constantly and heard others explaining
their experiences.
Collecting Historical
Information
Historical inquiry can help students see the need for multiple sources of
information.
A History of Me
• This exercise also introduced students to the collection of historical
data.
• It began with the most basic source of information—their own
memories.
• They also began to notice the limitations of relying on memory:
Although they remembered many of the things that had happened to them, few
knew when they happened—either the dates or how old they were at the time.

•
• By having to combine their own memories with information from
relatives, they learned that using multiple sources can lead to a
fuller picture of the past than relying on any single source—one of
the most basic principles of historical research.
• Even the idea of consulting resources in order to learn something can
be a new concept for children; they sometimes claim they couldn’t
possibly know anything they haven’t directly experienced.

• Many students are unfamiliar with how people learn about the past.
Barton (2008)
Relatives provide a comfortable and accessible way for
students to move beyond their own experiences.
• Collecting information from relatives obviously gives students a
comfortable and accessible way to move beyond their own
experience.

• Even such familiar sources, though, begin to acquaint them with

fundamental issues of historical interpretation.

• Students quickly learned that their sources might disagree and that
they had to make judgments about reliability.
Sources sometimes disagree; some sources
are more reliable than others.
• In this simple assignment, then, students dealt with fundamental
historical issues—how to reconcile conflicting accounts and how to
judge sources’ reliability.
• Students need experience evaluating sources as evidence for
historical interpretations. Ashby & Lee (1998), Van Sledright (2002)
Teachers can provide the structure students
need to collect information successfully.
• This was their first exposure to time lines and to collecting
chronological data.
• Collecting data is a fundamental part of all research, yet it is
enormously difficult for young children.
• Providing them with the structure necessary—in this case, in the
form of a printed time line—is crucial to ensuring their success.
DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
AND REFLECTING ON
LEARNING
• Learning activities should be authentic; if students complete
assignments only to please their teachers or get a grade, they’re
unlikely to understand the purpose of what they’re doing or be able
to apply it in new situations.
• Students should go further and use this information to create a
narrative of their lives for an audience of classmates—and the
creation of narratives is one authentic use of historical information in
our society.

• Not just learning skills or content but were using what they learned
to create new knowledge.
History can be integrated with other
subjects.
• Creating written narratives and presentations about their lives.
• Learning more about writing during other times of the day, they were
familiar with the elements necessary for an effective narrative—
putting events in order, including details, and so on.
Teachers need to help students apply their
knowledge and skills.
• Teachers cannot simply throw an assignment at students and expect
them to learn from it; at one time or another, most will need help
figuring out how to use their knowledge and skills in their work.
Students have difficulty putting what they
have learned into new forms.
• Again, teachers will recognize how difficult it is for students to take
information from one form and put it in another; because many
elementary children only learn about creative, fictional writing, they
often have little understanding of how to use writ- ten language in
other ways.
Teachers focus students’ attention on
questions of historical significance.
Students need the opportunity to reflect
on the meaning and significance of history.
• Periodically asked students to reflect on what they thought.
• Reflection gives students responsibility for creating meaning and engages
them in critical thinking.
• Personal identity, the impact of the past on the present, or the gathering and
interpretation of data.
• So what?
• What then?
• Then, why?
• How?
• Why, so?
THE “HISTORY OF ME” IN
THE CONTEXT OF
DIVERSITY
• A teacher who accepts the differences among students and their
families as natural and who shows genuine interest in their
uniqueness will find that many of her students do the same.

• But a teacher who regards deviations from some imagined norm as

deficiencies—or who tries to ignore such differences—will rarely have
students who demonstrate even basic tolerance.
• When a teacher develops a supportive and caring environment in her
classroom, “celebrating diversity” can become more than a slogan,
and investigating personal histories can help children see how their
backgrounds both converge and differ.
• Nevertheless, the purpose of an assignment like this is not to pry
into children’s personal lives.

• Some families decline to reveal personal information.

• Assignments must be flexible to accommodate diversity.
• Students should not be required to share personal information.
• The solution to these dilemmas—we decline to call them “problems”
because we recognize and accept the reasons for them—is not to
avoid assignments about personal histories, nor is it to exempt some
students and thus highlight what they may think of as an inadequacy.

• Rather, teachers must make such assignments flexible enough to

accommodate the legitimate differences among students and their
families in our extraordinarily diverse society.
• Those who don’t want to call attention to themselves should have the
option of doing a history of a friend in another classroom, a teacher
at the school, or someone else in the community.

• However, it is important to keep in mind that all students must be

given these options, not just those whom the teacher thinks may
need them. Otherwise the mere presence of an alternative may seem
just as unpleasant as the original assignment.
ASSESSING STUDENT’S
LEARNING
The purpose of assessment is to improve
teaching and learning.
• Assessment fulfills that goal when teachers establish clear standards
and criteria for achievement, when they help students understand
the meaning of those standards, and when they provide feedback on
how well students have mastered the goals of the class—including
how far they still have to go.
• Letting students know what they have accomplished, and making
them aware of the criteria for improvement, enables them to learn
far more than if they are only given summative evaluations of their
assignments.

• Authentic tasks require multiple forms of assessment.

• Anecdotal records provide the opportunity for ongoing assessment
during classroom activities.
• Assessment helps teachers plan for ongoing instruction and
assistance.
• Anecdotal records allow teachers to track individual students’
progress.

• Scoring guidelines or rubrics can provide criteria for assessing

complex student performances. Popham (1997)
• Students should not be limited to a single learning “style.
• Authentic tasks allow for student choices
• Using multiple formats helps students learn about historical
interpretation and representation.
• All students should be given the time and support to engage in a
variety of assignments.
EXTENSIONS
• Biographies allow students to move beyond their own experiences.
• Book reports, like all assignments, need a clear purpose and
audience.
• Students can use multiple sources of information to create
biographies.
Conclusion
• Yet the amount of information they retain from these courses is
shockingly small, as national tests and surveys have shown for more
than 50 years.
• For history to be meaningful, students must understand the meaning
of history as well as their place in history.
 Assignment
1. Whole Class: 1 copy
Print the Chapter 4 To Find Out Things We Didn’t Know About Ourselves 33 – 44
2. Study the reading about “Teaching with Timelines” by Dr. Fillpot and answer the following questions
based on the article. 2 students = 1 output. This is to build collaborative work skills.
2. When to start a classroom timeline?
3. When there is a significant event or people in a class discussion, how should a teacher respond to it
according to the article?
4. How to start a history study inside a classroom?
5. What are the findings of the researchers about the students studying history?
6. As the class explores history, what should be the intervention of the teacher according to the Dr. Fillpot?
1. Write a biography of yourself using all of the provided guidelines, theories or principles we have
discussed.