Powerful Social Studies!

1. Challenging

1.1. The students worked in collaboration with peers and teacher.

1.2. The students were challenged to create and present a topic.

1.3. The students connected their prior learning to new ideas and commented on what they had learned after completing the presentation. Ex: Student learned that their were a chain of missions

1.4. Understanding that the missions were not an easy time for who was involved.Ex: They had to rebuild the missions when they were burnt down.

2. Active

2.1. The teacher went above and beyond to push understanding of his students. He had them do 5 projects within the assignment. This allowed all students to have a job but also having to teach the same idea in different ways reviews the understanding many times.

2.2. He encouraged the students to think deeply but asking questions about their missions. As well as in the beginning he asked the students what they thought they needed to know.

2.3. Planned for hands on activities within the assignment. Ex: Models

3. Meaningful

3.1. The Mission topics connected to where the students were living. Ex: California missions

3.2. The concept connected to a lot of the students because their history connected to these missions.

3.3. The students learned facts and ideas that were important to the understanding of the missions. Ex: who, what, when, where, why, etc.

3.4. The teachers and students were reflective on the topic of the missions

3.5. The students were making connections between prior knowledge. Ex: longitude and latitude of their mission

4. Integrative

4.1. The student's had to find out the history and present of their mission. (Connecting past to present).

4.2. The student's were to include technology into their presentation. They had a choice of a slideshow or imovie.

4.3. Integrated writing, drawing, technology, and models to present their mission.

4.4. Allowed students to find something they were good at and engaged in.

5. Value-Based

5.1. The students were to work in their table groups. They had to figure out a way to equally divide the roles throughout the group on their own.

5.2. They had to make their own decisions on course of action for their project. Ex: who did each job, poster, model, etc.

5.3. Student's helped others within their group when they finished their own section of the assignment.

5.4. Students were respectful when working in groups.

6. New node