Category Archives: Social Sciences

You’ll find domain-specific material designed to meet Common Core Standards in social studies, along with adapted and differentiated materials that deal with a broad array of conceptual knowledge in the social sciences. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Central Park East’s Habits of Mind

The Central Park East Habits of Mind

From whose viewpoint are we seeing or reading or hearing? From what angle or perspective?

  1. How do we know when we know? What’s the evidence, and how reliable is it?
  2. How are things, events, or people connected to each other? What is the cause and what is the effect? How do they fit together?
  3. What’s new and what’s old? Have we run across this idea before?
  4. So what? Why does it matter? What does it all mean?

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

The Clash

A couple of hundred years ago, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, The Clash liked to call themselves “the only band that matters“: indeed, it was emblazoned across the front of their towering record “London Calling.” Last week while on spring break, I listened to a podcast series on The Clash, hosted by Chuck D of pioneering Hip-Hop group Public Enemy (an inspired choice, by the way) on the streaming music service to which I subscribe. It brought back great memories of a very different time in this world of ours.

Here is a reading on The Clash and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it. When I’ve given this to alienated students to read, it has aroused, almost to a one, their interest. Whatever you think of punk rock and The Clash, there is no doubt that their music carries a message of rebellion and its concomitant, hope and action to create a better, more just world.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Howard Gardner III: On Signs of Understanding

“An important symptom of an emerging understanding is the capacity to represent a problem in a number of different ways and to approach its solution from varied vantage points; a single, rigid representation is unlikely to suffice.”

Howard Gardner

The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Word Root Exercise: Cracy and Crat

Here is a worksheet on the Greek roots cracy and crat. Unsurprisingly, they mean government, rule, and power–you know, like democracy, physiocrat, and kakistocracy.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Howard Gardner II: On Understanding in Action

“The test of understanding involves neither repetition of information learned nor performance of practices mastered. Rather, it involves the appropriate application of concepts and principles to questions or problems that are nearly posed…. Whereas short-answer tests and oral responses in classes can provide clues to student understanding, it is generally necessary to look more deeply…. For these purposes, new and unfamiliar problems, followed by open-ended clinical interviews or careful observations, provide the best way of establishing the degree of understanding…attained.”

Howard Gardner

The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Howard Gardner I: On How Understanding Appears

[By understanding] I mean simply a sufficient grasp of concepts, principles, or skills so that one can bring them to bear on new problems and situations, deciding in which ways one’s present competencies can suffice and in which ways one may require new skills or knowledge.”

Howard Gardner

The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Hans-Georg Gadamer on Questioning

“It is opinion that suppresses questions. Opinion has a curious tendency to propagate itself…to question means to lay open a place in the open. As against the fixity of opinions, questioning makes the object and its possibilities fluid. A person skilled in the ‘art’ of questioning is a person who can prevent questions from being suppressed by the dominant opinion…. Only a person who has questions can have [understanding].”

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Truth and Method

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Jerome Bruner III: On Essential Questions in Biology

“One of the principal organizing concepts in biology is the question, ‘What function does this thing serve?”—a question premised on the assumption that everything one finds in an organism serves some function or it probably would not have survived. Other general ideas are related to this question. The student who makes progress in biology learns to ask the question more and more subtly, to relate more and more things to it.”

Jerome Bruner

The Process of Education

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.

Developmental Delay

In response to student demand, I’ve been producing a lot of new reading and comprehension worksheets on health-related topics. In the course of this work, I typed up this reading on developmental delay and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I haven’t had any specific requests for the topic. However, once I write one of these, a student, to my persistent surprise, will ask to read the text and complete the worksheet. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me that kids will take an interest in the very last thing I expect them to.

In any case, this is also a potential topic for a professional development roundtable of some sort, so I tagged it accordingly.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Jerome Bruner II: On Avoiding Inundation in Curriculum Design

“Let me suggest one answer [to the problem of going into depth and avoiding excessive coverage] that grew from what we have done. It is the use of the organizing conjecture. They serve two functions, one of them obvious: putting perspective back into the particulars. The second is less obvious and less surprising. The questions often seemed to serve as criteria for determining where [students] were getting and how well they were understanding.”

Jerome Bruner

Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing

Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.