Category Archives: Social Sciences

As regular readers of this blog may know, I have been trying for a number of years to develop a set of materials, particularly for my social studies classes (which I am no longer teaching at the moment), based on the methods articulated by Judith C. Hochman and Natalie Wexler in The Writing Revolution (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017). Even though I have never had a chance to actually teach writing (which was done directly in none of the schools in which I have served in New York City; teachers assign writing work, but don’t really teach students how to write), I have been interested in doing so since I began my career 22 years ago. Now that I am about to retire, I see that I will probably never teach writing, and I probably won’t further develop my store of materials based on The Writing Revolution.

I’ve read enough about curriculum and curriculum design to know that I don’t care much for curricula that aren’t at once scaffolded and flexible. Most are not. But The Writing Revolution is the best thing of its kind I’ve encountered; I knew the first time I read the book that I would want to develop a curriculum based on its methods. It is scaffolded and flexible.

Two years ago, I was finally able to focus on working on these materials. It’s a lot of stuff, and I stipulate that it is uneven at best. Nonetheless–and I think now is a good time to remind users of this blog that most of what you’ll find here is set in Microsoft Word, therefore it is highly convertible and manipulable–I think some of this stuff is worth putting out there. I should also mention that I created a plethora of templates and supports–mostly typed verbatim from the book itself–for developing curricular materials consistent with The Writing Revolution’s prescribed methods.

At the time I began work on this stuff, sometime late in 2018, I thought it might me most useful for my freshman global studies class. This was for a number of reasons, the most salient among them that the New York State Regents Exam in Global Studies was notoriously challenging, and that the student population I served, everyone in my school at the time knew, really struggled with that particular test. But I also wanted to get students writing on their own, and to use language in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t–one of the principal strengths of The Writing Revolution in my opinion.

For global studies, I conceived of strands of work that followed a conceptual and factual arc across a relatively short, but dense and mildly challenging, series of documents. So, without further ado (and with apologies for the ado thus proffered), I offer the documents for Strand Three. This strand would concern agriculture and the earliest cities, but so far, as the lesson plan for Strand Three will show you, I only managed to pull together worksheets on agriculture and crop rotation. These are “developing questions” worksheets: they call upon students to read short passages of text, then develop a question or questions based on what they’ve read. The teachers copy of the agriculture as well as for the worksheet on crop rotation should help make the purpose of this work, and its methods, clearer.

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.