SOCIALS CURRICULAR COMPETENCIES & BIG IDEAS

Every year, students will also develop their Social Studies Thinking Skills. These skills remain the same each year, but students are expected to become more sophisticated in their understanding and application of these skills over time. These skills include:

​Social Studies Inquiry Processes and Skills: How do we ask good questions and find the reliable information that we need to answer them properly? How do we communicate what we have learned with others?

Students will learn to:
  • Pose questions and gather data to answer them
  • Collect, organize and interpret data from multiple sources
  • Assess the accuracy and bias of their sources
  • Draw inferences to define issues and draw conclusions from research
  • Give credit to their sources and document their research
  • Present their understandings effectively using a variety of formats and technologies

Significance: How do we decide what is important to learn about?

Students will establish the significance of people, places, events and ideas from the past and present as they begin to understand that:
  • People, places, events and ideas become significant if they result in change.
  • People, places, events and ideas become significant if they are revealing enough to help us better understand a current or historic issue.
  • Significance is constructed by those who decide which people, places, events and developments fit within the story they are telling about the past or present
  • Significance varies over time and from group to group

Evidence: How do we know what we know?

Students will learn to use relevant and reliable evidence as they begin to understand that:
  • Social Studies is based on interpreting and making inferences about primary and secondary sources.
  • Asking good questions turns a source into evidence.
  • We need to ask questions about who created a source, when it was made, and what beliefs and values shaped its creation before we start examining it.
  • All evidence and inferences should be corroborated.

Continuity and Change: How do we make sense of the complexities of the world?

Students will identify the continuity and change that characterizes different time periods and places as they begin to understand that:
  • Continuity and change are interwoven--even in the midst of change, many aspects of a society or culture will continue on as they did before.
  • Change is a process with identifiable turning points that mark important shifts in the direction or pace of events.
  • Change may lead to progress or decline; in many cases, progress for one group will lead to the decline of another.
  • Periodization helps us organize our thinking about history; determining the dates and events that make up a historical time period involves interpretation by historians. 

Cause and Consequence: Why do things happen and what are their impacts?

Students will analyze the causes and consequences of decisions, actions, developments and events from the past as they begin to understand that:
  • Change has multiple causes and results in multiple consequences, many of which are interrelated.
  • The causes of these changes have varying levels of influence and importance.
  • Events and developments are the result of interactions between people (individuals or groups) and their social, political, economic, environmental and cultural conditions.
  • Actions often have unintended consequences.
  • The events of history were not inevitable. Different actions, choices or conditions could have produced very different results.

Perspective: How can we better understand the people of the past?

Students will learn to understand and adopt different perspectives to help them examine the past and present as they begin to understand that:
  • There are often significant differences between our current worldviews and those of the past.
  • It is important to avoid presentism (imposing current worldviews on people of the past).
  • The perspective of a person or group must be understood within their context (events, worldviews, etc.).
  • Taking on a different perspective means inferring how others feel and think based on evidence; it does not mean that a student must agree with those perspectives.
  • People have diverse perspectives. Different groups will see the same event or place differently.

Ethics: How can Social Studies help us remember the past and live in the present?

Students will form ethical judgments about events, people and developments as they begin to understand that:
  • Historians and other social scientists make ethical judgments in their work and these may be clearly stated or implied.
  • Our ethical judgments of the past must consider the historical context of the actions or events we are examining.
  • We must recognize that historical actors beliefs about right and wrong may be very different from our own. 
  • We have a duty to remember and respond to the contributions, sacrifices and injustices of the past.
  • While our knowledge of history can help us to better understand current issues, we must recognize the limitations of any direct lessons from the past.