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Teaching With Powerful Ideas. Dana Austin Michelle Knox Jodi Mathe. Learning Objective. We will understand how to incorporate powerful ideas into our multicultural curriculum. The Conceptual Approach.
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Teaching With Powerful Ideas Dana Austin Michelle Knox Jodi Mathe
Learning Objective We will understand how to incorporate powerful ideas into our multicultural curriculum.
The Conceptual Approach • The big, powerful ideas that people tend to remember and that facilitate understanding and transfer of knowledge are called concepts and generalizations. • Powerful ideas help students organize and synthesize large amounts of information • Example: Most people can’t give all the battle names and dates from the American Revolution, but can you remember why the war was started and how it progressed?
Vocabulary • Facts: low-level, specific empirical statements • Concepts: words or phrases that enable people to categorize or classify a large class of observations and reduce the complexity of their world • Generalizations: tested or verified statements that contain two or more concepts and state how they are related – These are the BIG IDEAS!
Spiral Development • Key concepts and generalizations are taught and developed at an increasing degree of complexity and depth throughout the grades
Goal of Multicultural Conceptual Curriculum Help Students: • Develop an understanding of how knowledge is constructed • Create awareness that knowledge is influenced by biases, experiences, and perceptions of historians, textbook writers, and other researchers.
Once goal is achieved, students will be able to: • Construct their own versions of the past, present, and future. • Make thoughtful decisions • Reflect on their moral choices • Have courageous conversations • Ask intelligent questions
How can we help students attain these skills? Values Education • Provides students an outlet to act on their moral decisions. Why? • Powerful concepts like discrimination and prejudice are shaped by ones values and/or morals.
Banks Value Inquiry Model – Teacher Strategy Give students opportunities to develop “democratic values” by stimulating value discussion and decision making (p.72) • Define and recognize value problems • Describe value-relevant behavior • Name values exemplified by behavior • Determine conflicting values in behavior • Hypothesize about possible consequences of behavior
Banks Value Inquiry Model – Teacher Strategy continued • Name alternative values • Hypothesize about those possible consequences • Choose value preference • State reasons, sources, consequences: justify, hypothesize, predict
So What? - Conclusions • Make value choices you can defend in a democratic society • How we construct knowledge is just as important as the knowledge itself. • As stated by a world-known, social studies instructor, Mr. R., “Don’t always believe what you hear.”