10th Annual Partnership Conference for Educational Renewal

South Carolina's new social studies standards are skills-focused and implementation will require inquiry lessons. In order to equip students to be successful in the twenty-first century, these new standards were designed to help students develop analysis skills so that they can manage the vast amount of information that fills our world and learn to work collaboratively in a global economy. Each grade level includes both disciplinary themes, key concepts, and skills, and content; and the content serves as the vehicle for teaching the skills. Examples of skills include context, periodization, continuity and change, and gathering evidence, and they are much like the skills found in Advanced Placement courses. While many of our teachers are already doing this work in their classrooms, these standards call for a much greater emphasis on skills than our previous standards.

This session will introduce participants to the new standards, along with the Inquiry Design Model® for planning social studies units, and will demonstrate how teachers can teach their students to think, read, and write like geographers, economists, historians, political scientists, and civically engaged citizens while also teaching the content of social studies. Based on the National Council for the Social Studies College, Career, and Civic (C3) Framework for State Standards, the Inquiry Design Model® is an organizational structure that helps teachers write lessons that are centered on questions. Students analyze primary and secondary sources and create evidence-based answers to the questions.