Week 1 Journal

Weekly Journal: Week 1
Grand Canyon University: EED-570
June 5, 2013

Weekly Journal In this week’s reading assignment, it discussed the importance of relating the social studies content to student’s social world and their prior knowledge on situations, how teachers need to use instructional activities, develop pedagogical content knowledge, and how teachers need to use the three-phase sequence when teaching social studies. In both chapters, it is discussed that by making meaningful connections to student’s experiences, they tend to understand the information better and can apply the skills to their everyday lives. They also discuss how it is important to restructure the student’s prior knowledge and build from there. In turn, students will be able to use this knowledge to make informative and responsible decisions in their futures.
In the first chapter it discusses how educators must incorporate five elements that are used for instructional activities to make social studies purposeful and powerful. These five elements are when they are: meaningful, integrative, value-based, challenging, and active. When using these five elements, it is important that educators use them in instructional activities to keep students active in their learning by giving them “greater control activities”. By giving students greater control and adapting the lessons to use the five elements, we as teachers are working on our pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Developing PCK helps educators identify what practices to use for students to best understand the material by having students do different activities that involve observing, collecting evidence, and forming conclusions. In the second chapter, the primary focus was on how to create meaningful lessons for social studies. Educators must encourage student so recall prior knowledge, connect that knowledge with new ideas in social studies, have the students compare this new idea, and encourage the use of metacognition. Educators will also create social studies lessons consisting of the three-phase sequence in order for students to achieve full understanding of the new idea. -The three-phase sequence is: exploratory introduction, development, and expansion. The exploratory introduction phase is when the students are exposed to a new social studies idea and the students relate this idea with past knowledge of this topic through different methods like demonstrations (Sunal & Haas, 2011). The development phase is when the teachers provide in depth explanations for this new idea. The teachers may use other resources as well for student involvement and challenging information. The final phase is the expansion phase where educators have the students apply this new idea to new experiences. After reading both chapters, the information has helped me to understand how to engage the students, encourage them to broaden their ideas, and how to become a successful teacher by working on my PCK. I use to be one of those students who became easily disengaged from the social studies courses due to a lack of connection to the material. After reading these chapters, I can confidently say that I would apply this information to my lesson plans by using the phases and strategies in my lessons.

Reference
Sunal, C. S. & Haas, M. E. (2011). Social studies for the elementary and middle grades: A constructivist approach (4th ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.