Literacy in action in high school social studies classrooms-Destiny

During my field experience, I was able to sit in on a variety of different classes taught by different teachers. I observed pretty much every teacher in the Social Studies department, seeing core classes and electives. I saw many literacy skills in practice, but what I found most interesting was the teacher's attempts to make their review activities focus on a students literacy. I observed several classes on days where they were filling out study guides to prepare for their test. I noticed that in several of the Modern World History classes I observed, teachers made sure to include images, cartoons, or other primary source documents for the students to reference and analyze. Teachers also asked students to rely on prior knowledge and tested their understanding of the relationship between people, places, and things. For example, during one such review day, in a supported class (one SPED teachers assistant in addition to the main teacher), students were given a chart about important philosophers during the enlightenment, the chart included the name, main idea, and a quote section, some information was given, then students were challenged to fill out the rest of the chart to connect each philosopher to their main idea, and demonstrate this idea through quotes found from texts. I also noticed that in several classes, videos were shown. These videos seemed to function for a variety of purposes, some teachers introduced a unit with them, others ended units with them, and yet others used these videos as the primary source of notetaking. I think this prevalence of videos has a lot to do with the fact that the school I observed at has fairly modern technology, so teachers have the ability to do this. However, in addition to the video, students were given questions to answer, within these worksheets they would be asked to pull main ideas from the videos and contextualize the era they were studying, understand patterns of change, and at the end often were asked to synthesize what they just saw. In another class that I observed, a full SPED class with six students taught by one special education teacher who has a bachelor's degree in social studies, taught his students through inquiry learning. He asked more questions than answers, asking students to really think about what they were learning and letting them guide their learning and get the answers on their own. There was obviously scaffolding for the students, but the teacher was great at taking the better parts of students answers and using their questions and ideas to guide their learning. He asked the students to think about history and question it. Why did certain people make certain decisions? Why did this cause this? Overall, it was a great experience to see teachers using a variety of texts and seeing disciplinary literacy in action. There were times where I wish teachers would have given students time to work more independently with sourcing and contextualization, but since I observed a majority of freshman level classes, it is understandable that these skills were not fully developed, thus not as emphasized.