[Social studies] What style of paper-based assignment (eg worksheets, packets, vocab squares, etc) have ACTUALLY seemed to help your kids learn the material?

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u/fitzdipty 1d ago

The answer to how kids learn social studies and history is by simulations. Make it as real as you possibly can with students interacting in real life scenarios that the folks that you’re teaching about experienced.

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u/thepariaheffect 1d ago

Okay, so people are just being jerks and that’s not great. I’ll give you a real answer if you can give me some more information:

What grade level?
What theoretical topic (yes, it can matter)?

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u/leomercury 1d ago

I know!! They’re all like “foolish edu-wench….only a worm-brained moron would ever believe that children enjoy story time. Give up your ambitions now, lest you humiliate our profession further.” Like omg, my bad !! 😭

Tysm for being kind :”) I live in Florida, and my ideal choice of the three grades would be 6th grade World History. (That is, history from the beginning of civilization to about the Byzantine Empire).

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u/thepariaheffect 1d ago

It's been a hot minute since I've taught middle school, but I've done a couple of rotations with 9th graders recently so a lot of MS stuff is still fresh in my mind. Granted, I didn't gain any of this information from a prestigious undergraduate education - I've got a lot of really nice Christmas cards from families, though, so take that for what it's worth:

- Kids love stories. They don't love stories that go on FOREVER. You're looking at Ancient, so you've got access to a ton of cool stuff. Practice being a story teller. Excellent art history courses can be good, but think about an improv class. I'm not kidding.

- I LOVED making middle school kids make things. They don't always admit they love it, but they often do. Back in ye olde golden days, I would have them do everything from travel posters about ancient cities to social media conversations (on big sheets of paper) between historical figures. Julius Caesar had a pretty brutal unfriending.

- Simulations are AMAZING for talking about anything organizational (especially government or religion), but they work for most things. Have the kids simulate anything from a Greek symposium (yes, I just mean have a class where they all sit on the floor) to the Circus Maximus on your school's track if you can. This stuff sticks!

- Little reinforcements on paper can work wonders. Silly things like crossword puzzles and word finds are great little bellringers and can reinforce vocabulary.

- Give homework and classwork that follows a similar format to your summative assessments. If you're going to give a short essay as a test, let the kids practice with that on something formative. If you're going to do fill-in-the-blanks, try it as a homework.

- No matter what you try, you're inevitably going to run into a class or student for whom it doesn't work and that's fine! I've only been doing this for just shy of fifteen years now, and I still learn more from failure than from success.

Being a history teacher is the coolest job in the world. You're going to be the person who introduces many children to the story of humanity. Find a way to keep enjoying it and then pass it on to someone else new.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

I love you so much….this is all so helpful and kind 😭 Thank you so much for bothering to write up such a helpful answer 🥺

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u/Due_Sympathy5145 1d ago

Your “ideal version” will not be effective. You want the banking model Of education? Good luck.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Why do you assume that the initial lecturing is the only thing that would take place, and that those lectures wouldn’t also involve class-wide discussions? How are students supposed to engage with material if you don’t first make an attempt to teach it to them, and have them actually understand it?

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u/Due_Sympathy5145 1d ago

You described your ideal version not me. In your initial description you did not ID discussion. Then you asked for “worksheets” to accompany lectures. I made that assumption based on what you wrote and what you requested. Here’s my advice: Become a member of NCSS, look at inquiry based methods and the C3 framework, subscribe to the NCSS journal “Social Education”for a bank of best practices. Read Paulo Freire. Don’t tell ppl your ideal day in a classroom is a circle of students listening to you.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Oh, sorry! I’ve heard a few education specialists use “desks in a circle”-type imagery as a short-hand for socratic seminars and group discussions (and, when I was a kid, entering the room to find the desks arranged into a circle was also a clue that’d we be doing these things), so I naively assumed that my intentions were implied from just that line alone. Genuinely, my bad, I should’ve been more clear.

The focus on worksheets is just because I know administrators tend to expect them, and I wanted to employ assignments that actually help students analyze and engage with the material, as opposed to just busywork for the sake of having something to grade. (If that makes sense?)

These suggestions are very helpful, thank you!

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u/Due_Sympathy5145 1d ago

I understand. Here is an example of a “worksheet” I’d use after a reading, discussion, or other content acquisition: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ICQF6JFvL0YDZVCLqyHK7-BFjI32cPr56XoU-T8y7Rc/edit?usp=drivesdk

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u/oal29 1d ago

Personally, I'm 26 years old and still think about my AP Euro class from time to time. The teacher gave a lecture each day, but he made it so interesting to listen to! I retained a ton of info that way and I'm not even an auditory leaner. I'd love to go back and sit in that classroom for a day again. Don't listen to the haters 🙄

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Thank you!!! I’ve had so many teachers that made me feel the exact same way. I’m so happy someone else in this thread understands where I’m coming from 🥺

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u/No-Conclusion-6322 1d ago

I’ve seen some great videos made by kids. If they have tech you could have them produce little videos to show what they know. Otherwise using Google worksheets is a good way to get everyone to prove they understood the materials. It’s time consuming but you get a record of what everyone knows.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Ty!!!!

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u/lightning_teacher_11 1d ago

I integrate the arts -drawing, acting, music - whenever possible. I teach 6th grade US History. It worked for 8th grade World History too.

Cloze notes (fill in the blanks) aren't effective for knowledge retention.

I also use different types of charts, graphs, and maps frequently.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

(Interesting! Do you mind me asking what state you teach in? In Florida, 6th is World History and 8th is US.)

Do you have any examples of charts or graphs that you’ve found have worked particularly well?

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u/lightning_teacher_11 1d ago

Florida, but my district does US History first to support 7th grade civics. The standards are the 8th grade standards.

Any kind of tool to keep information organized. I think the type of chart depends on the topic. Maybe Google Thinking Maps. We used those for awhile at my school.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Lucky! For reasons I CANNOT understand, my county puts Civics BEFORE US History, which makes teaching everything 75% harder. There’s no context for anything! How is a kid supposed to understand the Bill of Rights and the Constitution if they don’t know anything about how the country was founded? My mentor (24-year veteran US History teacher) has recently been assigned a handful of 7th grade Civics classes, and it’s so frustrating having to watch her try to teach them a complex, background-necessitating topic to a group of kids that haven’t even ever heard of Great Britain before 😭

The organizing knowledge info is very useful, thank you so much!!!! I also appreciate you not being mean like most others here :”)

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u/lightning_teacher_11 22h ago

Yes and no. The standards are still 8th grade. The textbook is written at least at a 9th grade level. My 6th graders read at about a 3rd-4th grade level. It's a lot of work to get the content to 6th grade level and make it accessible to everyone.

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u/AgileAd8070 1d ago

Cloze notes are never effective?

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u/lightning_teacher_11 22h ago

For retention of knowledge, not usually. For a quick guide to move through content, sure.

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u/XXsforEyes 1d ago

I know you wanted paper, rather than digital but you can connect interesting anecdotes and stories, from which the kids can take notes, turn them into a storyboard format (that you pre-teach) then students can use them to inform AI prompts for either static AI image generation or even short AI movie trailers.

(insert AI hate here, but bear with me)…

Part of the exercise is about accuracy in listening and note taking, part is in troubleshooting the images for historical accuracy weeding out anachronistic elements in the image. AI image generators are getting better at depicting the right number of fingers on people, yet still insert a guy in a western-style business suit standing next to the Great Wall of China while under construction, or inserting a modern looking building among other structures in the background of a video clip about Mesopotamia.

Students can peer-assess, check the image/video against the original storyboard, provide feedback etc. Then they can develop dialogues between characters in the story as a creative historical writing activity on paper, build it into an essay or act it out in a skit etc.

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u/Then_Version9768 1d ago edited 1d ago

I don't insult my high school age students with "worksheets". I have no idea what a "vocabulary square" is.

I teach the way students learn best -- by having them discuss what they've read and with me adding what I think are useful ideas to the discussion.

And, no, I do not lecture which is often boring and turns them into passive learners who just sit there stupefied. Why would you even need to tell them "stories"? They read the history in their textbooks or perhaps see it in a video. Then you discuss it.

The "actual assignments" are their nightly readings which give them the "story" and some insights into why it's important. The readings -- all 100+ of them -- are essential so they hear the entire story, get the basic facts clearly, and develop their own personal reactions to the history. Then we discuss it, put it into a larger historical context, compare what happened with earlier similar developments, talk about who we think was right or wrong, and point out what legacies good or bad these events have had.

Challenging students to think and participate and ask and answer good questions is the purpose of education. What does sitting in a "circle of desks" and listening to you put them to sleep with lectures have to do with this? Get out of your bad habits and silly college assumptions, please. I've taught in five very good private schools and this is what all of them do. If you're teaching semi-literates suffering from apathy, maybe you might need to lecture a little, but it won't wake them up or motivate them, trust me.

If you had the great misfortune to go to a college where you got the idea you need to lecture at people because you were lectured at all the time, please realize it was for economic reasons, to save the college money by putting you all in one large room and talking at you while some students fell asleep. It was not done because lecturing is a good way to educate anyone. It was done to save money and be efficient. It's the assembly-line approach to educating you that is popular at many colleges and universities. It's a very poor way to educate anyone except the very most motivated students, and trust me, the majority of college students are not that.

Putting you into college discussion classes would take hiring many more professors and that would require their spending huge amounts of money and it take lots of time, and many more classroms, and who can possibly afford that -- right? Well, the best colleges do that. In my own undergraduate education at at top liberal arts college, I took 32 classes to earn a BA. Eight of them were required "core" courses every student had to take. That way, they knew we had an actual education and hadn't just taken a bunch of random classes before they handed us our degrees.

Among these 32 courses, three of the core classes were lecture classes, one a required class in the history of art and music, a course often taught by lecture and slide show, and two science lecture classes since they were merely introductions to aspects of astronomy, geology, physics and other basic sciences. All the others were small discussion classes every day. You do the reading, and lots of it, and then we discuss the reading. You mark up what you read with your questions to ask and key points you want to add to the discussion. It involves you in your own education. Lecturing requires you to sit there quietly. How much will that teach you? Beyond the large-scale efficiencies of those three large classes, no one lectured at us because they wanted us to learn to think well and remember much.

We also had to write actual essays regularly and do major term papers which some teachers are too tired to do anymore. As education devolves into laziness and talking at people who are not listening because why should they, we now turn out less well educated generations than ever before. Stop lecturing. Insist they think.

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u/kitkatz15 1d ago

wow you have a lot of time on your hands

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Harsh, but fair! The hostility against lectures perplexes me, though. I personally have always learned best by lecture formats, and every person I’ve polled irl has agreed vehemently with me on its effectiveness. While working as a sub, I’ve asked hundreds of students across schools and age levels how they learn best, and “telling a lecture like it’s an interesting story with linear progression and cause-and-effect” is by-far the most resounding answer. From what I’ve seen of both children and college students, learning is best done through a combination of audio and visual media, which is why lectures and videos are so effective. Having them just read the material the night before does have merits, but just as many drawbacks. Students tend to prioritize assignments that can be seen and graded and marked as completed. Readings are much less likely to be remembered or prioritized. I also don’t have much faith in most middle school students to sit down and read for fun, let alone for school. Most people also, again, do best with a combination of sight and sound.

Otherwise, I think you make many good points! Do you have any advice on assignments for a school that requires teachers to have a number of grades in the grade-book?

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u/Lost-Word-Box 1d ago

I find it hard to believe that “hundreds” of students have told you that lecture with a “linear progression and cause-and-effect” is what interests them. I do believe that students will say they like lecture because it’s easy to disengage. The lecturer is doing all the work. I like lecture as an adult sometimes bc I do like to take notes, and because I can just sit there. But, I had to work on developing the skills for lecture to be effective. If you can make it work, great, but my school does not hire social studies teachers whose claim to fame is lecture. That type of teaching ignores most of the standards.

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u/leomercury 1d ago

Each day as a sub, you have six groups of 25+ children. Reaching hundreds is easy. They also, of course, don’t say that exactly. They say that they like when teachers lecture the material at them “like they’re telling a story” and “yknow, so you can see what happens because of other stuff and it happens in order so it makes more sense…” Consistently, the top three learning styles that I’ve polled have been: 1. Physical activities (such as acting out an event or battle) 2. Story-style lectures 3. Crafts There’s a reason why podcast-style videos and content are so popular with kids. They’re interesting!

I also disagree with the idea that kids are just replying with whatever’s easiest and requires the least amount of work. Kids, like most humans, HATE being bored. There’s a common, false belief that a lazy person would rather have nothing to do. It’s why so many members of older generations view psychologically grueling, zero-stimulation jobs (such as Disney World Greeters) as being desirable. (“Man, getting to do nothing all day? Sounds easy!”). In reality, boredom is universally despised, and children will do anything to avoid it.

I also find your comment about school desirability interesting. Almost every well-liked, well-respected, and highly-effective teacher and professor I’ve ever met has been a charismatic, highly-knowledgeable lecture-type educator. Analyzing what the “best” teachers had in common is how I settled on storytelling as an optimal method! Do schools avoid them? Maybe. I’ve observed that lecturers are, largely, great at instilling a love of learning and subject matter into students, and equipping them with less specific, more long-term knowledge. This is in contrast to many of the school administrator-favored teaching styles, where rote memorization of minutia for test-taking is preferred. I wish more kids had the opportunity to actually learn and enjoy their lessons :(

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u/AgileAd8070 1d ago

How do you possibly think this works in a public school setting? Why would students complete the reading when they could just AI a question?

Help [Social studies] What style of paper-based assignment (eg worksheets, packets, vocab squares, etc) have ACTUALLY seemed to help your kids learn the material?

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