Reframing a Social Studies Methods Course: Preparing Elementary Teacher Candidates for the Common Core

ABSTRACT

The emphasis on disciplinary literacy skills embedded within the Common Core State Standards requires a shift in preparing teachers to explicitly address the craft of reading and writing within social studies instruction. As teacher educators, we think it is imperative to understand the ways in which our teacher candidates integrate literacy within their social studies instruction and strive to modify our own practices to support their needs. Using practitioner research, we share the instructional changes we made to better prepare teacher candidates to meet the standards, and we consider how our teacher candidates responded to those changes in their work. Our implications suggest research-based practices must be utilized in social studies methods courses while maintaining an emphasis on key historical thinking skills. Such practices include using essential questions to guide deeper thinking, integrating appropriately modified informational texts, developing skills in close reading, using graphic organizers, and emphasizing content integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Social studies methods
• common core
• practitioner inquiry

Notes

1. Determining an accurate quantitative account of text complexity for primary source documents is difficult because of the archaic grammatical structures and language present in historical sources.