We kicked around the idea of another year of U.S. history. Most of my background is in non-Western history. I teach the AP world history class here so we have to get something international in there so people and places is geography but not the memorization of capitals like we did when we grew up. It's human geography. Keep in mind we have some location geography. Very important for me that every sixth grader knows their continents, oceans, cardinal directions. I'm old school when I was in seventh grade and this was done in a series of discussions. We thought what a wonderful opportunity. Massachusetts passed a law and said we need every middle school kid to study civics. I taught high school government. High school I hate to say it almost too late sometimes to introduce these concepts and think about civic identity and things like that. A lot of my high school kids say it's rigged and against me. The cynicism and the! We felt like this was a wonderful opportunity so we reached out and in each of these we had help from collaborating partners in different groups but one in particular the democracy knowledge project at Harvard took on the Massachusetts law and said if we're going to do this in Massachusetts for eighth graders let's do it well. We haven't done the whole thing but we took bits and pieces of what we're asking for in terms of students and that's a picture of the changes.

We felt like this was a wonderful opportunity so we reached out and in each of these we had help from collaborating partners in different groups but one in particular the democracy knowledge project at Harvard took on the Massachusetts law and said if we're going to do this in Massachusetts for eighth graders let's do it well. We haven't done the whole thing but we took bits and pieces of what we're asking for in terms of students and that's a picture of the changes. When we think about what we're asking to approve in terms of long-term goals I basically summarize the first one of those that we want to align more closely with the standards and not abandoning that but learning for justice as some of that depth. I'm very, very proud. We had a speaker in third grade the other day somebody else who came out of Harvard working at UMSL and said we're teaching persons of color in a positive light prior to enslavement and all the third-grade teachers chuckled and laughed and raised their hand and said we teach the ancient civilization of Benin in third grade. Every K-5th grade class has an introduction to West African civilizations, different civilizations so that we can see persons of color in a positive light before we start moving into enslavement and these things. Moving on to the second goal which again is elementary and middle school. So many times when districts talk about integrating in literacy it's the loss of social studies.

Moving on to the second goal which again is elementary and middle school. So many times when districts talk about integrating in literacy it's the loss of social studies. It's for minutes and social studies kind of gets put by the wayside. We are in some ways the fourth discipline but my job for the last 18 years is making sure and Milena has been very supportive and so have all of you so the integration with literacy is not a loss of social studies. It's using literacy skills. If we're going to read nonfiction, right, let's read nonfiction that lines up with what we're doing already in social studies as opposed to something distinct. If we're going to do narrative writing let's do the narrative writing as an assessment of our learning for social studies itself. So whereas the first goal is well in the works and we really need the next four years to add assessments and you read about the different things we're doing and how we give kids choice still even when we have common reading assignments and there's things we need to work on as social studies teachers. The third is mostly at the secondary level and my visual was taken unfortunately out of the slides. I'm very proud of my visual. It's basically a four-part circle so the inquiry model is kind of the current pedagogical approach to social studies. It's not ketting edge.

It's basically a four-part circle so the inquiry model is kind of the current pedagogical approach to social studies. It's not ketting edge. It's not brand new or anything that's rebranded but essentially what we're looking at is four parts and the first is inquiry. How do we get kids to ask good questions? So many times in my education the teacher stood up and said this is what we're going to learn and this is the way we're going to learn it so we don't do inquiry daily but some units and some days and things like that asking kids to ask good questions. The second piece is what I'm most proud of and that's the evaluation of the students. It's increasingly significant that we work on media literacy skills and so that second comes out of Stanford. They have a digital inquiry group, civic education group that has changed a little bit but essentially 612 we have three overarching questions that become more nuanced by the time you get to APs. The first question is what is the source of information? Who is behind it? So when you think about who is behind it in a primary source online thing it's who is putting this information together online? We have exercises where we give kids two websites and they have to dig in and look. It may say it's an environmental website but if you dig deeper you realize it's funded by an oil company or something so question one is who is behind the information?

We have exercises where we give kids two websites and they have to dig in and look. It may say it's an environmental website but if you dig deeper you realize it's funded by an oil company or something so question one is who is behind the information? Question two, those are real things we train kids for. Question two is what does the evidence say and three is what does the evidence say? So the research at Stanford suggests that kids and they're talking Stanford freshmen spend a majority of their time reading straight through a website and we've done that click, click, click, click. It's very simple but powerful. Lateral reading is no more than 10 minutes on a site before you open another tab and check that information against something else so the inquiry cycle and I'm getting detailed because I like this one. What are we doing for homework? What are we doing in class, et cetera? And the last one is our CER, claim evidence reasoning which again is not new but what I'm proud of in this particular goal we started working on is aligning what does that look like? A CER in sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade so we're using common language all the way through. CER is used in science and used in literacy.