What statement synthesizes major beliefs within this culture of curriculum?

• According to David McCollough, historian, “History is not about dates. History is about ideas, and about human nature, and why we behave the way we do in the best and the worst of times” (Townsend, 2008). I could not agree more, and I believe you could substitute "social studies" in for "history" and it would  just as accurate.

• McCollough also states you should not confuse information with education. “If information were learning, if you memorized the world almanac, you’d be educated. If you memorized the world almanac, you wouldn’t be educated! You’d be weird!” (Townsend, 2008). (But you'd likely be first pick for the trivia contest team. 😉)

• The point of social studies education is for the student to learn to think critically for themselves, to be able to evaluate the credibility of what they are being told, and then make an informed decision, while having a sense of the historic, political, social, and geographic context of the issue and decision. This will equip them to be informed, thinking, and democratic citizens who can impact their own future and the lives of those around them. 

What depiction of education within my culture of curriculum captures many of its important themes and assumptions?

• I do not have a picture in my head that works, but I think of education as active, questioning/skeptical, curious, rigorous, thoughtful, and open-minded.

• ​Active. Education and learning are active endeavors for both students and teachers. Neither is well served by a transmission or banking model.

• Questioning/Skeptical. Students should have a healthy dose of skepticism when it comes to accepting material assertions about the world.

• Curious. Students and teachers should indulge there curiosity. 

• Rigorous. Students (and teachers) should be pushed to grow and learn a little with each and every task possible.

• Thoughtful. Education should explore all sides of any issue and, especially in social studies, embrace the opportunity to consider multiple perspectives. 

• Open-minded. Students and teachers should listen and consider other points of view and adjust their own when faced with new information, or old information that has reemerged. In no case, should they trim the information they consider to better fit their point of view.

What are the goals of education or schooling for the individual? What is the ultimate benefit for society if all individuals were education in this culture of curriculum?

• As I said in the Quote focus, the point of social studies education is to teach students to think critically for themselves so the can make informed decisions based on credible information with the historic, political, social, and geographic context of the issue or decision.

• Importantly, the goals is to teach students how to think critically, not what to think. Social studies' aim is not to produce indoctrinated sheep. 

• If all individuals could achieve this goal, we might actually live in a democratic society. Our country is governed by a democratic republic, but we appear to be lacking what we need to be a democratic society. ​​​

How has my culture of curriculum been present in schooling? What are the forces, events, and ideas that influenced my culture of curriculum?

• ​My specific culture of curriculum has not been tested in a a school, but I see that others have had success with approaches that seem similar (Ayers, 2016; Merchant et al., 2022; Kahne & Westheimer, 2014).

• My life experience and recent political events has shaped my culture of curriculum more than anything else.

• First, one thing has been proven over and over in every context of my life, a person has to be true to themselves and be themselves to be excellent; a person can be satisfactory, and even good, when they are trying to channel someone else or follow a confining set of strictures, but they will never excel. If the outside forces are too confining, they will deny students excellent teaching and learning opoportunities.

• In my life, critical thinking and exercising judgment have been the keys to success for me and those I have worked with as a Department of Justice Attorney, not remembering every name, date, and fact. You need to be aware of the facts and have a sense of relevant names and dates, but it is more important to be able to find those things in the oceans of data available today than remembering them, unless your playing Trivial Pursuit. (I'll take on anyone using the original Genesis edition of Trivial Pursuit, but my knowledge of pop culture has only declined since then, putting me at a significant disadvantage.)

• And recent political events have only made it abundantly clear that students need to be armed with the skills to evaluate the credibility of information sources, rather than give credence to bald-faced, self-serving prevarications openly used to manipulate people, which can kill when they relate to medical advice.

What are the beliefs about student’s needs, development, competencies, motive, and interests? How have these beliefs influenced practice?

• ​Secondary school students have unlimited possibilities ahead of them, and they have not reached the point of no return in relation to anything.

• Every day these students face a whirlwind of events, stressors, and decisions that all feel life-defining and altering . It can be miserable as they find their identity and gain confidence to go out into the world. It's a difficult time of life. I've never met anyone who would like to relive their high school years other than the local star athlete who peaked in high school. 

• And students, like most of us, do not want to waste their time and energy on something that does not seem to provide any future value to them. So like any audience, you need to draw them in, which social studies is primed to do because at its core are stories about people, which students enjoy. (Note, I did not say memory tests of facts, figures, and dates are engaging for anyone.)

• This, students need generosity, support, patience, understanding, and to be met where they are.

• I expect these beliefs to keep me going when my efforts are frustrated as I need to adjust my teaching or other demands are eating up their mental bandwidth.

What are the beliefs about the role of teachers? How should they facilitate learning?

• ​The teacher is a guide, facilitator, and coach, but not the "source of truth"—i.e., the single, authoritative data source that a company relies on for accurate information ("Finding a balance," 2024). In those roles, the teacher holds students accountable, pushes them to extend themselves, helps them recover when they overextend, and plans new adventures to challenge students.

• The teacher advocates for their students, making sure they have opportunities and and working to remove obstacles to learning.

• Most importantly, and to facilitate learning, the teacher creates a classroom that 

  • encourages questions—No earnest question is a bad question.

  • encourages challenges to orthodoxy and unsupported assertions—In law school, it was stressed to reject naked conclusory statements and going to law school in St. Louis, in the Show-Me State of Missouri ("Missouri history," n.d.), only emphasized that.

  • seizes the opportunities these questions and challenges provide—Questions and challenges often reveal student interest or their funds of knowledge, and you should never miss a chance to leverage either for teaching and learning. 

What constitutes the subject matter? How is the subject matter organized?

• ​See response in Quote focus above; information is not education.

• The subject matter of social studies is to gain a sense of history, politics, society, and geography. For example, social studies is not about learning as many dates and names as possible, when those can be looked up in a book, but it is about understanding how people, actions, and events are connected—e.g., causation, correlation, sequencing, perspectives, motives, and biases. 

• Ideally, the study of social studies should be organized thematically, and within themes in chronological sequence, because the corpus of social studies knowledges grows each and every day, making it impossible to cover it all in a chronological manner.

What is the environment in the classroom? In the school? How is instruction organized?

• ​I will work to make my classroom reflect my answers in the other focuses, especially in Impressions and Teachers.

• The classroom should be an active, questioning/skeptical, curious, rigorous, thoughtful, and open-minded space where a student can share their thoughts; question each other, the teacher, the textbook, and any other authority; and opportunities to leverage students; curiosity, interest, and funds of knowledge should not passed over. 

• The school should mirror and support the active, questioning/skeptical, curious, rigorous, thoughtful, and open-minded classroom. It should be collaborative and supportive and hold students, teachers, and administrators accountable.

• As with Content, instruction would be ordered thematically with each day building on the skills and knowledge from the previous day with iterative loops to revisit the most important skills and knowledge. In addition, where social studies can partner or cross-over with other subject matters, it will make learning in both subjects more meaningful.

What are the models of curriculum development? Who plans the curriculum?  Who has the power to make decisions?

• ​At the top-level, the government sets the standards, but the most important aspects of the curriculum occur in the classroom and at the school level in the implementation of those standards. Because no student is like every other student and no class is like every other class. Teachers must tweak and adjust the curriculum to best engage their students and classes every day, sometimes mid-class, and even from class to class across a high school day teaching the same lesson.

• A robot can drill the content, but only the teacher can mediate those standards to lead to meaningful learning  which is relevant to the students and includes critical thinking skills. The fact that human graders are still needed to grade AP exam essays proves the point. Maybe AI will get to the point where it can evaluate such an essay to make a pass/fail determination, but I believe that only a human reviewer can recognize brilliance and intervene to help students overcome many difficulties in learning to write.

• So that makes the other answers easy, the teacher has to have the power to make many decisions to make any curriculum successful. Within a school, many decisions can be made school-wide, but even those require the teacher to implement them in manner that works for the teacher and for their group of students. The decision-making power may formally lay elsewhere, but it will always lie in the classroom if you desire to promote meaningful learning responsive to the students in the classroom. 

How should students be assessed? How is the worth or success of the curriculum determined?

• ​Students should be assessed based on where they end up. Can they demonstrate the skills and knowledge we set as goals for them by the end of the class? Isn't that the goal?  Do we really care if they performed dreadfully as the journeyed to that goal? I think not. Otherwise, we will be rewarding a fast-starting student even if they cap out before their slow-starting fellow student who can achieve much more. Both of those students should be valued and rewarded in how we grade, but I would put the most weight on where they end up. (And I am not talking about the student who refuses to engage until the very end.)

•  Unfortunately in social studies, the true worth and success of the curriculum cannot be easily measured. But I would contend that a student that learns to write and use critical their thinking skills in social studies improves across the board, academically and in life. I learned more about how to write and construct and support an argument from my 10th grade World History teacher than I learned in another aspect of my education, including all of law school, but I didn't truly understand that until after I graduated from law school 12 years later.  

• That said, we should focus on assessing critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate the credibility of evidence and not the final answer in evaluating social studies skills. In many disciplines there is one correct answer, but in social studies there are facts—and there are really only one set of facts, despite the delusions of many in the public sphere—which must be interpreted to reach an informed, reasoned answer. This latter situation is is more akin to what we typically face in our lives and should be the focus of assessment. 

What problems or challenges do teachers face when they work in or try to implement this culture of curriculum?

• Rather than inviting trouble by focusing on legislators becoming curriculum designers, it is more productive to focus on the challenges that I may be able to influence.

• The challenges are many. Probably the most significant is that this culture of curriculum takes work and commitment and to be the most successful and requires building a relationship with your students. Building this relationship takes time and requires releasing the reins to allow students to think for themselves, which this curriculum demands. But to someone dropping in on a classroom to observe for a day, it may seem messy and disorganized, and as noted in the Evaluation focus, it can take time to ripen or realize that the intended results have been achieved.  ​​

What problems are inherent in the vision of this curriculum for individuals and society? What are my blind spots that I fail to perceive in relation to this culture of curriculum?

• For teachers, it requires hard work to prepare the active, questioning/skeptical, curious, thoughtful, and open-minded classroom.​

• For the student, it requires a willingness to step out on a limb and think for oneself. 

• For society, many consider an informed, thinking, and democratic citizen who can impact their own future and the lives of those around them as someone who will rock the boat and be a problem, unless they happen to agree with them. Thus, society often is inclined to meddle in search of "right" thinking citizens, versus independent thinkers.

• I wish I knew my blind spots, especially considering that there are probably many more that I am aware of. I could see some arguing that this culture of curriculum is too optimistic and will collapse once it collides with students who lack interest, read below grade level, or otherwise are not prepared to become informed, thinking, and democratic citizens. I have 2 responses.

  • First, while my culture of curriculum may run up against those obstacles, they are only obstacles, which are better framed as challenges.

  • Second, students are not served by a culture of curriculum that does not believe in them, nor are they served by a teacher that lowers expectations because they don't believe in them.

• Will I be disappointed? Yes, probably more than I expect. But will I be amazed? Most definitely! And that is the secret sauce that will keep me going.