Question

What are some specific ways a teacher can guide a student to articulate their ideas and develop higher-level questions about a social studies topic?

Answer 1

Answer.

In a participatory form of learning, a crucial task in teaching school students is to help the students develop student inquiry, that is to help them develop their own higher-order questions, which they can use to approach any learning situation. Such an approach becomes particularly important in the social sciences curriculum as it helps to avoid the passivity associated with didactic teaching and instead encourage the students to approach knowledge and practices associated with their society, culture, political system, geographical environment, more proactively.

A primary way to guide students in developing higher order questions in the social sciences is to Model curiosity. A teacher can Ask big, higher-order novel questions, and do so as a learner, share his/ her own curiosity about a specific topic into the classroom and share them with passion. By taking such an approach, the teacher can reach out to the students as an equal and encourage them to participate in building and learning information by participating in the process of question generation. For instance, a History teacher may ask her class, “Hey, y'all. Have you ever wondered what kind of propaganda speeches did people in The United States use during WWII? What do you think it would have been like to listen to and be a travel of such speeches.”

Moreover, another technique is to Provide rich stimulus to inspire rich questions. Exploring and introducing well-written, progressive pieces about topics that can increase students interest and involvement would influence them to start asking higher-order questions since information presented through forms such as music, documentary films, political cartoons etc, would appeal to the students' minds and encourage them to relate to the topic my probing the issue with their own set of questions.

Such questions can provide effective prototypes to the students to understand that events and facts learned in the oscillator sciences are not merely textual but they are a part of ordinary everyday life of the people’s and this can Instill their own curiosity about raising their own set of significant questions about the social processes.