Social Education

C3 Teachers Social Education Column

In 2017, C3 Teachers began a partnership with the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) to publish a Teaching the C3 Framework column in each issue of Social Education. Edited by Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant, the column features articles about designing inquiry-based curriculum and teaching with inquiry. Articles in our series appear below beginning with our most publication. Each entry includes a brief excerpt and link to the article at Social Education. An NCSS membership subscription is required to access most of the articles.

Column 36: (July 2023) Designing and Teaching a Critical Inquiry: Lessons Learned by Emma S. Thacker, Josephine L. Valentine

Since the publication of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, social studies teachers, school leaders, and teacher educators have explored ways to implement it in the classroom, with various results. Much of the published work around the implementation of the C3 Framework in classrooms highlights its use in middle and high school classrooms; however, particularly in the context of limited instructional time for social studies in elementary classrooms, the possibilities of using the C3 Framework to bring more inquiry based elementary social studies instruction needs more attention. In this article, we explore how a second-grade teacher used the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) as a way to engage in inquiry based social studies instruction with students in a low-income, majority-minority elementary school with attention to both her challenges and successes

Column 35: (May/June 2023) What Can Women Teach Us About Equality? An Inquiry-Based Curricular Approach to a Gender and Women’s Studies Course by Christy Cartner, Kathy Swan, Ryan Crowley

In this article, we describe an inquiry-based approach to a Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) course at Bryan Station High School in Lexington, Kentucky, designed to confront contemporary women’s issues. The course consists of a curricular loop of six inquiries developed with the Inquiry Design Model.1 The inquiries push students to consider the larger conceptual question that guides the course: “What can women teach us about equality?”

Column 34: (March/April 2023) IDM as an Assessment System by S.G. Grant, Kathy Swan, John Lee

Emerging from the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) was initially intended as an approach to curriculum development. Although curriculum is often treated as an independent element of teaching and learning, it is a distinction without a clear difference. As we work with teachers, we now see assessment as the next frontier for IDM.

Column 33: (January/February 2023) Designing Questions for Critical Inquiry by Jenni Conrad and Jennifer Gallagher

Experienced teachers and teacher educators agree that crafting compelling questions for inquiry is challenging yet vital for shaping inquiries that support meaningful student learning and action. According to the C3 Framework, compelling questions should “focus on enduring issues and concerns.” Without criteria for what constitutes an enduring issue and concern, teachers may struggle to prioritize topics that are most important for students in our democracy to explore. Teachers’ decision-making about which compelling questions are most worthy of instructional time and resources quickly becomes complex in the sociopolitical realities of schools.

Column 32: (November 2022) Why Should I Care About Book Bans? by Bonnie Lewis and Laura H. Darolia

The public debate regarding problematic ideas and personal autonomy has cascaded into classrooms over the last two years, as families and politicians demand more control over what our youth are learning. One approach to limiting exposure to perceived harmful or controversial content has been to remove it completely.

In this paper, we present the blueprint for a ninth-grade inquiry that focuses on book bans. Through a series of questions, tasks, and sources, students first consider what makes books worth reading, then analyze arguments for banning particular kinds of books, and explore reasons why and how students are organizing to resist book bans.

Column 31: (October 2022) The Political Immersion Project: Differentiated Experiential Inquiry in Civics Education by Robert Alvis, Scott Morrison, and Amanda Ruvolo

When Sarah started asking questions about the roles that mayors play in local governments, Robert did not anticipate that she would be sitting in North Carolina’s Burlington mayor’s office a few weeks later. Sarah’s email to Burlington’s mayor had been simple and to the point. She explained that she was doing a political immersion project in her high school civics course, and she wanted to find out more about the duties of the mayor. To everyone’s surprise, someone on the mayor’s staff responded within days, and Sarah soon had an appointment to meet with and interview the mayor.

Not all the students in Robert’s civics course are expected to land an interview with a local politician, but they are expected to engage in a cycle of inquiry. Questions, tasks, and sources are the mainstays of the Inquiry Design Model, but an additional element in Robert’s political immersion project is experience. Students are expected to participate, either in person or virtually, in local political activity. The purpose is for students to develop authentic, real-world

Column 30: (May/June 2022) How Do We Discuss Controversial Issues that Confront Injustices?: Three Approaches to Framing Critical Inquiries by Daniel G. Krutka and Mark Hlavacik

In 1921, white residents of Tulsa destroyed the Black neighborhood of Greenwood and murdered hundreds of Black Tulsans. Viola Fletcher was seven years old and survived the attacks. On the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, at 107 years old, Fletcher testified before the House Judiciary Committee. She not only called on all U.S. citizens to remember this event but also called for reparations for those whose wealth was destroyed by the mob.

For occasions when educators ask students to discuss controversial public issues as part of an IDM lesson or unit, we have identified three approaches. Historically, deliberation has been offered as the default discussion framework for controversial issues. However, we believe both civic litigation and counternarration offer frameworks that are particularly
attuned to confronting the types of injustices that get taken up in critical inquiries.

Column 29: (March/April 2022) Disrupting Anti-Asian Violence During Epidemics: A C3 Inquiry Lesson by Sohyun An

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old white man traveled to three different locations in metro Atlanta and shot eight people to death.1 Six of the victims were Asian immigrant women. A witness reported hearing the shooter say, “I am going to kill all Asians.”

As an Asian American woman living just 15 minutes from the mass shooting sites, I was beyond horrified and heartbroken. However, I was not surprised. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in January 2020, people of Asian descent have been targeted. From coast to U.S. coast, Asian people have been yelled at, spat on, attacked, or harmed. My children and I have been told to “go back to China!” (I was born in South Korea) and to “Stay home, you sickly people!” by strangers at a grocery store and at a park.

By inquiring into contemporary and past cases of scapegoating Asian Americans for public health crises, students can learn to debunk and disrupt these stereotypes. Such racial literacy is vital for the students to take informed action and prevent anti-Asian violence. This article presents historical background and a high school inquiry on the history of anti-Asian violence during epidemics.

Column 28: (January/February 2022) Countering the Past of Least Resistance: A Hard History Inquiry-Based Curriculum by Kathy Swan, Ryan Crowley, Nick Stamoulacatos, Bonnie Lewis, and Grant Stringer

The past year has been turbulent for social studies educators. The summer of 2020 brought calls for racial justice and discussions of structural racism to the forefront in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and widespread Black Lives Matter protests. Then, shortly thereafter, a group of pundits, politicians, and parents weaponized the term critical race theory and framed any attempts to teach about historical oppression as divisive and unpatriotic. In stunning coordination, state legislatures across the U.S. began to introduce legislation limiting the ways teachers could discuss issues of race, gender, and other aspects of identity.2 In a matter of months, talk of racial justice moved from commonplace to, in some settings, potentially costing teachers their jobs. The overarching conflict is most plainly encapsulated in the competing visions put forward by the New York Times’ 1619 Project,3 which positioned enslavement as foundational to the development of the United States, and the Trump administration’s 1776 Report,4 which called for an uncritical re-commitment to the nation’s founding documents. Despite debates on the historical merits of each camp, both view history education as a fight for the soul and character of the nation. As educators witnessing these culture wars in action, it can be tempting to succumb to the heat of these ideological factions and seek safety in the past of least resistance.

Download the article HERE

Column 27: (November/December 2021) Inquiry-Based Core Practices for Social Studies Teacher Education by Alexander Cuenca

Since the introduction of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards in 2013, several states across the country have incorporated into their standards the idea that high quality social studies instruction is characterized by active student engagement with inquiry. Although the notion that inquiry drives learning in social studies classrooms is not new or particularly provocative, the C3 Framework has enabled states to embrace inquiry as policy, which is a distinct turn in the history of social studies standards. The most recent iteration of the “social studies wars” has focused on curricular policymaking through content-based standards and turned mostly on the question of “whose” knowledge is included or excluded in social studies standards. However, the C3 Framework bypasses content prescriptions, and instead, seeks to codify inquiry as the pedagogical modality that distinguishes quality social studies education.

Column 26: (October 2021) Scaffolding Historical Source Work Using the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) by Stephanie van Hover, David Hicks, Colleen Fitzpatrick, and Melissa Lisanti

In day-to-day life, we learn complicated tasks in component parts—one step at a time. A soccer player does not intuitively know how to dribble, pass, play a position, or play the offside trap. The coach breaks apart the steps, the player learns them and then practices, over and over, with ongoing feedback, until match time. A musician does not sit at a piano and automatically know how to play, but rather learns notes, chords, and finally full songs that are practiced over and over until a performance. A historian does not just know how to construct a narrative, but has to learn the conceptual underpinnings of the discipline, how to ask robust questions, how to contextualize and analyze sources, how to synthesize multiple pieces of evidence, and how to develop evidence-based claims and arguments. As these examples suggest, learning to engage in complex tasks such as historical inquiry requires providing learners with specific scaffolds and explicit strategy instruction to help them engage in the doing of history.

The specific scaffolds and strategy instructions outlined in this article will help students engage in the complex task of historical inquiry.

Column 25: (September 2021) The State of Social Studies Standards: What Is the Impact of the C3 Framework? by Ryan New, Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant

On Constitution Day 2013, the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) published the College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards. The document was written by a team of academics with specialties in social studies education and its disciplines in consultation with state education agencies, professional organizations, and teachers from across the country.1 This collaboration produced a watershed moment for social studies. Publication of the C3 Framework demonstrated that social studies educators could get along and work ambitiously toward a common goal and that they could produce a framework reconciling the “turf wars” that have hampered previous social studies standards and reform efforts.

This study examines the impact of the C3 Framework on state standards presents interesting implications about the ways in which the framework has influenced state-level social studies policies and standards-based content and skills nationwide.

Column 24: (May/June, 2021) Power, Injustice, Costs and Benefits: Looping Curricular Concepts with the Inquiry Design Model by Kathy Swan, S.G. Grant, John Lee, Andrew Danner, Christy Cartner, and Grant Stringer

Ideally, inquiry is not a once in a while experience. After all, inquiry is the essence of social studies and we know students need lots and lots of practice to get better at it.1 In other words, we want inquiry to loop throughout the social studies curricula. What do we mean by the term “looping”? At its simplest, we mean offering students opportunities to engage in inquiry in regular intervals and in a coherent fashion within and across grade levels.

Engaging students in inquiry at regular intervals, or looping inquiry, within and across grade levels promotes deeper content knowledge and skills over time.

Column 23: (March/April, 2021) What’s In A Claim? A Framework for Helping Students Write Persuasive Claims by Ryan Lewis

With ten minutes left in class, my junior year sociology students sat quietly, full of controlled effort as they tackled the exit question on the overhead. The question was a simple supporting question that they had been working on as part of our latest inquiry. After a few minutes, I began walking the aisles, glancing over some shoulders, stopping here and there to look closely at student work. What was I looking for? Like many teachers, at this point in a lesson, I was hoping to see coherent answers to the question. However, over the last few years, I have come to look for something more specific. I was looking for a claim—a two- to three-sentence long response that would reveal what I needed to know about the depth of student learning. I stopped at the desk of one student who had finished her response. I picked her paper up, read it, and handed it back. “This is good, really good,” I said. “A few months ago, you wouldn’t have written this.” She responded, “I know. After doing this all year, it’s easy now.”

Teaching students to make an effective claim is a critical step in establishing a culture of inquiry in the social studies education.

Download the article HERE

Column 22: (January/February, 2021) Making Inquiry Possible: A Film Project on Building a Culture of Inquiry by Kathleen Swan, Ryan Crowley, S.G. Grant, John Lee, Gerry Swan, Callaway Stivers, and Gates Sweeney

Social studies has long had a bad rap as a “just the facts” school subject. That reputation isn’t entirely deserved but it’s been true long enough that far too many students have said “no thank you” when it’s time for social studies. However, as Bob Dylan once wrote, “The times … they are a changin’.” The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards (NCSS, 2013) places inquiry at the center of good social studies teaching and learning.1 Instead of social studies courses that emphasize rote memorization through the use of textbooks and lecture-based instruction, the C3 Framework asks teachers to reframe their content and instruction around important, compelling questions that we grapple with as citizens and within the social studies disciplines.

Educators can get an inside look at how some classrooms have shifted to inquiry-based social studies with four documentary films featured in the The Making Inquiry Possible project.

Column 21: (November/December, 2020) Blueprinting an Inquiry-Based Curriculum: Planning with the Inquiry Design Model by Kathy Swan, S.G. Grant, and John Lee

Teachers introduced to the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) are often relieved to learn that inquiry isn’t a fuzzy ideal, but rather is a curricular approach with a defined vernacular—questions, tasks, and sources. The inquiry blueprint is a one-page visual representation of the questions, tasks, and sources that define an inquiry.1 In the blueprint, there are compelling and supporting questions, formative and summative performance tasks, and disciplinary sources that aid students in answering the inquiry’s questions.

The authors describe five types of inquiry that keep students engaged, promote student agency, and meet the need of teachers for curriculum flexibility.

Column 20: (October, 2020) Dining with Democracy: Discussion as Informed Action by Paula McAvoy, Arine Lowery, Nada Wafa, and Christy Byrd

Jeremy Thomas and Russell McBride are social studies teachers in North Carolina and, until recently, were colleagues at a charter school outside of Raleigh, serving students in grades 6–12. After learning about the Inquiry Design Model (IDM),1 both teachers implemented it into their classrooms and immediately saw how the blueprint helped deepen students’ engagement, understanding of concepts, and ability to make and support arguments. The teachers even took the model to the next level by co-teaching an elective in which students learned to design their own inquiries and took turns leading classmates through their lessons. The course was student-centered and alive with discussion. As a result of their collaboration, Jeremy and Russell made the IDM blueprint a regular feature of their school’s social studies program.

A “Dinner with Democracy” event encourages civil discourse, promotes deliberation, and exposes students to different perspectives.

Column 19: (September, 2020) Zooming Inquiry: Online Teaching with the Pomodoro Technique by Kathy Swan, Andrew Danner, Meghan Hawkins, S.G. Grant, and John Lee

When the pandemic shut schools down in the spring, teachers mobilized the educational home front and taught themselves how to navigate familiar and unfamiliar instructional challenges in the virtual classroom. Say “Zoom” to a group of teachers now and you might see them twitch, tear up, or roll their eyes. Ask teachers how they managed inquiry on Zoom and you may wish you were more than six feet apart.

Implementing 25-minute instructional blocks when teaching online can help learners develop stronger inquiry skills and prevent the zombie-like effects of staring nonstop at a screen.

Column 18: (May/June, 2020) Inquiry as a Way of Thinking through the COVID-19 Pandemic by Kathy Swan, S.G. Grant, and John Lee

A crisis can play out in lots of ways, as we are all seeing right now. Our “now” is no time to abandon inquiry; in fact, we argue that an inquiry mindset is more valuable than ever. Consequently, we wrote this piece to help readers think about how they might do inquiry even within these challenging times. But, fear not, weary social studies teachers. We are not adding to your impossible to-do list. Instead, we argue that inquiry is happening all around us and by recognizing and supporting this natural inquiry mindset, you are doing inquiry.

Our students will understand the principles of inquiry better by examining their own reactions to the pandemic.

Column 17: (March/April, 2020 The Signal and the Noise: Coaching Pre-Service Candidates to Teach with Questions, Tasks, and Sources by Kathy Swan, Ryan Crowley, and Gerry Swan

In his best-selling book, The Signal and the Noise (2012), Nate Silver investigates the art and science of predicting the future by finding a true signal in the noisy world of big data.1 He interviews successful forecasters from a range of fields— from weather to sports to the stock market—trying to weave together a theory of what makes these individuals’ predictions reliable. What becomes clear in the book is that these experts do not pay attention to all the data points and instead focus on the most salient variables.

Teacher educators are inundated with ideas about what their students should know. A newly developed protocol focused on questions, tasks, and sources can help teachers cut through this information overload.

Column 16: (January/February, 2020) In Support of Students’ Needs: Exploring the Benefits of the Inquiry Design Model by Christopher T. Dague

For 13 years, I was a high school history teacher in North Carolina. During that time I had the good fortune to work alongside teachers whose work I respected and admired. I respected their savvy and thoughtful instructional design, and I admired the meaningful relationships they developed with their students. Perhaps most importantly, in each of these teachers, I observed an unmistakable passion for their content and students alike.

The Inquiry Design Model offers an instructional framework that enables students to exercise control and agency in their social studies inquiries.

Column 15: (November/December, 2019) Can the Civics Test Make You a Good Citizen? Reconciling the Civics Test with Inquiry-Based Instruction by Jennifer Fraker, Carly Muetterties, Gerry Swan,, and Kathy Swan

Students’ knowledge of civics is bleak. As evidenced by National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) civics assessment data, only 23 percent of students performed at or above the proficient level on the 2014 civics assessment.1 Whether eroded by the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) or the evershrinking footprint of social studies in K-12 schooling, educators across the political and pedagogical spectrum agree that students’ lack of civic knowledge is problematic.

Engaging students in a structured inquiry offers an excellent approach to bridging the tension between a fact-based civics test and inquiry-based learning.

Column 14: (October, 2019) Using Inquiry and Digital Storytelling to Teach about American Enslavement: Anna, One Woman’s Quest for Freedom by Grant Scribner, and Aaron Johnson

An inquiry framed around the experience of an enslaved woman, highlighted in a recent film, offers an opportunity for meaningful student engagement with the history of American enslavement.

https://www.socialstudies.org/social-education/83/5/using-inquiry-and-digital-storytelling-teach-about-american-enslavement-anna

Column 13: (September, 2019) Be the Change: Guiding Students to Take Informed Action by Carly Muetterties and Kathy Swan

Teaching the history of the United States necessarily leads teachers to struggle with the history of enslavement in North America and the nature of its influence on American institutions and social relations. In recent years, many teachers have begun to shift their attention from the broad political effects of American slavery to the lives of enslaved people as historical actors. Attempts to investigate and understand the lives of enslaved people in history classrooms have occasionally led both to powerful learning and to uncomfortable or even harrowing experiences for students and teachers.

This guided inquiry walks teachers through the steps to help students understand a societal problem, assess possible actions, and move to civic action.

Column 12: (May/June, 2019) Engaging Social Studies Educators: Professional Development on Inquiry by Patricia Krizan

Social studies teachers often have a love-hate relationship with inquiry. The possibilities of a dynamic and engaging approach to learning labor against time constraints imposed by a content heavy curriculum. In that scenario, how can professional development (PD) on inquiry inform educators and encourage skeptical teachers to implement this practice? How can those responsible for teacher learning opportunities plan meaningful, inquiry-based PD?

Having a meaningful plan for professional development on inquiry-based learning will translate into richer instruction for students.

Column 11: (March/April, 2019) Inquiry in the Social Studies: Reflections of an Octogenarian by Peter B. Dow

What a pleasant surprise awaited me in Chicago last November! Following an absence of nearly a decade, I attended the annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies, where I was invited to appear on a panel to discuss Geoffrey Scheurman and Ronald Evans’s new book on the social studies reforms of the 1960s. What struck me about the Chicago NCSS gathering was the amount of attention given to the topic of “inquiry.” At the conference bookshop, the first publication that caught my eye was Swan, Lee, and Grant’s Inquiry Design Model: Building Inquiry in Social Studies. I was also surprised to find that a number of the conference sessions, and even some of the publishers’ displays in the exhibit hall, proposed “inquiry-based instruction.” Why was I startled by this? After my experience as project director of Jerome Bruner’s Man: A Course of Study, a 1960s model for social studies inquiry that became a casualty of the politics of the period, I never thought I would see the day when the social studies profession openly embraced a questioning approach to exploring our social world.

When teachers are driven mainly to transmit a prescribed curriculum, student curiosity is left by the wayside.

Column 10: (January/February 2019) The Deliberative Classroom: Inquiry-Based Teaching, Evaluative Questions, and Deliberation by Stefanie Olbrys

When I first met Angela,* an 8th grade student, she was disengaged, rarely in attendance, failing or almost failing every class, and homeless for part of the year. In every respect, Angela was an “at risk” student, one who felt that school had nothing to offer her. It was because of students like Angela that I decided to transform my social studies practice. In my first 10 years as a traditional teacher, I had had success with many students. But not all. When I encountered the C3 Framework,1 I saw an opportunity to develop a different approach that I hoped would encourage all my students to reach their highest potential. The approach I created—The Deliberative Classroom—has pushed me as much as it has pushed my students. The benefits have been powerful: better academic performance along with development of the twenty-first-century skills of collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity, which will support student success in the future. Best of all, these benefits have been shared by all of my students.

In a classroom that promotes deliberation, students practice the kinds of speaking, listening, and critical thinking skills that advance active citizenship.

Column 9: (November/December 2018) Why Korea? Why Now? Using Inquiry to Teach about the Korean War and Its Legacy by Jongwoo Han and Joseph Karb

Numerous research and scholarly articles have been written on the Korean War. Yet in many K-12 history classrooms, the war and its legacy are still “forgotten” and are only addressed with a paragraph or two in a textbook. The Korean War Legacy and World History Digital Education foundations are changing this situation by honoring veterans, preserving their stories, and creating online teaching materials for the social studies classroom. The new online resources include an interactive narrative history of the war, C3 Framework aligned curricular resources, a special documentary film, and the largest collection of Korean War Veterans’ interviews from 12 UN countries that participated in the war (with interviews from the other 10 UN countries to be completed by 2020) (www.koreanwarlegacy.org). The central feature of the web resource is the Memory Bank of historical texts combined with short oral history videos from the 1,100 interviews of veterans collected by the Korean War Legacy Foundation.

The inquiry-based materials and audio interviews of Korean War veterans highlighted in this article offer an excellent entry point into a lesson on the “forgotten” war and its legacy.

Column 8: (October 2018) C3 Teachers Blogging: Grappling with the Realities of Inquiry by Carly Muetterties

These quotations are opening lines of educators’ blog posts on C3 Teachers (www.c3teachers.org). For the last four years, I have been the managing editor of the C3 Teachers website, collaborating with many teacher leaders across the country, as well as providing my own personal reflections on inquiry learning. C3 Teachers offers a virtual space that empowers teachers as they wrestle with inquiry. The bulk of the website offers teacher-created, open-resource curriculum inquiries for K-12 classrooms. I would argue, however, that the heart and soul of C3 Teachers is the blog space where educators share their experiences with inquiry-based teaching and learning. Since its launch in 2014, over 50 contributors have reflected on their work using the C3 Framework and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM).

The educators’ blog space of the C3 Teachers website offers teachers a valuable opportunity to share their experiences on inquiry-based teaching and reflect on their own practices.

Column 7: (September 2018) Getting Inquiry Design Just Right by Wayne Journell, Adam M. Friedman, Emma S. Thacker, and Paul G. Fitchett

The notion of teaching social studies through inquiry is far from a new development. With the publication of the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics, Economics, Geography, and History, however, there is arguably a greater emphasis on inquiry in K-12 social studies education than ever before.1 Since its publication, the C3 Framework has received considerable attention in NCSS conference sessions and in the pages of Social Education. Some recent empirical work has looked at teachers’ and other stakeholders’ views of the various components of the framework.2 Yet, we still do not know a lot about how teachers are designing inquiries to put the C3 Framework into practice in elementary and secondary classrooms.

Creating an effective compelling question is the cornerstone of any inquiry that engages students with evidence in critical ways.

Column 6: (May/June 2018) Questions, Tasks, Sources: Focusing on the Essence of Inquiry by Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant

How many times should I do inquiry in a year? This is the number one question educators ask us about inquiry, and we understand why. One of the inescapable challenges to inquiry is its lack of efficiency in “covering” content. Inquiry necessarily takes longer than direct instruction and this can be problematic for teachers struggling to find time to cover the breadth of content outlined in most social studies courses. As a result, we often suggested that teachers begin with two to four inquiries a year, believing that a couple of meaningful inquiry experiences a year is better than none.

A focused inquiry approach, like the one on Pearl Harbor in this article, enables teachers to weave inquiry into the fabric of their courses as part of their daily instruction.

Column 5: (March/April 2018) Using Project-Based Learning to Drive Inquiry and Student Questioning by Andrew Miller

Project-based learning (PBL) is a powerful way to make learning meaningful to students and to promote student questions and ownership of the inquiry process. It is a useful way to design and deliver curriculum that is similar in many ways to the Inquiry Design Model (IDM). Although PBL and IDM both value inquiry and student questioning, PBL features key components that promote student-led inquiry and attention to authentic products and tasks.

A true project-based learning experience provides students with a voice and choice in what they want to learn.

Column 4 (January/February 2018): Making Inquiry Critical: Examining Power and Inequity in the Classroom by Ryan M. Crowley, and LaGarrett J. King

What does it mean to approach inquiry from a critical perspective? It is not quite as simple as it may sound. We use the term critical in a way that is distinct from the broader educational goal of encouraging critical thinking. Although critical thinking is a crucial skill, our use of “critical” refers specifically to the use of critical theory. Critical theory is one of the predominant schools of thought in the social sciences. Like all theory, it is a framework used for explaining—and examining—something about the world. Critical theory pays special attention to the social world, focusing on the hierarchical nature of social relations and examining how these unequal power relationships lead to privilege for some and oppression for others.

A truly critical inquiry should identify unequal power relationships in society and offer students counter-narratives to transform unjust social relations.

Column 3 (November 2017): Calibrating Your “Compelling Compass”: Teacher-Constructed Prompts to Assist Question Development by Rebecca Mueller

Since the publication of The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework in 2013, there has been growing interest in compelling questions and their impact on social studies instruction. But what exactly does “compelling” mean? How do teachers know when they have hit “the sweet spot between the qualities of being intellectually rigorous and relevant to students?”1 As more and more states include similar language in their own standards,2 it has become increasingly important to understand how classroom teachers conceive of compelling questions so we may learn from them and grow in our development and use of inquiry-based questions in social studies.

These key prompts can help social studies teachers and students gauge a compelling question’s rigor, relevance, and functionality.

Column 2 (October 2017): Stimulating and Sustaining Inquiry with Students’ Questions by Our Colleagues at the Right Question Institute

It is crucial that students in the twenty-first century learn how to formulate and use questions, drive their own inquiries, and apply question formulation skills in their everyday lives. Students’ ability to formulate questions can help support learning both within and outside the classroom and is foundational for promoting democratic thinking and civic engagement beyond the classroom.

A simple yet rigorous technique enables students to develop their ability to ask questions as they plan and drive their own inquiries.

Column 1 (September 2017): Questions that Compel and Support by S.G. Grant, Kathy Swan and John Lee

“What’s the difference between a compelling and supporting question, again?” Perhaps no other question arises more frequently than this one during the professional development sessions we lead. Teachers quickly grasp of the power of questions, but the line between a compelling and a supporting question can blur.

Successful inquiries using the C3 Framework depend on compelling questions that structure an inquiry and supporting questions that allow the inquiry to unfold coherently.