Many social studies teachers get lost in source selection. We can’t be blamed for it. It’s a hazard of the job. Our passion for learning and for social studies instruction leads us down rabbit holes that force us to make difficult instructional choices about what to share with students and what sources best fit the questions we ask. This makes raising a content barrier to entry all too easy.
One way to address this barrier is to take a step back and consider, what is the idea or the concept we want students to take away from this lesson? Do we want students to just know a lot of things, or to walk away with the core ideas and skills needed to continue to be curious and learn more? In other words, sometimes less is more. Some of the most powerful lessons are ones where the sources are, on their face, the simplest or shortest. Ones where students are given the space and trusted to make meaning from sources on their own.
A remarkable example of this comes again from the BBI stack about Government Trust. The first blueprint in the stack focuses on the Pentagon Papers. Instead of offering a complicated telling of the papers leading into the Vietnam War or instead of watching The Post, students are offered a little bit of context and a list of book titles about the Vietnam War and asked simply to sort them into two groups, ones you think were written by authors connected to the government and ones by authors not connected to the government. Students are trusted with the space to make criteria and sort the titles on their own. After this, students are asked to complete another sorting task, to organize the titles in the order they think they were written. These tasks are simple in instruction but ask a lot in terms of cognitive load for students as they collaborate through this lesson. To make up for the cognitive complexity of the task, the sources are relatively simple. From a small collection of only book titles an entire lesson is made with a couple simple steps of student sorting and just thinking.
Imagine if instead the sources were written descriptions of the Pentagon Papers, or a timeline of events, or an entire movie. Rather than not demonstrating trust to students by bogging them down in a mound of work, or tasks that require predominately recall or identification, this blueprint trusts students to make meaning out of a collection of book titles and a couple sorting tasks. In this way, the blueprint lowers content barriers to entry and allows students to find success and confidence in struggling with subjective and complicated ideas. Teachers are able to demonstrate their trust in students by verifying their ideas and trust is built between students through an activity that truly centers collaboration.
