Long gone are the days of the “sage on the stage” social studies teacher who delivered instruction through lecture and asked students to recall content on multiple choice tests. A surge pushing teachers to engage students in social studies skills that social scientists use on a daily basis (asking questions, accomplishing tasks, and analyzing sources) is replacing a more traditional method of instruction. At the tip of this inquiry-based instruction movement is of course the C3 Framework and Inquiry Design Model (IDM). IDM is built not around teachers sharing their knowledge with students on a one-way street but in teachers inviting students into the shared creation of knowledge. However, this knowledge creation community requires a shared fundamental aspect: trust.
Trust-building is an active process and must engage all parties involved. For the classroom this means that teachers trust students, students trust their teacher, and students trust each other. While teachers hopefully demonstrate buy-in to their own lessons, we must create this buy-in for students. In other words, we must lower the barrier to entry for student engagement. However, we often think about “the barrier to entry” as a single idea. How do I make my lesson more approachable for students? It may be helpful to delineate this barrier so that we can more accurately analyze lessons. Let’s consider it through the lens of three separate barriers, each of which must be surpassed for engagement. These could include personal barriers, procedural barriers, and content barriers. Personal barriers to entry are specific for each student. Am I confident enough in myself to engage in this lesson? Everything from the relationship a student has with the teacher, a student’s level of interest in a lesson, how tired a student is, how outgoing of a personality they have, and many other factors lead to increasing personal barriers. Procedural barriers, in contrast, are controlled by the teacher. Do I understand the rules of the activity well enough to engage with the lesson? Needlessly complex activities or classroom rules raise this barrier without making content more accessible. Content barriers are likewise controlled by the teacher. Do I understand the content well enough to engage with this lesson? Long, tedious sources that are not coherent with the task or are too complicated raise this barrier and therefore lower student engagement.
Delineating the barrier to entry for student engagement in this way highlights the factors that may make a student more or less likely to engage. Furthermore, IDM offers a clear framework for dealing with each barrier to entry individually. The IDM framework is based on three main tools of instruction: questions, tasks, and sources. The intentional use of each tool can help us build trust. While personal barriers may be the most complicated and difficult to surpass, we know that intrinsic motivation to engage is the surest way to build relationships with students. What better way to build this motivation than through tangible, relevant, intriguing, and important questions? Our intentional use of clear and simple (but cognitively challenging) tasks can lower procedural barriers, and our use of well-selected, modified, and relevant sources can lower content barriers. Through building coherence amongst questions, tasks, and sources, and by varying the complexity of each over time teachers can use these core elements of IDM to build a trustworthy classroom.
What is trust if not our increased capacity to take greater risks with each other? Over time the goal of the inquiry teacher is to increase intellectual risk-taking amongst their students in a shared space. We hope as social studies teachers that this trust gives our students the ability to leave the classroom and engage with the world at large with greater confidence in struggling with questions, engaging in new tasks, and grappling with varied sources. IDM gives us the shared language and framework to reproduce and share these trust building aspects. However, balancing our use of questions, tasks, and sources to lower personal, procedural, and content barriers is another trick unto itself. A series of future posts will deal with each of these barriers to entry and IDM individually.
