Publications

C3 Teachers is proud to bring you a wide range of topics related to using inquiry in social studies.

Front and center in the work of C3 Teachers is our ongoing effort to support educators as they take on the challenges and opportunities that come with inquiry-based learning. All of our efforts require deep knowledge of research and practice so we that we are acting with confidence when we use inquiry in our classrooms. To support those efforts, we present this collection of scholarship.

Here you’ll find hundreds of links to books, articles, and brief papers. Learn more about inquiry design through our IDM Book Series, an ongoing collection that probes the theory and practice informing the Inquiry Design Model (IDM). Our Social Education columns examine inquiry practice in classrooms and the design moves needed to bring inquiry to life. In our C3 Publications, we also present a comprehensive listing of research and scholarship related to using inquiry in teaching and learning. Finally, be sure to check out our C3 Briefs where we present essays on some of the biggest opportunities for and challenges with using inquiry in the classroom.

The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) Book Series offers educators a practical and conceptually grounded pathway into inquiry-based social studies teaching and curriculum design. Across the series, Grant, Swan, and Lee introduce the foundations of IDM, guide teachers through the process of building inquiries, and extend the model into broader questions of curriculum planning and classroom practice. Whether you are new to inquiry or looking to deepen an existing approach, these books provide accessible tools, examples, and frameworks for designing meaningful social studies learning.

Inquiry-Based Practice in Social Studies Education: Understanding the Inquiry Design Model

Our first IDM book presents a conceptual base for shaping the classroom experience through inquiry-based teaching and learning.

Using their Inquiry Design Model (IDM), Grant, Swan & Lee provide a detailed account of inquiry’s scholarly roots, as well as the rationale for viewing questions, tasks, and sources as inquiry’s foundational elements.

Inquiry Design Model: Building Inquiries in Social Studies

The second IDM book will walk readers through the process of designing an inquiry. Organized into three clear design phases (Framing, Filling, and Finishing an Inquiry), the Swan, Lee & Grant break down the components of the IDM blueprint and teach others how to create intellectually engaging and thoughtful inquiries. Foreword by Walter Parker.

Blueprinting an Inquiry-Based Curriculum: Planning with the Inquiry Design Model

Our third book in the series is intended for educators who want to speak fluent inquiry across a social studies course and throughout their schools and districts. In this book, we elaborate on the ideas presented in our first two books on the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) by pushing on the original model to think not just about a singular experience of inquiry, but inquiry as a routine practice in social studies classrooms. More importantly, this book honors the curricular dialects of IDM inquiry that have grown out of the experiences of teachers who have innovated with the original blueprint model and want even more from inquiry.

Inquiry Design Model: The Workbook

Inquiry-based teaching puts students in the middle of important ideas and events. The Inquiry Design Model helps teachers plan, teach, and assess those ideas and events in ways that position students to succeed. Inquiry Design Model: The Workbook was written as a companion to Inquiry Design Model: Building Inquiries in Social Studies. Together, the two books offer teachers a practical means of developing ambitious and relevant curriculum blueprints.

The Inquiry Teacher: Tools for the Elementary Social Studies is written for anyone who would like to be an inquiry teacher or to become a better one. The book is organized into three parts. Part I tackles the fundamentals of inquiry and social studies in the elementary classroom. Part II helps you design an inquiry using the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) blueprint. Part III expands your skill set by helping you think about different kinds of inquiry and how to create an inquiry-based curriculum. Each chapter is anchored by a question because teaching through questions is the cornerstone of inquiry. You will meet real inquiry teachers along the way who have helped us hone our inquiry practices. We hope you see yourself in them and laugh a little along the way.

Available on Amazon

Learn more about The Inquiry Teacher at c3teachers.org/the-inquiry-teacher/

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 59: (May/June 2026) Trusting Students to Deliberate, Collaborate, and Produce: Inquiry in a Co-Taught ESL Civics Classroom by Meghan Hawkins and Kathy Swan

This article highlights civics teachers’ use of collaboration and student-centered inquiry to support English learners and build critical thinking.

Column 58: (January/February 2026) Channeling Frustration Toward Action: How Student-Led Inquiry Can Empower Students as Change-Agents by Davis Harper

This account of high school students organizing around mental health after a school crisis can inspire inquiry-based lessons that empower civic action.

Column 57: (November/December 2025) How Do I Make Inquiry My Own? Embracing the Instructional Artistry of the IDM Blueprint by Kathy Swan, John Lee, Emma Thacker, and Laura Darolia

Six teachers across the country personalize an inquiry on trash and pollution, demonstrating how the Inquiry Design Model empowers educators to adapt, innovate, and bring inquiry to life.

Column 56: (October 2025) deepIDM: Designing Inquiry with AI by John Lee and Jordan McGaughey

A new suite of AI chatbot tools, deepIDM, can help teachers create rich, inquiry-based social studies lessons through a collaborative and reflective design process.

Column 55: (May/June 2025) Teaching with an Ethos of Trust: Anatomy of an Inquiry Design Model Blueprint for English Learners by Meghan Hawkins, Kathy Swan, and Bárbara Cruz

The highlighted IDM blueprint illustrates how teachers can create inclusive, inquiry-based social studies lessons that support English Learners through scaffolding, visual sources, and a classroom culture that builds confidence and language skills.

Column 54: (January/February 2025) Anatomy of an Inquiry Stack: Using the Building Block IDM Blueprint to Reinforce Concepts, Skills, and Action (and Trust) by Kathy Swan, Alicia McCollum, and John Lee

Short, focused lessons that foster trust, collaboration, and critical thinking, help students engage deeply with concepts, skills, and real-world issues through inquiry-based learning.

Column 53: (November/December 2024) Taking a Leap of Faith toward Inquiry: Introducing the Building Block IDM Blueprint by Kathy Swan, Alicia McCollum, and John Lee

Incorporating deliberation, collaboration, and production through the Building Block IDM can foster a supportive learning environment and build a culture of trust in the classroom.

Column 52: (October 2024) Inquiry as a Steady Drumbeat: Designing a Curricular Groove for Middle School Social Studies by Kathy Swan, Alicia McCollum, Kelli Lemaster, Helena Sands, and Tanya Schmidt

One district’s shift to inquiry-based teaching and the strategy of revisiting social studies ideas across the grades, showcases how “looping” can make complex concepts more accessible.

Column 51: (September 2024) Teaching to a Better Test: Using the Inquiry Design Model to Reframe State-Mandated Assessment in Social Studies by Beau Dickenson, Kathy Swan, and Gerry Swan

A pilot program that replaced traditional social studies assessments with IDM performance tasks demonstrated that inquiry-based approaches can significantly enhance student achievement.

Column 50: (May/June 2024) Don’t Forget the Tasks: Why Formative Tasks Are Key to Deliberation by Bonnie Lewis, Kathy Swan, and Ryan Crowley

If teachers want their students to engage in meaningful deliberation around a compelling question, they should focus on explicitly connecting questions and sources with formative and summative performance tasks.

Column 49: (March/April 2024) Turning Student Teachers into Claim Makers: Developing the Pedagogical Content Knowledge of Novice Teachers with the Persuasive Claim Framework by Ryan Lewis, Kathy Swan, and Ryan Crowley

The task of becoming a teacher is daunting. As preservice teachers navigate the emotional and physical stress that teaching demands, they face new pressures ranging from curriculum disputes
to a revolving door of political and social policies that attempt to redefine social studies. As such, social studies educators and methods instructors have struggled to develop a common language and set of expectations around what it is that we “do” in the classroom.

Column 48: (November/December 2023) The Art of the Blueprint: Inquiry in the Classroom by Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant

The one-page blueprint known as the Inquiry Design Model helps teachers outline essential elements of inquiry-based instruction and enables them to plan inquiry experiences for students.

Column 47: (November/December 2023) The State of the C3 Framework: An Inquiry Revolution in the Making by S.G. Grant, John Lee, and Kathy Swan

An increasing number of U.S. states use the inquiry-based C3 Framework when developing new social studies standards, ensuring that more students have the opportunity to engage in ambitious social studies learning.

Column 46: (July 2023) Trusting Inquiry: Teaching with the Inquiry Design Model by Kathy Swan, S.G. Grant, John Lee

It is one thing to build an inquiry-based curriculum, it is quite another to make an inquiry come to life in a classroom. If curriculum is a recipe, then how do teachers move from being line-cooks to inquiry chefs? How do they get students to eat their inquiry vegetables and keep coming back for more? What is inquiry’s instructional secret sauce? We argue that trust is how inquiry teachers “kick it up a notch!”

By encouraging deliberation, collaboration, and production in the classroom, teachers can build a culture of trust that leads to successful social studies inquiries.

Column 45: (September 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 44: (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 43: (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 42: (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 41: (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 40: (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 39: (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 38: (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 37: (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 36: (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 35: (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 34: (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 33: (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 32: (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 31: (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 30: (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 29: (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 28: (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 27: (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 26: (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 25: (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 24: (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 23: (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.

Column 22: (September, 2019) The “Forgotten” War and Its Legacy: Teaching about Korea through Inquiry by Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant

A new set of inquiries based on the C3 Framework provides questions, tasks, and sources to launch classroom examinations of the Korean War and its many aftershocks.

Column 21: (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 20: (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 19: (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 18: (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 17: (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 16: (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 15: (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 14: (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 13: (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 12: (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 11: (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 10: (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 9: (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.

Column 8: (May/June 2017) Students as Modern Muckrackers: Creating Films for Social Change by Kathy Swan, Joseph Karb, and Mark Hofer

Making documentaries about human rights engages students in the full Inquiry Arc of the C3 Framework, culminating in taking informed action through film production.

Column 7: (November/December 2015) The New York State K-12 Social Studies Toolkit: An Introduction by John Lee, S.G. Grant, and Kathy Swan

This special section presents a rich set of curriculum resources based on the C3 Framework, created by teachers for all grade levels

Column 6: (November/December 2015) Bringing the C3 Framework to Life by John Lee, Kathy Swan, and S.G. Grant

The New York State Social Studies Toolkit offers a rich array of inquiries with blueprints that outline the key components of each instructional plan while leaving room for teachers to tailor investigations.

Column 5: (November/December 2015) The New York State Toolkit and the Inquiry Design Model: Anatomy of an Inquiry by S.G. Grant, John Lee, and Kathy Swan

The Uncle Tom’s Cabin inquiry illustrates the Inquiry Design Model structure as students examine Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel to explore how words can affect public opinion.

Column 4: (November/December 2015) By Teachers, For Teachers: The NYS Toolkit and C3 Teachers by S.G. Grant, Kathy Swan, and John Lee

A collection of turnkey professional learning materials and a collaborative network of hundreds of teachers aims to empower teachers as they wrestle with the big ideas and instructional implications of the C3 Framework and the Inquiry Arc.

Column 3: (May/June 2014) Teaching Social Studies Students to Write with Light Using the Documentary Filmmaking Process by Mark Hofer, Kathy Swan, and Sharon Zubar

Documentary filmmaking weaves together reading, writing, speaking, and production skills, enabling students to communicate understanding of important ideas and issues in a compelling manner.

Column 2: (November/December 2013) Is the Common Core Good for Social Studies? Yes, but… by John Lee and Kathy Swan

The Common Core State Standards has opened up an opportunity for educators to re-frame literacy instruction in the social studies.

Column 1: (November/December 2013) Beating the Odds: The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards by Kathy Swan and Susan Griffin

The C3 Framework is the culmination of an unprecedented collaboration between professional organizations representing the different social studies disciplines.

C3 Teachers Middle Level Learner Column

In 2023, 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 Mary Beth Yerdon, Kathy Swan, John Lee, and S.G. Grant, the column features articles about inquiry-based teaching and learning with inquiry. Articles in our series appear below beginning with our most recent 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 12: (May/June 2026) Nimbleness, Humility, and a Laminator: C3 Teachers asks Alicia Saccomanno from Lexington, Kentucky, about Helping Students Develop an Inquiry Mindset

Dr. Alicia Saccomanno is a middle school teacher at Mary Queen of the Holy Rosary School in Lexington, Kentucky. Alicia completed both her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Kentucky. After completing her PhD in 2025, Alicia returned to the middle school classroom, implementing inquiry and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), particularly the new Building Block Inquiry, [https://c3teachers.org/bbi/] which she co-created with Dr. Kathy Swan. We sat down with Alicia to see how she makes inquiry possible every day with middle school students.

Column 11: (January/February 2026) C3 Teachers Talk Taking Risks with Inquiry with Alissa Schwermin from Central Illinois

In this interview, middle school social studies teacher Alissa Schwermin discusses how inquiry, curiosity, and questioning help students become lifelong learners and democratic citizens.

Column 10: (September 2025) Inquiry is No Deepfake: Illinois’s Jeff Rosen Prepares the Next Generation for Democratic Citizenship Through Inquiry and Media Literacy

Jeff Rosen has been teaching middle school social studies at The Joseph Sears School in the small suburb of Kenilworth, Illinois, for 15 years. Although Jeff has seen Kenilworth change a lot in the last decade, the community continues to retain that small-town feel, where the school is the center of the community, and where inquiry is at the heart of how students learn about democracy, citizenship, and taking informed action. In an interview with C3 Teachers, Jeff told us that he believes his greatest responsibility as a social studies teacher is to educate the next generation of democratic citizens by teaching students about civic responsibility, government, and history. He sees inquiry as a vehicle for developing an informed citizenry, which is central to sustaining our democracy.

Column 9: (May/June 2025) Department-Wide Inquiry Initiatives: C3 Teachers Talk with Yoana Villarreal and Lindsey Mizerek from Monterrey, Mexico

Yoana Villarreal and Lindsey Mizerek have more than three decades of experience in the classroom; they teach and lead social studies at the American School Foundation of Monterrey (ASFM) in Mexico. Before moving to Mexico, Lindsey taught for many years at multiple schools in Illinois. Lindsey’s experiences span classroom teaching, inclusive co-teaching, special education, and leading grade-level teams. At ASFM, Lindsey teaches seventh-grade social studies and heads the middle school social studies program. Yoana attended the American School Foundation of Monterrey as a student, moved to the United States to pursue a degree in education, and then returned to ASFM as a teacher. At Monterrey, Yoana teaches AP social studies courses in the high school and leads the social studies department. Together, Yoana and Lindsey lead an inquiry initiative at the American School Foundation of Monterrey.

Column 8: (January/February 2025) Inquiry as a Ground-Up Shift Rather Than Top-Down Mandate: Tennessee’s Bruce Stubblefield Talks about the Rollout in his District

After nine years in the classroom, Bruce Stubblefield took a position as the Social Studies Content Lead for Hamilton County Public School District in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bruce has a wide range of experiences including teaching at an urban middle school, then at a diverse large suburban high school, and more recently overseeing 50 middle and high schools. In his current role, Bruce supports all things social studies, including curriculum development, professional learning, instructional coaching, and advising senior leadership.

Column 7: (September 2024) Start! Do Not Wait – The Results of Inquiry are Immediate

Fateema Nelson came to the field of education after working with a public defender’s office. Her siblings, who were teachers in South Jersey and New York City, often talked about their classroom teaching. After visiting their classrooms and doing some subbing, Fateema decided to make the shift to education. Since then, Fateema has taught everything under the umbrella of social studies, including financial literacy, as well as teaching computer science and business classes. Two years ago, after much time spent in the classroom, Fateema Nelson transitioned to a leadership role, now serving as the 7-12 social studies supervisor for Trenton Public School in New Jersey. Recently, Fateema sat down with C3 Teachers to talk about how she has implemented district-wide inquiry and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) in Trenton social studies classrooms and instruction.

Column 6: (May/June 2024) Running with the Bulls: Tanya Schmidt on Living a Life of Inquiry in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

After almost 20 years of service to her district in Oshkosh, Tanya Schmidt began working to revamp her school district’s K-5 social studies curriculum and, three years ago, she became the Oshkosh Area School District’s Social Studies Curriculum coordinator. C3 Teachers sat down with Tanya to talk about the state of education in Wisconsin, the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) as best cross-curricular practice, and what it means to live a life of inquiry.

Column 5: (January/February 2024) Inquiry as the Perfect Answer: C3 Teachers Speak with Beau Dickenson about Inquiry and Overcoming Obstacles

Beau Dickenson’s tenure in social studies education spans over 20 years. Currently, he serves as the K-12 Social Studies Supervisor for Rockingham County Public Schools in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Throughout this time Beau has seen schools in Virginia respond to a variety of educational policy shifts. In our interview, Beau described some of the shifts—from the No Child Left Behind legislation to recent standards and assessment policy in the State of Virginia. Beau has been invested in inquiry since the beginning. He started using the C3 Framework and its Inquiry Arc when they were first published in 2013. He says he considers the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) the perfect tool for uniting practice-based and pedagogical threads central to his own teaching. In addition, Beau spoke with us about the “content dilemma” in social studies education and how the C3 Framework, Inquiry Arc, and the IDM interrupt that content dilemma. He says he plans to use inquiry in response to some recent restrictive education policies.

Column 4: (September 2023) A Call to Action for Social Studies Teachers: Nick Stamoulacatos from Syracuse, NY, Talks Inquiry

Nick Stamoulacatos is the type of leader every school district hopes for. Nick grew up in the Syracuse area, is a product of the SUNY teacher education system, and taught social studies in the district he now directs. Nick’s love for social studies began during his own school experience as a student in the Syracuse City School District. As a student whose first languages were Greek and Bulgarian, Nick struggled early on with English language literacy and reading comprehension, and it was social studies that ignited his love of reading. Nick’s fifth grade teacher sparked his love for learning about humanity, global issues, human history, and, of course, civic action. Nick’s desire to learn more about the world motivated him to pick up book after book.

Column 3: (May/June 2023) A Veteran Teacher Gets Hooked: Kim Dove from Rockingham, Virginia, Talks Inquiry

Kim Dove is no stranger to change. As a veteran teacher of 19 years, Kim has seen things come and go—from different standards and approaches, to teaching virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the years, Kim has gotten good at changing her pedagogy in response to these shifts. However, standardized approaches to learning never sat well with Kim. She thinks that shifts away from students applying their learning to everyday situations have been a travesty. That’s why when Kim began incorporating inquiry and the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) as a means of creating authentic assessment to replace standardized testing—forgone during the pandemic—she was hooked.

Column 2: (January/February 2023) Creating a Space for Hope Through Inquiry an Interview with Ckristina Bennett from Syracuse, New York

This might be Ckristina Bennett’s first full year in a social studies classroom, but she cut her teeth as a substitute teacher in the Syracuse City School District. This past fall, Ckristina brought her experience to one of Syracuse Latin School’s eighth-grade social studies classrooms. In her new classroom, Ckristina uses inquiry to support her culturally relevant and sustaining teaching. Despite the past year’s uptick in curricular oversight and controversy surrounding social studies content, Ckristina is not deflated. In fact, she says she sees hope in inquiry’s ability to facilitate relevant and sustaining content and for teaching the democratic discourse missing in our current social and political landscape. C3 Teachers sat down with Ckristina Bennett to discuss her first full year of teaching, using inquiry in the classroom, and teaching hard history by using an Inquiry Design Model (IDM) curricular loop.

Column 1: (September/October 2022) C3 Teachers Talk Inquiry with First-Year Teacher Deja Rivers

Heading into your first year of teaching is always tough, but against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent political turmoil and social unrest, and increasing public rhetoric and policy aimed at curricular censorship, Deja Rivers’s first year is sure to be filled with both expected and unexpected challenges. However, as a recent graduate of the University of Kentucky’s School of Education, Deja knows a thing or two about implementing inquiry in the classroom. C3 Teachers sat down with Deja Rivers to discuss her experience working with inquiry, her expectations and plans for her first full year, and how she might navigate some of the recent curricular legislation on teaching history.

C3 Teachers Social Studies and Young Learner

In 2022, 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 Emma Thacker 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 9: (September/October 2025) Big Thinking for Little Learners: Making Social Studies Accessible with Micro-Inquiries

Teaching social studies to younger learners can be a challenge, especially given the time crunch many elementary teachers face trying to cram social studies into their week. Add in the many diverse needs we encounter in our classrooms and the hyper scrutiny teachers are facing within their communities, and we have a perfect storm of uncertainty and apprehension. The response to these barriers is often the oversimplification of social studies into a read-aloud or single children’s book to meet a teacher’s literacy goals. We know that teachers would like to offer more robust and engaging social studies lessons but may not know how to do so.

Column 8: (January/February 2025) Inquiry Is Social Studies: An Action-Oriented Inquiry Loop for Third Grade

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. 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.

Column 7: (November/December 2024) Teaching Young Learners with the C3 Framework: Leveraging Community Partnerships to Reframe the Narrative in Elementary Social Studies

In the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in which white supremacists fomented terror and death in our city of Charlottesville, a group of educators came together to reflect on what happened and determine what we could do to push for racial justice in our community. As white educators immune from some of the direct negative impacts of racism in our daily lives, we found ourselves largely unaware of the history of Black agency and success in our small Southern city and of the white backlash to that success. We wanted to learn more. We wanted to do more. From that tragedy, “Reframing the Narrative” was born, a years-long grant-funded project to produce and implement antibias and antiracist curricula.

Column 6: (September/October 2024) Trade Books Beget Inquiry: Anatomy of a New IDM Blueprint for Elementary Classrooms

Educators have been pleading for decades to revive social studies in the elementary classroom. But it’s not working. Social studies remains largely absent from elementary curricula despite persuasive advocacy, research, and policy statements about the narrowing of the curriculum and the role of social studies in making better readers and citizens. To confront this curricular inertia, we have been working on a new initiative at C3 Teachers called Trade Books Beget Inquiry where we marry our inquiry work in social studies with what is being taught in elementary classrooms—literacy.

Column 5: (January/February 2024) Local History as a Pathway for Powerful Social Studies

Author Rebecca G. W. Mueller posits that local history is an effective approach to powerful social studies when it builds from children’s prior knowledge in personal and tangible ways. In this article, Mueller describes an inquiry approach that uses experiences of children who lived in Beaumont Mill Village to answer the question, “Did children in the past live like me?”

Column 4: (November/December 2023) More than Hanukkah and the Holocaust: Teaching About Judaism in Elementary School

In this article, the author describes one way to teach about religion in elementary school social studies using the C3 Framework IDM model. The compelling question that guides the lesson focuses specifically on whether Judaism is a race, religion, or ethnicity. Each compelling and supporting question in the lesson is connected to one or more picture books that complicate student understandings of what it means to be Jewish. Students use these texts to develop answers to the questions. Throughout the lesson, students are asked to engage in formative performance tasks, but teachers are also encouraged to intentionally facilitate classroom discussions using structured discussion strategies.

Column 3: (September/October 2023) Using the Inquiry Design Model to Reveal Pauli Murray’s Story: A Fierce Advocate and Activist Hidden in the Elementary Curriculum

Pauli Murray was an activist, legal scholar, author, and she was also queer. Her impact on the civil rights and women’s rights movements cannot be overstated. The authors present the reader with the potential for elementary teachers to disrupt and “unmute” curricular silencing by shifting focus to Pauli Murray’s story and work in the civil rights movement. In this C3 inquiry, students explore ways Pauli “pushed for the promise” of America, revealing a more diverse citizenry within the social studies curriculum.

Column 2: (March/April 2023) Asking Their Own Questions: Supporting Student-Initiated Inquiry in Third Grade

In this article, the authors share how a third-grade teacher supported students in crafting and researching their own inquiry questions using a process known as the Question Formulation Technique to scaffold students’ development of supporting questions. Hughes and Heckart provide the reader with suggestions and resources for supporting student-initiated inquiry.

Column 1: (September/October 2022) So We Want Kindergarteners to Argue? Developing Argumentation Skills in the Kindergarten Classroom

In this article, the author examines how the New York State Social Studies Resource Toolkit supports argument discourse in social studies and then explores a primary teacher’s curricular and instructional decisions regarding the development of children’s argumentation skills. The study provides insights into how teachers can involve some of our youngest students in authentic, inquiry-based social studies learning that fosters argument discourse.

College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards

The C3 Framework (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013) ushered in an important opportunity to articulate a common vernacular for and a curricular approach to inquiry. Featuring four distinct but inter-connected dimensions, the C3 Inquiry Arc lays out a process for supporting students to ask questions about our social world, use concepts and tools from the disciplines that make up social studies, analyze and argue about what they have learned, and apply that knowledge to the challenges that face our world today.

https://www.socialstudies.org/standards/c3

Teaching Social Studies: A Methods Book for Methods Teachers

This innovative methods book features short tasks designed to take preservice teachers deep into schools in general and into social studies education in particular. Organized around Joseph Schwab’s commonplaces of education and recognizing the role of inquiry as a preferred pedagogy in social studies, the book offers a series of short chapters that highlight learners and learning, subject matter, teachers and teaching, and school context.

Available from Amazon HERE

Teaching the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework: Exploring Inquiry-Based Instruction in Social Studies

Part I of our Teaching the C3 series consists of model lessons contributed by 15 social studies curricular organizations. Each lesson encompasses the whole of the C3 Inquiry Arc from questioning to action, engages students in a meaningful content experience that fits a typical curriculum, and needs between 2 and 5 days of instruction. There are lessons for all grade bands from K-2 to 9-12.

Published in collaboration with the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) – available HERE

Teaching the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, Part 2.

The powerful social studies inquiries in this book bring the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework to life. They are based on the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), a curricular approach that animates social studies standards and integrates the four dimensions of the C3 Inquiry Arc.

The editors of this book invited outstanding social studies curricular organizations to take the “IDM challenge” and contribute units based on IDM blueprints about topics that are central to K-12 social studies. The resulting inquiries cover an impressive range of subjects: teaching students about the concept of money and how to understand maps; engaging students in historical investigations of Indian Removal, slavery and the failure of Reconstruction, and the Holocaust; exploring social changes such as the historical impact of bicycles and the present-day effects of the use of robots in manufacturing; and dealing with current issues such as gun control, media literacy, the minimum wage, and the controversy over school bathrooms. We are pleased to feature inquiries from an impressive array of organizations and colleagues in the collaborative spirit of the C3 Framework.

Digital Public Library of America
Echoes and Reflections
Facing History and Ourselves
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
Ford’s Theater
National Constitution Center
National Geographic Society
National Museum of American History
National Museum of the American Indian
Project Look Sharp
Teaching Tolerance
University of Delaware Center for Economic Education
Virginia Commonwealth University Center for Economic Education

Published in collaboration with the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) – available HERE

The Korean War and Its Legacy: Teaching about Korea through Inquiry

Korean War Legacy Foundation. 231 pages. 2019

News headlines regularly remind us of the importance of the Korean Peninsula and the challenges facing U.S. policy on North Korea.

The tensions in Korea are part of the legacy of the Korean War, which culminated in an armistice in 1953, but has never been concluded by a peace treaty. Often described as the Forgotten War, it had significant consequences for the United States and the world. Even though more than a million U.S. soldiers fought in the Korean War, and 28,000 U.S. forces are still stationed in South Korea, it only receives limited coverage in history textbooks.

This book fills an important gap by presenting rich primary resources in the form of oral histories, photos, and official documents of the Korean War that enable teachers and students to explore the war through the eyes of those who experienced its intensity and hardships. The contributors to the book also offer important background information about contemporary Korea and the challenges facing United States diplomacy in the Korean Peninsula.

The lesson plans in this book are inquiries based on the C3 Framework that pose important questions and show students how to evaluate evidence, make analyses, and communicate conclusions about the Korean War and its legacy. This unique collection of teaching ideas and resources will enable students to learn about the Korean War in depth and understand the historical background to todays headlines.

Published in collaboration with the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) – available here

Inquiry-Based Global Learning in the K–12 Social Studies Classroom

Edited By Brad M. Maguth, Gloria Wu

This book, edited by experienced scholars in the field, brings together a diverse array of educators to showcase lessons, activities, and instructional strategies that advance inquiry-oriented global learning. Directly aligned to the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standard, this work highlights ways in which global learning can seamlessly be interwoven into the disciplines of history, economics, geography, civics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Recently adopted by the National Council for the Social Studies, the nation’s largest professional organization of history and social studies teachers, the C3 Framework prioritizes inquiry-oriented learning experiences across the social studies disciplines in order to advance critical thinking, problem solving, and participatory skills for engaged citizenship.

Available from Routledge here

Race Lessons: Using Inquiry to Teach About Race in Social Studies

Addressing the space between the theoretical and the practical, this edited book provides teachers and teacher educators with concrete lesson ideas for how to engage learners with social studies content and race. This work is unique in that it represents an attempt to use Critical Race Theory and inquiry pedagogy (Inquiry Design Model) to teach about race in the social science disciplines.

Edited by:
Prentice T. Chandler, Austin Peay State University
Todd S. Hawley, Kent State University

Available from Information Age Press here