The JCPS Social Studies Literacy Poster Set helps students develop better reading, speaking, and writing skills. Aligned with Kentucky Academic Standards, the poster set centers around the Using Evidence and Communicating Conclusion standards. The Literacy Poster Set helps students read and think like a historian, reason together as a community, and construct accurate, clear, evidenced, and well reasoned conclusions. The posters are designed to work together within instruction by engaging the question, engaging sources through discussion, and communicating conclusions.   

Democratic Classrooms require students to engage in literacies. Content, information, disciplinary, and critical literacy are essential elements helping students understand, evaluate, analyze, and challenge questions, sources, discussions, and actions. 

Tables 1 and 2 provide context for how literacy works throughout the school, within Social Studies, and through other disciplines. The JCPS Literacy Poster Set is aligned to Kentucky Academic Standards (KAS) and the Kentucky Summative Assessment (KSA). 

Communicating conclusions require students to construct descriptions, generalizations, explanations, and claims that are accurate, clear, evidenced, and well reasoned. The three Communicating Conclusions Posters help define the success criteria, define the task language, and provide multiple ways to develop student evidence and reasoning. They provide a through line for aligning tasks to criteria.

The JCPS Scaffolded Single-Point Rubric success critieria aligns with KAS for Social Studies and provides an equitable way for providing individualized feedback for student writing and presentations. When students communicate conclusions, they should be accurate, clear, evidenced, and well reasoned. 

Formative Performance Tasks (FPTs) address supporting questions. Verbal, written, and visual descriptions, generalizations, explanations, claims/counterclaims have specific demands, definitions, and skills. Each task scaffolds to the next helping students build capacity for argumentative thinking, writing, and speaking. FPT language should be standardized for teachers and students as well as how these tasks are evaluated based upon the standards aligned JCPS Scaffolded Single-Point Rubric.  

Evidence and reasoning work together to develop well rounded responses to FPTs. Evidence used and cited from primary and secondary sources helps students support and attribute their conclusions. Reasoning from thinking logically and making connections helps students connect evidence to support a conclusion. 

Questioning is foundational to inquiry and building Democratic Classrooms. Students should engage in disciplinary specific questions when reading, thinking, and reasoning through sources. The three posters that exemplify questioning provide language for the common practice of the skills that lead to students becoming independent thinkers and learners.

Historical Reading Questions help students read like a historian.  Sourcing, Contextualization, Corroboration, and Close Reading help students build disciplinary literacies to analyze sources and make inferences about a single source and across as source set. 

Historical Thinking Skills helps students think like a historian. Historical Significance, Perspective, Causation, and Continuity and Change over time help students categorize evidence, create inferences, consider multiple perspectives, and conceptualize the past. 

Discussion is foundational to a Democratic Classroom. Teachers and students must reason together to create conclusions backed with evidence and reasoning. Inference and interpretations need to be challenged to ensure the students construct conclusions that are accurate, clear, evidenced, and well reasoned.