Instructional Practice for Grades 9-12

Chapter 13

Instructional Practice for Grades Nine through Twelve

As described in the Introduction, in addition to providing history–social science content, teachers must emphasize disciplinary and literacy practices – investigation, close reading, analysis of evidence, and argumentative writing. The Historical and Social Science Analysis Skill Standards, the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies (CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy), and the California English Language Development Standards (CA ELD Standards) guide these practices in history-social science. Educators may also wish to consider the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework, published in 2013 by the National Council for the Social Studies. All of these resources emphasize the need for students to think, read, speak, listen and write in a discipline-specific way. The skills noted below are to be learned through, and applied to, the content covered in grades nine through twelve. They are also to be assessed with the content in these grades.

Disciplinary Thinking and Analysis Skills

The Historical and Social Science Analysis Skills and the C3 Framework address the intellectual skills students should learn and apply when engaged in inquiry (utilizing the individual tools of each discipline to investigate a significant question and marshal relevant evidence in support of their own interpretations) in history-social science courses in grades nine through twelve. The skills described below are organized by one of the four main social science disciplines: civics/government, economics, geography, and history. However, across all of the disciplines students should understand and frame questions of disciplinary significance that can be answered by research and study. Students should also use a variety of sources to make claims that address questions of disciplinary significance.

Civics and Government

When studying civics and government, students explore how people participate in the governing of society. In high school, these skills include students’ abilities to explain and distinguish the powers, roles, and responsibilities of citizens and governments, and how those have changed over time and are still contested. Students should also analyze the impact and appropriate roles of personal interests and perspectives on the application of civic virtues, democratic principles, constitutional rights, and human rights. Students analyze ideas and principles that influence social and political systems as well as the powers and limits of those systems. Additionally, students should evaluate the effectiveness of efforts to address social and political problems as well as the intended and unintended outcomes and consequences of these efforts. Students analyze historical and contemporary means of changing societies, promoting the common good, and protecting individual rights from the will of the majority. Students deepen their appreciation for civic virtues, democratic principles, and deliberative processes when working with others. In addition, these civics-related activities can be woven into a variety of classroom content areas:

1. Students evaluate rules, laws, and public policy in terms of effectiveness, fairness, costs, and consequences and propose modifications or new rules to address deficiencies.

2. Students use deliberative discussion including consideration of multiple points of view in making decisions or judgments on controversial political and social issues.

3. Students construct and evaluate arguments and counter arguments and positions on issues using appropriate discipline-specific claims and evidence from multiple sources.

4. Students analyze a specific school or community school problem or issue using appropriate disciplinary lenses from civics, economics, geography and history; propose and evaluate strategies and options to address it; and take and evaluate individual or collaborative actions and/or make presentations on the issue to a range of venues outside the classroom.

Economics

In order to make effective economic decisions, high school students need to understand how individuals, businesses, governments, and societies use human, physical, and natural resources and how incentives influence choices and actions and the resulting consequences of those actions. They need to understand capitalism, financial literacy, and their places in the broader economy. The economic reasoning skills that high school students need include the ability to conduct cost-benefit analyses and apply basic economic indicators to analyze the aggregate economic behavior of the U.S. and foreign economies, and construct arguments for or against economic policies. Students should also analyze and evaluate the role of competition and its effects on specific markets, the effectiveness of specific examples of government intervention in markets, and the selection of monetary and fiscal policies in a variety of economic conditions. Additionally, students learn to use current data and economic indicators to explain the influence of changes in spending, production, and the market supply on various economic conditions, as well as to analyze the current and future state of the economy. Students also should explain how current globalization trends and policies affect economic growth, labor markets, rights of citizens, the environment, and resource and income distribution in different nations.

Geography

In studying geography, students explore local characteristics of places and learn how places connect to each other and the relationships between humans and the earth. High school students’ geographic reasoning skills include using geographic data, maps, satellite images, photographs, and other representations to explain relationships between the locations of places and regions, and their political, cultural, and economic dynamics. Students also use geospatial and related technologies to create maps to display, analyze, and construct arguments using geographic data about the spatial patterns of cultural and environmental characteristics. They evaluate the relationships and interactions within and between human and physical systems, the influence of long-term climate variability, as well as the consequences of human-made and natural catastrophes, on resource use, trade, politics, culture, and human migration and settlement patterns and at local-to-global scales. Additionally, high school students should explain how economic globalization and the expanding use of scarce resources contribute to conflict and cooperation within and among countries.

History

Historical thinking is a process of chronological reasoning, which means wrestling with issues of causality, connections, significance, perspectives, and context with the goal of developing credible arguments about the past based on reasoned interpretation of evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources in diverse media formats. In high school, students evaluate how unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts shaped historical perspectives, decisions, events and developments. Students interpret these past events and issues within their original context, rather than in terms of present-day norms and values, while at the same time explaining how perspectives of people in the present shape interpretations of the past. Students analyze complex factors that influenced the perspectives and decisions of people during different historical eras and how and why those perspectives have changed over time. They critique the relevancy, credibility, and utility of historical sources for a specific historical inquiry or as used in a secondary interpretation based on the author, date, place of origin, intended audience, and purpose. Students recognize the complexity of historical causality including the challenges of determining cause and effect. Students understand that history is an interpretive discipline. They analyze historians’ interpretations of the past, including the limitations in historical evidence, and the authors’ arguments, claims, and use of evidence. Finally, students integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument based on evidence about the past and present it in oral, written, and multi-media presentations.

Literacy Skills

The CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy for grades nine through twelve represent increasingly sophisticated expectations for students as they move from middle school to high school. The relationship among English/language arts and literacy, English language development, and the content areas or disciplines is one of interdependence. History–social science content knowledge grows from students’ knowledge of language and ability to use vocabulary, grammatical structures, and discourse practices to accomplish their disciplinary goals; just as literacy and language proficiency grow from increased content knowledge. All students should be provided rich instruction, with appropriate pedagogy, in history–social science.

The standards at this grade span prompt students to think and operate at levels that result in the achievement of the College and Career Ready Anchor Standards in Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening[1], and Language by the end of grade twelve. Consistent with the growing cognitive capacities of adolescents, these expectations challenge students to think deeply and critically. The depth of knowledge and level of thinking reflected in these grade-level standards are commensurate with the work that students will do in postsecondary education and careers.

All teachers with EL students in their classrooms also use the CA ELD Standards to determine how to support their ELs in achieving the CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy and the content standards specific to each discipline. The CA ELD Standards also call for students to advance their language and thinking at these grade levels in preparation for college and careers. The complexity of written and spoken texts ELs are asked to interpret and produce aligns with the academic literacy demands of postsecondary education and careers. Students who are ELs participate fully in the history-social science curriculum at the same time as they are learning English as an additional language; some students may be simultaneously developing literacy and academic skills in languages other than English.

Content knowledge is increasingly important in high school. As students prepare for college and careers, their courses become more specialized. The literacy standards at grades nine through twelve make clear the value of both content and literacy. Literacy and language instruction, based on the CA CCSS for Literacy in History/Social Studies and the CA ELD Standards, complements and contributes to history–social science content instruction that addresses the History-Social Science Content Standards.

Reading

Increasingly sophisticated levels of analysis and interpretation are now evident in the CA CCSS Reading Standards for History/Social Studies for grades nine through twelve. Students are expected to grapple with a multiplicity of sources, authors, motivations, representations, and perspectives, and they synthesize multiple sources of information. Specifically, the Reading Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies expect students to cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information; analyze in detail a series of events described in a text and determine whether earlier events caused later ones or simply preceded them; and evaluate various explanations for actions or events and determine which explanation best accords with textual evidence, acknowledging where the text leaves matters uncertain. Students compare the point of view of two or more authors; assess, corroborate, or challenge authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence; and integrate and evaluate their findings from multiple sources of information into a coherent understanding that answers a question or solves a problem.

Providing students with significant inquiry-based and text-dependent historical questions can guide students to closely read and analyze primary and secondary documents to meet these standards. Sources, such as biographies, speeches, letters, essays, plays, films, and novels, both deepen understanding of key historical narratives, ideas, periods, events, and influential actors and provide evidence for students to answer those inquiry questions. Literary and informational text can be paired in units that encourage collaboration between English / language arts and history-social science courses.

The CA ELD Standards intersect with and amplify these CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy. English learners in grades nine through twelve explain ideas, phenomena, processes and relationships within and across texts, explaining inferences and conclusions. They evaluate and analyze language choices, explaining how successfully writers and speakers structure texts and use language to persuade the reader and explaining how a writer’s or speaker’s choice of phrasing or words produces different effects on the audience. English learners do all of this by applying their understanding of how English works on a variety of levels: how different text types are organized and structured to achieve particular academic purposes, how texts can be expanded and enriched using particular language resources, and how ideas can be connected and condensed to convey particular meanings.

It is important that students who are experiencing difficulty with reading are supported as they learn from texts; teachers should not avoid texts as sources of knowledge with students who find them challenging and rely exclusively on non-text media and experiences. Replacing texts with other sources of information or rewriting them in simpler language—in spite of the intention to ensure access to the curricula—limits students’ skill to independently learn with texts in the future. In other words, instruction should be provided to enable all students to learn with texts alongside other learning experiences.

These expectations for students’ understandings about language and how it makes meaning in history-social science means that teachers need to develop deep understandings about the inextricable link between language and history-social science content knowledge and how to support each of their students in understanding how language works to make meaning with different types of text.

Writing

The Writing Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies for grades nine through twelve also call for increasingly sophisticated levels of analysis and interpretation. As students advance through high school, they become increasingly effective at expressing themselves in writing as they synthesize multiple sources of information. High school students are expected to write relatively sophisticated arguments focused on historical issues. They must introduce precise and knowledgeable claims and establish their significance. They must organize their writing to establish clear relationships and logical sequence among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence. They must point out strengths and limitations of claim(s) and counterclaims in a discipline-appropriate form. They must anticipate their audience’s knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases. They must use words, phrases, clauses, and varied syntax to link major sections of the text; and attend to the norms and conventions of the discipline. Students also write history-social science informative/explanatory texts by organizing elements to make important connections and distinctions, so that each complex element builds on the previous to create a unified whole. They develop the topic with extended details appropriate to the audience’s knowledge and with the most significant facts and information. They use language to manage the complexity of the topic; and, as in argumentation, attend to the norms and conventions of the discipline. In both of these genres, students address what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience; use technology to update individual or shared writing products; and respond to ongoing feedback, including new arguments and information.

New to the CA ELD Standards, ELs in grades nine through twelve write literary and informational texts using the appropriate register, or tone and level of language. They justify their opinions and persuade others by making connections and distinctions among ideas and texts using sufficient and relevant evidence. They use a variety of grade-appropriate academic words and phrases, including persuasive language, when producing complex written and spoken texts. English learners continue to express their views by using nuanced modal expressions and knowledge of morphology to manipulate word forms. All students, especially ELs, benefit from a focus on making choices about how to use language in their writing for clarity, precision, and variety, adapting their choices to be appropriate for the task, purpose, and audience. As do all students, ELs in high school work their way towards fluency and proficiency in English by becoming increasingly conscious about how and why they manipulate language. In other words, they deliberately employ complex language structures in order to synthesize ideas and information, communicate different levels of generality, and make logical relationships clear. Supporting ELs to develop this metalinguistic awareness, with which they become more conscious of how English works and deliberate about the language choices they make, enhances students’ comprehension of texts and provides them with options for speaking and writing. It also conveys to students that grammar is not a set of rules but rather a resource for making meaning with an endless constellation of language choices that are available to them.

Research

Opportunities to engage in research contribute to students’ history-social science content knowledge. Teachers can use writing instruction to provide opportunities for students to conduct research to build and present knowledge. Teachers can also engage students in collaborative discussions about grade level topics, texts, and issues (including research conducted by students). In high school, research projects expand and become more complex than in middle school, which contributes to students’ motivation and engagement. In history-social science, students conduct more sustained research projects to identify and solve a problem, narrowing or broadening the inquiry when appropriate, and synthesizing multiple sources on the subject demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. They use advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; closely read to assess the strengths and limitations of each sources in terms of the task, purpose, audience, and strength of the authors’ arguments; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, including footnotes/end notes; and avoid over reliance on any one source.

California Department of Education

July 2016

[1] As noted throughout this framework, speaking and listening should be broadly interpreted. Speaking and listening should include deaf and hard of hearing students using American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary language. Students who are deaf and hard of hearing who do not use ASL as their primary language but use amplification, residual hearing, listening and spoken language, cued speech and sign supported speech, access general education curriculum with varying modes of communication.

[2] The term English as an additional language is used intentionally to signal that an explicit goal in California is for ELs to add English to their linguistic repertoires and maintain and continue to develop proficiency in their primary language(s).

[3] Some ELs are enrolled in alternative bilingual programs where they may be exclusively learning science in their primary language or learning science in both their primary language and English.

[4] Integrated and designated ELD may be unfamiliar terms. These new terms now encompass elements of previously used terms, such as sheltered instruction, SDAIE, or dedicated ELD. It is beyond the scope of this framework to identify all previously used or existing terms, and readers should read the framework carefully to determine how the new terminology reflects or differs from current terms and understandings.