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Thank you, teachers, for your inestimable
contributions to students, schools, and communities. In this Thanksgiving month,
it’s fitting to recognize the impact that each and every one of you has on the
well-being of our society. Ted Sizer often alluded to the “intense daily-ness”
of our classroom life. While each of you works to build a supportive and
engaging environment for your students, it is impossible to understand the
challenges you face or to document, much less quantify, the results of your
efforts.
 In an effort to honor and support your commitment to your students, this November issue provides a cornucopia of free online resources to support your classroom work.
Please accept it as an expression of gratitude from OSPI to you. Happy Thanksgiving!
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 StoryCorps presents The Great Thanksgiving Listen. Using the StoryCorps app, the Teacher Toolkit and Lesson Plan, you can support your students as they interview family or
community elders and create oral histories. Interviews become part of the
StoryCorps Archive at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
No time to use this before Thanksgiving? No
problem! The project can be done any time of year. If used between now and
winter break, you give your students an opportunity for deep learning during
this “giving” time of year.
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This consortium of nonpartisan, nonprofit organizations is committed to strengthening civic life in the U.S. by increasing the quality of civics education in our nation's schools and by improving accessibility to high-quality, no-cost learning materials. On the Civics Renewal Network site, teachers can find the best resources of these organizations, searchable by subject, grade, resource type, standards, and teaching strategy.
 Teaching about the World War II incarceration of Japanese
Americans? Use Densho’s
rich repository of oral history
interviews, photos, newspapers, and other primary source documents. The online Learning
Center features multidisciplinary instructional guides. Short on time to explore
the entire site? Then visit the online Learning Center and take a look at the
curriculum guide for “Examining Racism and Discrimination Through Oral History.”
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 Mark your calendars! January 15, 2018, is
Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.
To commemorate the occasion, PBS is presenting
James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro, a
2016 Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary.
It will be shown on
Independent Lens at 10:00 p.m. and made available for classroom use following
this screening.
A companion curriculum guide is currently available for download.
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If you are a social studies
teacher, you teach the Constitution. Get the best resources available from the National Constitution Center. You
don’t have to travel to Washington, D.C, to take advantage of the splendid
resources. The daily updates, the podcasts, the interactive constitution, the
lessons for engaged citizenship are just a click or two away.
 If you teach fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth
grade students, you are in luck. National
Geographic Society is inviting your
students to study a real-world problem by
using research, collaboration, creativity, and communication to create and
present a solution. This year’s challenge—On the Move!—invites participants to
learn about the problems facing migratory species while building skills in
geography, mapmaking, storytelling, theatrical techniques, and video
production.
Check
it out! Just by registering, you will receive the complete National Geographic
GeoChallenge: On the Move! program guide. That’s sure to serve as a powerful
teacher resource whether or not your students decide to take up the challenge.
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 To its already stellar Reading
Like A Historian website, SHEG recently
added two important assessment supports:
1.
Beyond
the Bubble: This site features
assessments meant to measure students’ historical thinking rather than the mere
recall of facts. Using the Library of Congress digital archive, SHEG created over
80 assessments called HATs (History Assessments of Thinking). HATs offer teachers
an important assessment tool in that they provide a more accurate assessment of
thinking than is possible with multiple-choice tests, and they are less time-consuming
to score than a DBQ essay.
2.
Civic
Online Reasoning: Increasingly,
students are learning from online information rather than print publications.
Our challenge as teachers is to help them acquire the skills to judge the authenticity
and credibility of this digital content. SHEG is ready to assist with
assessments that show students online content and ask them
to reason about that content. These assessments include both paper and digital
tasks. They offer teachers some flexibility in that they can be used to design
classroom activities, to launch class discussions, or as a formative assessment
to check student learning. To learn more, read SHEG’s report: "Evaluating
Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning."
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If you’ve taught
American History for more than a year, you probably have visited the Ashbrook
Center Teaching American History website. If not, check it out. It offers a wealth of teaching resources
such as:
The Holocaust is a difficult topic to teach. How do we
get our students to recognize the enormity of it? How do we help them acquire
historically accurate knowledge of anti-Semitism? How do we have them
understand the breakdown in German democracy that led to Hitler’s rise? As a starting point, we can turn to the
resources provided by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on its educator page. There you will find the following links and more:
Washington State Council
for the Social Studies (WSCSS) is our state
affiliate of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). Our Council
convenes three conferences every year, each one providing opportunities for
deep professional learning and statewide collaboration. The Council website
serves as a repository for a wide-range of social studies materials: units of
studies, conference presentations, and links to courses, standards, frameworks,
and assessments. Check out all that’s available; better yet, if you aren’t yet
a member, join today and begin building your collegial chops!
 OSPI Social Studies supports standards-based
learning and teaching for students and teachers across Washington State.
Information on Social Studies K-12 Learning Standards and classroom-based
assessments for civics, economics, geography, and history are available on the
website. The site provides information on graduation requirements, the laws and
regulations governing social studies, and resources (people, organizations,
programs, and processes) that enhance social studies curriculum and practice
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OSPI’s Civic Education
Initiative (CEI) seeks to ensure that every student is provided a high-caliber
civic education from kindergarten through high school graduation. This year’s
work focuses on building the Washington Social Studies Commons and WA C3 State
Hub, an open educational resource featuring
high-quality, Washington-centric inquiries for use by K-12 social studies
students and teachers alike. If you would like to participate, please contact
Carol Coe, Social Studies Program Supervisor, OSPI, by phone (360-725-6351) or
email: carol.coe@k12.wa.us.
Visit Social Studies Teachers (SST) Connect. Explore the curriculum maps and the instructional maps to find contact information of colleagues in
Washington state who are teaching the same courses or working on the same
instructional practices as you. Share your contact information. Make 2017-18
the school year to meet and learn with colleagues beyond your school and
district.
 Click here to check out SST Connect!
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