Teaching, Learning, and Content

The content covered in the area of social studies is surprisingly broad. The field of social
studies includes the subjects of history and political science, but it goes even further than that.
The full range of subjects social studies concerns itself with also includes less obvious subjects
like anthropology, religion, humanities, law, sociology, economics, psychology and even
philosophy (NCSS Intro).
An important thing to remember when teaching social studies- or any subject to studentsis that every individual comes from a different background and brings different experiences with
them in the classroom. Because of this, every student will understand the subject differently.
Because of these differences, misunderstandings will occur. What is important to remember in
these situations is that Misunderstanding is not ignorance. It is the mapping of an idea onto a
plausible but incorrect framework(Wiggins & McTighe, 1998). There are four principles
regarding how people learn, and adherence to these principles can be helpful to facilitate student
success. The first principle is that students have pre-existing conceptions and theories that
impact how they learn. The second principle is that thinking is hard, but people are more likely
to do it if there is a problem to be solved and if they have appropriate background knowledge to
with which to think. The third principle is that facts are important, but only are meaningful to
students when they are put into a context that a student can work with. The fourth and last
principle is that students need to think about their thinking to understand what it is that they
know and to fix the things that they need to understand better.