Using Staging Activities in Social Studies to Build Engagement

Staging is vital to the success of an inquiry approach to social studies and deceptively difficult to pull off. I believe that the best staging activities do more than create curiosity or pique interest—they build a bridge between what is relevant to students and what is academically rigorous in social studies. Consider the following example.

“Are painful experiences better remembered or forgotten?” A class of ninth-grade students stand side by side in a curving line so that they can all see each other. The word forgotten is posted on the wall at one end of the room, remembered at the other, and students have taken positions closer to one or the other to represent their answer to the question.

A student steps forward and says, “I decided to stand here because I’m mostly on the side of forgetting. When something bad happens to me, I just want to move on and not let it hold me back.” The teacher paraphrases, “You don’t want to be stuck in the past,” to which the student nods vigorously.

The students on the other side of the line find this perplexing, and one says, “I guess I agree about not getting stuck, but we have to remember, we learn from things because we remember them.” A student in the middle almost jumps forward, “Yes, exactly! That’s why I’m here. I want to learn from the experience but also move on.”

Students think this over, and after a few moments the teacher says, “What if the painful experience is a conflict between two people and they think about or remember it differently?” Students quickly incorporate this wrinkle into their thinking, and the discussion continues.

The C3 Framework for Social Studies calls this a “staging lesson”—an “exercise intended to generate interest in and curiosity about the topic of the inquiry” and to introduce and frame the compelling question. In the above example, the inquiry focuses on the ongoing controversies around what to do with public monuments commemorating controversial historical figures and events. The compelling question, revealed at the end of the lesson, is “How should we remember the past?”

Qualities of Effective Staging

Here are four criteria for effective staging of lessons that help them move beyond generating interest and build a bridge between relevance and rigor.

Effective staging makes complex thinking accessible. You need the classic “low floor, high ceiling” type of activity. For staging to work, every student needs to be thinking. I have found that open, no-wrong-answer questions work well, in addition to visual sources, evocative quotes, and polls.

In my example, the class is engaged in a barometer activity around a “hook question” (“Are painful experiences better remembered or forgotten?”) that draws on their own experiences and ways of understanding the world.

Effective staging creates space for student thinking and talking. Once we’ve made the ideas and thinking accessible, we want to let students develop their initial ideas and gut reactions, push each other’s thinking in new directions, and make connections. The idea here is that we want to let student thinking develop and percolate so that it is as expansive and rich as possible.

In my example, the barometer is preceded and followed by many opportunities to turn and talk and pair-share. My goal as the teacher is to speak as little as possible.

Effective staging introduces concepts behind the compelling question. The goal is not to transmit content knowledge, but to give students a conceptual framework to connect their thinking to. This is a bridge between student and disciplinary thinking.

In my example, I define what we mean by past and history—the former being everything that happened before and the latter being the meaning we make of it.

Effective staging creates a need to know more. We can lay the foundation for a bridge between relevance and rigor, but students must feel compelled to cross it.

In my example, I shift the discussion from general thoughts and feelings about how we should hold painful experiences to the specific case of a real public monument. Students can seldom resist testing their assumptions and gut reactions against a real situation.

Structure of Effective Staging

I often design staging lessons in three steps:

1. Engage students in relevant conceptual thinking they can connect to their own cognitive and emotional experiences. In the opening vignette, students are thinking about historical interpretation in the context of their own experience.

2. Introduce something new that will challenge or deepen student thinking while bringing it into the context of social studies. This is where a staging lesson pivots into the academic. After the barometer discussion, I have students examine two visual sources with vastly different ways of representing Columbus (First Landing of Columbus on the Shores of the New World and A Journey With More Shipwrecked Than Sailors).

3. Reveal the compelling question, and invite reflection and forethought. This is the moment when the full bridge takes shape, and my goal is for students to articulate their initial response to the question as well as what they still need to know.

Practical Tips

Design for complex thinking, not a complicated lesson. Frequent transitions, ponderous conceptual explanations, or long sources can get in the way and derail engagement.

Stage, and then restage. The thinking and engagement in a staging lesson should continue long after the class period is over. Consider how you might start each lesson of an inquiry reactivating the thinking in the staging lesson.

If it doesn’t work, try again. If the bridge is not built, do not try to cross it! Staging is a large part of what makes inquiry work. Trying it again, in a different way, is often well worth the time.

We all want classrooms full of engaged and curious students eager to think deeply and know more. This is the promise of an inquiry approach to social studies, and staging lessons has a lot to do with making that promise a reality. When we stage, we surface curiosity by building a bridge between what students think, feel, and experience, and the more academic and rigorous ways of knowing and doing in the social studies.