George Lucas Educational Foundation

Social Studies/History

Explore and share tips, strategies, and resources for helping students develop in the social sciences.

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  • Setting Up PBL for National History Day

    Middle and high school teachers can boost engagement in social studies with project-based learning units for National History Day.
    Suzie Boss
    266
  • Applying the Scientific Method in History Class

    Using a key concept from science class in history encourages high school students to analyze data with a willingness to make mistakes.
    271
  • Game-Based Learning in Civics

    Teachers can use games, both physical and digital, to help students build a foundation for understanding complex content.
    311
  • Integrating Social Studies in the Early Grades

    Elementary teachers can ensure that students are exposed to social studies by setting up interdisciplinary lessons that focus on real issues.
    620
  • How to Teach History in a Culturally Responsive Way

    History is complicated, but teachers can approach it by leading with truth and advocating for empathy.
    826
  • Scaffolding Discussion Skills With a Socratic Circle

    Students deepen their understanding and build a sense of community by engaging with their peers’ reasoned arguments.
    12.2k
  • Turning Students Into Bold Historical Thinkers

    By collapsing the distance between historical eras and the present day, we motivate students to ask hard questions and dig deeper into the past.
    845
  • Inquiry-Based Tasks in Social Studies

    Assignments that are bigger than a lesson and smaller than a unit are a good way to experiment with inquiry-based learning.
    10.6k
  • Building Students’ Background Knowledge With Station Rotation

    Station-based book study can help build students’ background knowledge for a unit as they survey content before direct instruction.
    827
  • Designing Interdisciplinary Units in Elementary School

    This eight-step framework can help teachers create units that integrate science and social studies with math and English language arts.
    4
    649
  • Reinventing AP Courses With Rigorous Project-Based Learning

    A new study shows that when implemented well, AP courses built around project-based learning can raise test scores for all students, including those in traditionally underserved demographics.
    4.7k
  • Nurturing Changemakers With an ELA Project

    One way to help students master skills is to let them cultivate their own English language arts content to explore. Here’s how.
    654
  • Project-Based Learning: Raising Student Achievement for All Learners

    Researchers in Michigan showed that project-based learning in high-poverty communities can produce statistically significant gains in social studies and informational reading—see how they did it in this video.
    10.4k
  • 6 Free Online Resources for Primary Source Documents

    The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents.
    15.1k
  • How to Engage Students in Historical Thinking Using Everyday Objects

    Asking students to examine their own possessions from the perspective of a historian in the future helps them sharpens their analytical skills.
    3.9k

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George Lucas Educational Foundation

Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.
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