CSUEB History-Social Science Framework Conference

The plenary session will begin with an overview of History-Social Science Education policy delivered by Nancy McTygue, Executive Director of the California History-Social Science Project
Rachel Reinhard,Director of the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, will then host a discussion with three teacher leaders about Framework implementation. The panel will feature:

• Cara Appleton, who has been a history teacher at RJ Fisher Middle School for more than a decade. She currently enjoys teaching 8th grade US history and working with English Learners as the school's English Language Development Coordinator. Additionally, Cara spent a number of years as her department's representative for the district's Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Task Force. Cara holds a BA in Cross Cultural Studies as well as a BCLAD Single Subject credential in social science from San Diego State University.
• Lauren Piraro, who teaches United States History and World History at Gilroy High School.  This is her dream job because Gilroy is where she completed her K-12 education. Piraro reports that it has been a lot of fun learning alongside her students as a first year teacher. She loves infusing my content with contemporary relevance and modern connections so students can see just how incredibly meaningful learning history can be!
• Holly Royaltey, who has been teaching history for 15 years and has worked at all levels and in a variety of school contexts. She holds a doctorate in Education from San Francisco State University, and has worked with both the UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz History and Civics projects.  Holly is passionate about ensuring that all students have access to rigorous content and learn to recognize and utilize their power. She currently teaches at a predominantly Latin(x) school with a large population of socioeconomically disadvantaged students teaching IB History of the Americas, IB Theory of Knowledge, AVID, and World History.

In this session, participants will learn how to anchor history-social science content with inquiry questions, input charts, and academic conversations. Aligned to the History-Social Science Framework, which addresses the English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and English Language Development (ELD) Standards/Framework and the College, Career, and Civic Life Readiness C3 Framework; we will synthesize strategies and resources from models for effectively teaching English learners and all students, apply Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and inclusive practices, and develop protocols. We will guide teachers through the process of integrating the ELD standards for collaborative conversations to assess language development and provide students with effective feedback using developmental rubrics.

Supported by the Framework’s “Language/Process-Assisted Historical Thinking,” we will demonstrate with an example of how to activate and build on background knowledge and schema with a guiding question to prompt inquiry. Then an input chart will provide an introduction to the main idea, key concepts, and academic vocabulary. Students will then be prepared to discuss the content and move on to tackling complex text by speaking and writing with grade level standards and ELD level informed scaffolds (verbal and non-verbal communication cues, question stems, sentence frames, sentence starters, guided oral practice, visuals, color coding, and brain science informed strategies). Teachers will be provided with resources to incorporate academic conversations and ELD protocols into their integrated ELD history-social science instructional design.

What is environmental literacy and why does it matter?
Studying the past through an environmental lens provides students with a more comprehensive understanding of the motivations, possibilities, and constraints of different peoples throughout history and today. In this session, participants will receive a brief introduction to California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) and related classroom resources, and have the opportunity to identify how and when to best integrate these new ideas into their instruction. There will be time for teachers to work with grade-band colleagues to develop environmental literacy-based learning objectives for at least one content standard. Teachers will be given selected primary sources by grade band and Education and the Environment Initiative (EEI) materials that can support their new learning activities. As a group, we will discuss and brainstorm teachers’ ideas and strategies for integrating environmental literacy in their classrooms.

LGBTQ-related content appears in the Framework in grades 2, 4, 5, and 8. What’s the best way to teach it in accurate, engaging, accessible, and age-appropriate ways? In this session, educators will workshop different possibilities for elementary and middle school classrooms. We will focus on two key areas that might feel especially challenging conceptually and pedagogically—Native American gender diversity and so-called “passing” men and women in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Framework signals multiple entry points into teaching the embraced third- and fourth-gender roles within Native American cultures—“two-spirit” traditions—and the impact of the loss of those roles due to European conquest and settler colonialism. How can these histories be incorporated into 4th-grade California mission history, 5th-grade Early American history, and 8th-grade histories of western expansionism? How did some people assigned female at birth passed and lived as men during the Revolutionary era and the Frontier West? What did this mean then, and what can it tell us about those times and places? How do these histories live on with us in the present? Professor Romesburg will share primary and secondary sources from which educators will collaborate on strategies to bring this content into their classes. This session aligns with Framework Chapter 7 (pp. 68, 76, 78, 79), Chapter 8 (p. 98), and Chapter 12 (pp. 249, 264, 274).

This session will offer inquiry sets for 3 or 4 investigative questions for Grade 10.  After a brief discussion of framing and strategies for inquiry, teachers will receive background on the historical context and have the opportunity to work with the sources and discuss implementation with each other.  This will be repeated for 2 or 3 additional source sets.

Using the Library of Congress’s digital archives as a foundation, this workshop focuses on lesson planning that includes inquiry, primary sources, and literacy. Participants will be supported with instructional materials and given time to create or adapt a lesson plan. During this hands-on workshop for lesson development, we will provide tips for creating inquiry questions, templates for backwards planning, primary source sets created by the CHSSP and the Library of Congress, as well as literacy strategies for how students will access and interact with instructional materials.

This session will focus on integrating economic education into grades K-12.  Three topics will be addressed in this session.  First, the session will cover decision making (inquiry) through literature in the primary grades.  A selection of grade-level appropriate materials will be used.  This will support the Framework's goal of developing inquiry-based critical thinking skills, improve reading comprehension and expository writing ability as well as increasing access to economic instruction.  The focus will also be on literacy as well as academic content and vocabulary.  Focusing on grades 4-11, participants will learn about teaching markets where appropriate at each grade level.  The last portion of the session will focus on evaluating public policy using an economic lens in grades 10 and 11.  This session aims to better prepare students to succeed when they become 12th-grade students enrolled in a stand-alone economics course.

This session will begin with an examination of Financial Literacy (FL) as it is described in the History-Social Science (HSS) Framework with particular attention to human capital and benefit-cost analysis as they relate to FL. Attendees will discover how a focus on the themes of content, literacy, and inquiry will prepare high school graduates to acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become responsible, engaged citizens as they examine economic content, topic, and issues from Chapter 18 of the HSS Framework.
Specific areas of content focus will include labor and financial markets and both the U.S. and Global economies all the while addressing choice, use of physical and human resources, and making informed decisions.

While there is substantial LGBTQ content at multiple grade levels and throughout the Framework, 11th grade is the place where the bulk of the content appears, for obvious reasons. Teaching about the 20th century U.S. means understanding the development of both LGBTQ communities and the emergence and elaboration of an LGBTQ rights and liberation movement. In this session, educators will engage with several key entry points into this content and its related concepts: The Harlem Renaissance (1910s-1930s) and the Lavender Scare and Related LGBTQ Rights Movements (1940s-1960s). Using both primary and secondary sources, educators will workshop various possible ways to integrate this content into their existing curricula with methods based in inquiry, interpretation, and critical thinking. This session takes an intersectional approach to this history and our classrooms--it is attentive to the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality must be understood as interrelated social dynamics of power, meaning making, and identity. This session aligns with Framework Chapter 16 (pp. 392, 411, 415, 421).

In this session, teachers will be introduced to the Global Competence Framework developed by CGEP and enhanced with benchmarks developed by the California Global Education Network (CDE, CWLP). Based on global competence domains, indicators, benchmarks, and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, teachers will bring a “global perspective” to their K-12 course of study for History-Social Science. They will be guided by the seven themes outlined in Appendix B of the H-SS Framework as teachers consider problems, questions, and themes in the History and Geography classroom. They will also use information presented in Appendix D (Teaching the Contemporary World) to explore globalization as a key theme for teaching history and geography across the grades. Attention will also be paid to Appendices E (Civic Education) & G (Environmental Education). Yes, this is a lot! But there is a rich quality that can be brought to every standards-based H-SS program when the teacher understands, integrates, and teaches global competence. Teachers will be provided examples, models, and strategies for using a global perspective to engage students in the development of H-SS knowledge, global competence skills, and agency required of citizens at local and global scales.  

This session will offer inquiry sets for 1 or 2 investigative questions for Grades 6 and 7.  After a brief discussion of framing and strategies for inquiry, teachers will receive background on the historical context and have the opportunity to work with the sources and discuss implementation with each other.  This will be repeated for 2 or 3 additional source sets.

The Framework calls for more complex examinations of Native Californian history across grade levels and time periods. This session will focus on ways to incorporate the history and culture of Native Californian peoples into lessons at both primary and secondary levels. Lessons that explore Native Californian history provide teachers with unique opportunities to connect students with local history and living Native communities that, historically, have been frequently misrepresented and not consulted in public representations of their groups. Furthermore, this topic allows teachers and students to explore interdisciplinary themes that span the various fields of social and behavioral sciences, including history, geography, economics, civics (political science), anthropology, religious studies, and psychology. Investigations that focus on the lifeways of Native Californians both before and after foreign contact highlights important historical thinking strategies including understanding diverse perspectives, evaluating historical evidence, recognizing continuity and change, assessing cause and consequence, and unpacking ethical considerations of the past.  

This session will engage participants in a model lesson that investigates the experiences of Native peoples during transitional times in California’s history—guided by the major instructional shifts in the Framework. Participants will use inquiry to investigate primary source content from the following periods: pre-contact, European settlement, the Gold Rush, and the early 1900s. Participants will also leave with exposure to Teaching California Inquiry Sets for grades 3, 4, and 10 (that can be also adapted for grade 8) that address Native Californian history and culture.

Come explore Integrated Action Civics in which content informs civic engagement and conversely integrates civic empowerment strategies into your course content. We'll look at a model for integrating civic engagement into your course and share a framework for examining power that help students understand history content while preparing them for possible civics action projects in your course. By integrating civic engagement with course content, this model helps students learn and apply historical content knowledge and critically important discipline-specific literacy and analytical skills to their understanding of, and response to, contemporary social and political issues. Participants will engage with these strategies and leave with classroom-ready materials.

This approach to civics integration is being developed by the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project (UCBHSSP) in partnership with the Santa Clara County Office of Education (SCCOE).  

This session will provide participants with an overview of the History-Social Science Framework in the upper elementary grades, with an emphasis on the shifts of instruction and themes across grade levels.  As inquiry is a central shift in the new History Social-Science Framework, its important that students are given ample opportunities to ask questions, dive into documents, and engage in academic conversations with fellow students. There are numerous ways to structure inquiry and this session will explore a few tried and true methods.  A model lesson utilizing primary sources, children’s literature, and informational text focusing on the Mendez v. Westminster court case will also be shared.

This session will explore not only the new grade nine elective course but also how themes in ethnic studies are addressed throughout the framework through its new focus on broadening the diversity of the course narratives. Through workshop activities attendees will dig into how these themes are taught through the United States and world history sequence.

This session will support teachers to understand how to measure student learning of each element of the Framework through content, literacy, inquiry, and citizenship (CLIC). It will offer teachers practical examples that they can then use to develop their own assessments. The session will begin with examples of different types of assessments, such as constructed response, that allow us to measure specific aspects of CLIC. It will provide examples as well as frames and templates to support teachers to develop their own assessments. Teachers will then break into grade level groups and we will offer grade-level sources for teachers to use as stimuli to develop assessments. Teachers will provide feedback to one another and have time for reflection and revision. The assessments developed in the session will be added to a Google drive that teachers will be able to access. These can also be made available to the communities of practice across the state. The session's intention is that for the presentations in the fall, we will share sources of topics taught in the fall. For example, Africa in 7th grade, then in the spring, similarly, we will work on topics covered in that time period, such as the Americas. That way, the assessments that are created and shared build upon one another and continue to serve as a resource for teachers. Our goal is for this presentation to be an opportunity to network teachers across the state with practical exemplars of assessments aligned to the Framework they can use, like a CLIC test bank.

This session will focus on tools and strategies to help students (and teachers!) develop geography content knowledge and academic literacy while also supporting inquiry and informed action.  Tools presented will include a discussion guide that supports critical reading and reinforces key disciplinary concepts, frameworks for developing both compelling and supporting questions using a geographic lens, online mapping exercises that trigger spatial thinking, geo-histograms to bring spatial and historical perspectives together, and citizen science programs that encourage exploration and observation of local and remote environments.

This session will focus on the available opportunities for pre-credential and credential-level college students to expose them to the instructional shifts in the H-SS Framework. The Framework was published several years ago, yet teacher preparation programs inconsistently expose student to the instructional shifts outlined in the Framework. Teaching with the Framework serves to ground credential and pre-credential students’ practices in engaging and inclusive methods through hands-on exposure to the inquiry process, interdisciplinary understandings of historical content, inclusion of multiple perspectives, and the various ways to develop critical literacy skills among diverse student populations. Exposure to the instructional shifts in the framework further works to develop stronger analytical skills in future History-Social Science teachers who learn to understand shifts in historiography, develop critical media literacy skills, and explore various ways to present framework-aligned content to students. Moreover, teachers who are trained in using the Framework may increase the likelihood of implementation and adoption in the future.

This session will use the topic of Spanish Colonization in California to engage participants in a sample lesson that instructors and HSS coaches may adopt to expose teachers to the instructional shifts in the Framework. This lesson will include a short introduction to the historiography of the topic as a metacognitive exercise. It will also include time to analyze primary sources, secondary sources, and inquiry questions related to the topic that are relevant to instructors at primary and secondary levels. Participants will have time to explore example content generated by pre-credential History-Social Science college students developed in connection to this topic.

This session will begin with an examination of the “citizenship” theme as it is described in the History-Social Science Framework with particular attention to the need and urgency of citizenship education as part of a well-rounded history-social science program.  Attendees will discover how a focus on the themes of content, literacy, and inquiry prepares young people to acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to become responsible, engaged citizens by examining civic inquiries in specific chapters of the Framework in their grade level descriptions.

We will explore the various components of civic learning as described in the Framework and engage participants in an activity to practice reading specific content and utilize strategies to deepen content understanding and strengthen deliberation skills. A number of engaging resources and opportunities including the Judges in the Classroom program and California Civic Learning Award program from the Power of Democracy, based on research-based best practices for civic learning, led by California Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye will be showcased as will the California State Seal of Civic Engagement and the Civics Digital Chalkboard from the California Department of Education.

The California History-Social Science Framework suggests a plan to help teachers
organize their courses around questions and topics of disciplinary significance (ch.21).
The Framework asks to teachers to consider, “What topics of relative significance,
enduring understandings-or “big ideas”-can be learned”. This session will demonstrate
how history-social science teachers can translate these big, significant ideas into yearlong
Essential Questions and unit-level Historical Questions using the backwards
mapping model developed by Wiggins and McTighe in their seminal work
Understanding by Design. In this presentation participants will learn how to effectively
and intentionally organize their content in order to create inquiry-driven courses.
Participants will also learn how to backwards map skills and practices to ensure that
their courses require students to build literacy by “doing history”.

This presentation will ask participants to develop year-long Essential Questions for their
courses and to develop a preliminary thesis in response to that Essential Question.
Additionally, participants will practice drafting unit-level Historical Questions that help
students explore a particular standard/historical era so that they can leverage this
content knowledge in order to develop a more refined and reformed response to the
Essential Question (Bruner, 1960). Finally, participants will evaluate their course and
determine what literacy and disciplinary skills students will need in order to engage with
its Essential and Historical Questions.

While the California FAIR Act included the requirement that K-12 curriculum incorporate disability history, educators still lack materials to support them in this area, leading many disability historians to fear that all students are getting is Helen Keller and FDR. The presentation will introduce some of the core themes worth exploring in disability history, as well as the opportunities for approach, whether one sneaks disability into existing lessons or develops new curriculum that centers on disability, but connects to broader social science themes. For example, we will look at how World War II lessons might incorporate a brief look at the Hiroshima Maidens, Japanese women who were deeply stigmatized as their bodies, covered in Keloid scars, showed the aftermath of the bomb. We will also look at the San Francisco Section 504 sit-in , where disabled people occupied a Federal Building to demand that the first disability civil rights legislation take effect, a lesson that really dives deep into disability, but also supports more traditional lessons about how legislation takes effect, how social change happens, and how social movements build upon one another. The session will include accessible media and recommended exercises to provide educators with new tools for incorporating disability into their classrooms.  

Amongst the required new teaching topics in the Framework is the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency. This topic allows not only for specific investigation into the significance of this election and how it fits (and doesn’t fit) into stories of Civil Rights and the second decade of the 21st Century, it can also serve as a case study into additional important issues. These include issues of content such as, how do we teach the recent past? and how do we teach the Presidents? This topic also allows us to explore issues of process, such as, how do we use the Framework and content standards as a teaching guide while tailoring specific curriculum and instruction for our particular teaching context? This session will engage participants in a lesson that uses legislation and excerpts from the Framework and standards to both introduce this topic and promote discussion of how we implement the Framework. We will then consider specific content questions (see above) through participant investigation and reading of relevant primary and secondary sources. Participants will leave with materials for teaching Obama’s election and presidency, a deeper understanding of choices to be made when teaching the recent past and the Presidents, and a set of questions for translating teaching topics related to the Presidents for their local contexts. This session will aim to make both the implementing of the Framework and standards into particular lessons, and considerations when teaching the Presidents, relevant and appropriate for both elementary and secondary educators.

This session will provide resources and strategies for administrators to plan their history-social science instructional materials adoption process. First the session will introduce the HSSFW Chapter 23, Criteria for Evaluating Instructional Materials: Kindergarten Through Grade Eight; and the process the materials went through to be adopted by the State Board of Education. Additionally, the session will highlight and discuss Category 1, Criteria 14 and Education Codes, which requires instructional materials to address the FAIR Act, giving administrators a chance to discuss concerns and will provide recommended resources to assist their efforts to address these concerns. The remainder of the session will feature example processes and resources, including model timelines and templates districts have used to complete their adoption. These will include, but not be limited to informing teachers on the new Framework and four shifts, working with teachers to narrow materials to pilot, how to incorporate parent and community input, and how to manage a pilot and the selection. District leaders who have worked through these processes will share their experiences. Participants will have plenty of time to engage in discussion to learn from each other and have questions answered by the presenters.

UCBHSSP has developed an approach to history instruction that invites students into the learning process through the use of their own, and their community’s, history as week as the knowledge construction process. Participants will be introduced to the vision of a Making History teacher, who views themselves as a learner within the context of their school community and its resources, as well as one of the historical thinking modules. In demonstrating the historical thinking module, participants will first apply the concept to their own life histories. They will then explore how that concept can be reinforced through content application and refined in a culminating project. A UCBHSSP teacher leader will co-facilitate so as to discuss how they have incorporated the approach into their own instruction.

This session will provide a thematic approach to address the content and inquiry-based form of instruction in U.S. history courses.  The session content material applies primarily to grades 8, 11, and 12.  The thematic approach introduced in the first phrase of the Framework conference that highlighted the enduring themes of citizenship, movement, and historical perspectives will serve as a foundation for this deeper exploration of the themes.  The session will focus more heavily on introducing the themes in the first and last units in the U.S. history grade level courses.  Examples that focus on recent history will also guide discussions of the thematic approach.  Participants will receive 2-4 inquiry sets that address this content.