"1. I am reminded of a student I had years ago. We were in WWII in US History and she was just utterly lost. No sense of who were Allies and who were Axis or where the fighting was, she was really missing very very basic stuff and forget moving onto…"

""That said, if I did that job properly, and if high stakes tests actually tested what they purport to test, then my students would be ready to take and do well on them with no other prep needed." This is the exact sentiment I've been…"

"I'm going to respond to everything, but first, I think we might be working with different editions. The discovery learning section is on my page 71... In any case, I agree with his points on discovery learning and think the same of PBL; only…"

"sounds perfect!! and Its a lot but they aren't writers yet so that's what we do; we break it down and help they learn the steps and parts and etcs. In fact, I like this a lot better than the ongoing thing I was doing."

"John, great points! I'm not a teacher anymore (professional development for ss) but I taught in a classroom with a 50/50 special ed/gen ed split with a co-teacher. Pretty middle of the road subburban, but a group who found making connections…"

"This is the conundrum we face with students who have little background knowledge, they don't know what they don't know so they don't even know what to be curious about. I love it when it strikes them to ask the lightbulb question,…"

"I'm under no illusions that kids really want the answers to those questions! Mostly they don't, but we do get into somethings more deeply because of the questions and that's where the curiosity grows. I don't think structure is…"

"there's more 'ah-ha' from kids, I think sometimes they didn't know how or why things were connected and those orchestrated moments help. Usually I would use the essential questions as writing assignments at the end of the unit…"

"I've tried to use my essential questions physically daily--posting them and then returning to them with any information from the day that adds to the answers or understanding, showing students that all this stuff we do adds up to these three or…"

"1. I agree that kids don't generally gravitate to reading that improves vocabulary (facebook probably makes my vocabulary worse!) but I'm not going to fight that battle. I try to assign more challenging reading and model reading through…"

"www.micitizenshipcurriculum.org has three essential questions posted for every unit of study that has been written so far (k-5, some MS, and US, World, Civic and Econ). They are guided by MI requirements but basically could be adapted by topic to…"

"not to add to your plate, but look at what they need to know for high school as well. In MI we found that high school people assumed a lot of learning from MS, but the MS had no idea what those assumptions were. We need to consider what they come…"

"John, you are doing exactly what we are trying to do with the www.micitizenshipcurriculum.org: build on each grade, so while you are teaching South Africa in 7th and Civics in 8th, conceptually there is a build. It requires a big picture view and…"

"I'm not even sure what a rational sequence of content would be. Currently I like the k-4 sequence of expanding horizons, but that's primarily geography, civics and econ with very little history. Ideally kids understand the geo/civ/econ…"

"John, Its not so much that no thought has been placed into the sequence, its that there are too many voices trying to do it! We can either teach US history in total several times (5th grade, 8th grade, 11th grade) or we can spread it out and know we…"

"Lisa, I had this problem too, with my 50/50 classroom of sped and gened. I found that everyone was better off if I used some standard practices so that the procedural elements were always the same for certain activities (like getting into groups,…"