Connecting with the 5Es

I found a number of new terms this week. When I think of engagement in a lesson, I think of it as an ongoing student interaction with the lesson. Students are engaged when they are excitedly working on the topic, not doodling along the side of the paper. The BCSC 5E Instructional model gives a different definition for engagement. What the BSCS calls engagement, I would call activating. On one thing we agree, student need to call to mind what they already know or connect with past learning to make the present learning relevant.

The BSCS model follows this directly with Exploration. I see how this works in science, but I don’t know that it always works in other inquiry. I have found that if I set the kids off finding information without some background instruction that is teacher led in Social Studies that they get lost in a sea of information that they are not familiar with. For a topic like government, I do like to give them a small foundation before I set them out on their own.

Then once they have this foundation they can explore the topic. I have tried the reverse, but there is too much vocabulary that the students are unfamiliar with to trudge through the topic alone first. Social Studies doesn’t have labs the way that science does, but students can explore with reading and games. Students can also walk video topics of their choice to find out more about different content facts.

Next I do agree that it is time for students to elaborate. They need to get out the basic ideas and then see how they can expand on them. Can they connect them to current issues, or chart them out, or crate a skit that would explain it to someone else. All of these are great examples of how they can elaborate.

Evaluation naturally comes at the end. Not that formative assessments have not been on going through out the process, but there needs to be an end and a culminating something that highlights all that the students have learned and now understand through the work of the unit. Choice boards are one of my favorite evaluation methods with Social Studies simply because there are so many rabbit holes of information that students can be drawn into. This allows them to take a topic that they had more curiosities about and explore them, while proving what they know and understand. 

Resource

The BSCS 5E Instructional Model. (2006, June 12). Retrieved February 26, 2015, from http://bscs.org/sites/default/files/_legacy/BSCS_5E_Instructional_Model-Full_Report.pdf