Social Education
Volume 62 Number 1
January 1998

From Behaviorist to Constructivist Teaching
Geoffrey Scheurman
This introduction to constructivism examines four hypothetical teacher roles based on different views of knowledge and matching methods for teaching social studies.

Teaching Ideas
Revisiting Lexington Green
Geoffrey Scheurman
Posing the question, "What happened on Lexington Green?", this article presents and analyzes several different approaches for helping students to solve this conundrum in early American history.

Authentic Intellectual Work in Social Studies: Putting Performance before Pedagogy
Geoffrey Scheurman and Fred M. Newmann
Establishing criteria for authentic intellectual achievement helps students learn in constructivist classrooms—and others too.

Teaching Ideas
The Time Before History: Thinking Like an Archaeologist
Michael M. Yell
The use of active teaching strategies makes study of the "Iceman" a process of discovery for students in this seventh grade world studies class.

Assessment in a Social Constructivist Classroom
Janet Alleman and Jere Brophy
Three curriculum goals—understanding, appreciation, and life application-lie at the core of constructivist teaching and should guide methods of assessment.

Teaching Ideas
Actual and Virtual Reality: Making the Most of Field Trips
Jennifer Marie Bellan and Geoffrey Scheurman
Real and electronic field trips can serve as complementary components of powerful social studies instruction.

The Oregon Trail: Wyoming Students Construct a CD-ROM
Pol William Holt
Creating a CD-ROM for use in their state’s fourth grade classrooms gave one group of Wyoming high school students the chance to learn electronic production techniques and to perform the work of actual historians.

What Would You Do? Constructing Decision-Making Guidelines Through Historical Problems
Kevin O’Reilly
Critical thinking involves not only examining past situations, but learning to reflect on the very skills that increase our understanding of historical problems.

History Alive! Six Powerful Constructivist Strategies
Bert Bower and Jim Lobdell
The cognitive benefits of allowing students to construct knowledge of the past are illustrated in this presentation of six dynamic teaching strategies based on multiple intelligence theory.

Resources for Constructivist Teaching
Michael M. Yell and Geoffrey Scheurman
This annotated list includes books that illustrate active teaching strategies as well as more general works on the philosophical underpinnings of constructivism.

Classroom Management in a Social Studies Learning Community
Jere Brophy and Janet Alleman
The potential of active teaching strategies to increase student learning is enhanced or undercut by the management principles in use in a classroom.

Teaching with Documents
President Harry S. Truman’s Diary
Stacey Bredhoff and Wynell Schamel
The voice of the "ordinary" man that speaks in Truman’s diary belies the extraordinary nature of his presidency, which involved some of the most fateful decisions of the twentieth century.