And We Wrap up This Webinar, We Just Want to Give You One Last Chance, If Anyone Would

SLIDE 28

And we wrap up this webinar, we just want to give you one last chance, if anyone would like to reflect on what we talked about today, if you have questions, if you want to bring up any challenges, that are maybe arising in your, as you go, as you try to approach inquiry in the social studies, we certainly want to honor your questions, your reflections, your ah ha moment, your oh no moments, whatever's coming to your mind. PAUSE
Wearen’t seeing anybody with any pressing, oh we do have a question. PAUSE
DR. JASON PARKER: Hi there, this is Jason Parker, I teach social studies methods at GardnerWebb university, a colleague of mine is also here listening today. We’re working through the concept based unit planning process with our students this semester, and we are almost to the point where we are ready to turn them loose to further develop their units. regarding the structure of knowledge that are so heavily embedded in concept based unit planning process, what is the ratio of including factual questions, because with the shift going to concept based instruction, facts still play a part, certainly not as prominent as they used to be, but this webinar today was very helpful. what is the best way to teach, or still involve, the factual questions? Is there a ratio of factual, conceptual, provocative questions that you would advise as?

DR. STEVE MASYADA: That’s a very good question. as far as a ratio goes, there isn't necessarily a ratio that we can suggest, but what I would say is your factual questions should support your conceptual questions, and that’s really the way to think about it, because you need facts to get to the concepts anyway, so all the factual questions should be linked in some way back to the generalization and try to link those factual questions back to the conceptual questions as well. use the factual questions to build the foundation that can answer the conceptual questions and get to the generalization. Does that make sense? Does that help?
DR. JASON PARKER: Yes, so you would still advise future teachers to just focus on making those conceptual questions and then...I guess I'm just still concerned how we should inform future teachers to integrate facts.
MS. ANN CARLOCK: If I could add also to Steve's comment, I don't think, and I think it's great that you're bringing this up, a lot of teachers don’t understand the balance between the facts and the concepts and the factual information is still critical. there is no way that you can teach conceptually without all that comes under facts. So where we begin is with the generalization, the big idea, the enduring understanding, and the teacher uses that understanding, that conceptual understanding, to then say what facts would be ideal to help students get to this understanding? That’s where the facts come in.
DR. JASON PARKER: So, you wouldn’t necessarily recommend for teachers and pre-service teachers to develop questions that are at the factual level?

MS. ANN CARLOCK: We have three types of questions: factual, conceptual, and provocative. It's critical to make sure that they understand the concepts, but you need to have factual questions to also get them there.

DR. JASON PARKER: Ok, thank you.

DR. STEVE MASYADA: so basically it wouldn’t be 3 factual questions for every conceptual question or something like that. it's just really depends on what the topic is, the generalization, and also the grade level of the students and the knowledge that they're coming in with, what they need to get to that conceptual level. You can't ignore factual questions. When I say stroking a balance, honestly I think that one way to look at is that there really should be a balance. your factual questions, there shouldn't be any extraneous factual questions, that’s one way to look at it, the factual questions should be not jeopardy type questions they should be directly related to content that helps students get to the generalization and connect to those conceptual questions. Does that help at all, make sense at all?

DR. JASON PARKER: It does.
DR. STEVE MASYADA: Keep in mind too, when we are talking about these questions, these are only the ones that might be in your UNIT plan, that doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions during your general instruction or anything like that, so you’re not necessarily just limited to those questions that are in the unit plan. The unit plan questions are really those ones you are specifically writing to get to your generalizations.

DR. JASON PARKER: And that makes sense to so and that’s a good point and I'll probably haven’t done as a good a job as I could have in delivering this with my students, but that’s a good point too to bring up in my class about factual should be within the lessons itself

DR. STEVE MASYADA: Jason, I'll email you a couple of links tonight that might help.
DR. JASON PARKER: wonderful, thank you.
MS. JUSTYN KNOX: It is a great question, Jason, and I think, I'm glad that you brought up that question, because it’s important to know that all of the questions that we talked about today are a mix of conceptual and provocative, but they really lean conceptual. i mean you look at a question like could the great depression happen again, which is provocative, in the students need to knows, they're almost going to have to ask themselves the factual questions in order to be able to answer the provocative questions. So students sometimes will formulate their own factual questions in the inquiry process. Which is what we want students to be doing.So we commend you and everyone that’s on this webinar for trying to learn more about the inquiry process and all the different types of questions that should be asked. There’s no right or wrong answer sometimes. It’s trial and error sometimes with questioning for students and teachers. So i think that I'm glad that you raised that point. Are there any other questions that anyone has before we wrap this up? PAUSE

We definitely want to take this opportunity to remind you that we will continue to post all of our listserv updates on our wiki site. That address is posted above, it’s hyperlinked, and we encourage you to return to our website regularly so that you can keep up with the latest and greatest news in North Carolina Social Studies. If you have anything that you would like to add to our listserv to go out you can certainly email Ann Carlock, , and if you would like to submit an item, you should include the prospect, association, the content, and be sure to include a brief description of the opportunity with either a link or contact information that you would like to go out on our listserv. If you are not a subscriber to our listserv, you can also sign up on our wiki site to subscribe. another important reminder that we want to remind you about is the NC Council of the Social Studies Conference coming up Feb 21 and 22, I;ve provided the hyperlink there for you for registration, and we will all be there, our entire team, conducting different sessions around curriculum and assessment, disciplinary literacy, project based learning and inquiry, and we would love to see you there, so please if you have not already registered for that, register, and we certainly hope to see you there. Lastly, we would like to

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Sorry I somehow just got muted. we would like to thank you very much for interactive participation today and we will not only archive this webinar but we will also be sure to archive all of the questions that you came up with throughout the webinar to ensure that you have those as a resource. ThePowerpoint will be posted on the webinar link in a little while and again we look forward to seeing you at the social studies conference in a few weeks. And our next webinar is scheduled for April first, 2014 and that will also be looking at inquiry and disciplinary literacy so please tune in for that. Thank you and we are now signing off.