Posted by Linda Brown on August 10, 2010 1 Comment

by Linda Brown
Lead writer, Performance Education

Why I became a Social Studies teacher
When I give workshops at conferences, my opening line is simple: "My mother was a public school teacher for thirty years." Immediately, there are men and women in the audience who sit up straight, smiling and nodding their heads. Their mothers were, too. Afterwards, they come up to me with knowing looks and shake my hand. It's a club, a secret club, where we learned "Colorful Stories from the Classroom" while our moms were cooking dinner or driving to the grocery store.

In fact, I come from a family of teachers and together we have over a century of experience in the classroom. My mom (Spanish, high school), my older brother (English, high school), my sister-in-law (first grade), and me (Social Studies, middle and high school). You can imagine what family gatherings are like —we talk shop! Everything from principals and superintendents to crayons and chalkboards.

My father, a salesman, loved reading books about history and politics. Every night at 6:30 he sat us down in front of the TV to watch the national news. Today, my little brother is the news anchorman at the local TV station. We laugh because his happy face is on the side of every city bus!

Being the middle child, I stand halfway between my parents. I have taught Social Studies (U.S. History, Civics, Current Events, World History, World Cultures, and World Geography) in every grade from 6 to 12.

Critical thinking
When I was in high school, my mother was my Spanish teacher. Was she a good teacher? You bet. Bless her heart, my senior year I scored an incredible 765 on the Spanish SAT. The funny thing was, in my native language (English) my score was 100 points lower!

"Wonder why . . ." I asked.
"Well, there is certainly a lot of reading, interpretation and analysis involved there," she explained.
"Can you teach thinking?"
"How do you mean?"
"Can one teach thinking?"
My mom did not think so.

Bloom's Taxonomy
Since then, our teaching world has undergone a dramatic change. Today, we use Bloom's taxonomy to teach critical thinking—and NO SUBJECT teaches more critical thinking than Social Studies. We have no choice; today's standardized tests are based on Bloom's taxonomy. On any one topic, they can ask a question in six different ways.

For example, some day soon, standardized tests in Social Studies are going to ask questions about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Each question will be posed in six ways—requiring students to recall, interpret, apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate.

Lessons in our workbooks
The beauty of Bloom's taxonomy is that you can teach thinking in an organized way—a skill that will benefit students not only on standardized tests, but for LIFE.

For this reason, at Performance Education we have designed workbooks in which every lesson is based on Bloom's taxonomy. Every textbook company makes that claim, but we actually do. In fact, we provide a grand variety of exercises based on Bloom's taxonomy. My personal favorite is called "Bloom!" — students take one major concept and walk it through all six steps of Bloom's taxonomy.

As my mother would say: "It is the ultimate MODEL for critical thinking."