Give your students the opportunity to think, discover, and learn together in social studies! Teamwork helps students strengthen individual retention, improve performance, and promote meaning-making in the classroom. To give adolescent minds practice in critical thinking, the authors use their considerable teaching experience to present more than 40 problem-solving activities that are ready for immediate use in the social studies classroom. This updated edition of Catch Them Thinking in Social Studies demonstrates how to use collaborative learning strategies to fully engage students in meaning-making. Cooperative Problem-Solving Activities for Social Studies, Grades 6–12 offers lessons in five areas of social studies instruction: geography, politics, economics, culture, and history. Each activity includes background information, clue cards, objectives, tasks, and worksheets. This updated edition helps teachers: • Develop students' decision-making, analysis, and communication skills • Foster teamwork and interdependent learning • Construct cooperative problem-solving activities using their own curriculum Through the activities in this book, students will work together to learn about social topics while developing important, real-world skills. Featuring current research and new activities, this hands-on resource helps teachers facilitate cooperative problem solving in social studies and provides teacher tips throughout the book.
Erin and I are both disciples of constructivist learning. We believe in setting a
table that affords our students the opportunity to think, to discover, and to learn.
The story of our book begins with my travels and experiences as a social studies
department chairperson and teachertrainer—as well as a former classroom
teacher—who used cooperative learning strategies in the classroom. I had been
looking for sessions that might benefit math classroom teachers in cooperative
learning.
