In this strategy, students work in pairs to complete fast-paced, skill-oriented tasks such as mapping, categorizing, interpreting political cartoons, graphing, identifying perspectives, and analyzing primary sources. You begin each activity by quickly modeling the skill and then challenging students to practice that skill again and again. Students receive feedback as they work. The activity ends with a debriefing session, allowing students to use their new skill to gain greater insights into history.

1. Tie the teaching of skills to historical content.
Teaching key social studies skills—mapping, categorizing, interpreting a political cartoon, graphing, reading a timeline—is a vital part of any history course. Without these skills, students cannot fully grasp many historical concepts. But most history teachers believe they have little time to teach such skills. You can resolve this if each skill lesson centers around important content objectives.

2. Create tasks that require students to use their multiple intelligences to learn the skill.
Each Social Studies Skill Builder should challenge students to use more than just their linguistic intelligence. For example, during a World War I propaganda poster activity, you might give each pair a placard with a reproduction of a poster. Pairs quickly sketch the poster, search for symbols, discuss the poster’s meaning, and record their answers. Each time they analyze a poster they use linguistic, visual, interpersonal, and logical-mathematical intelligences.

3. Quickly teach the skill to the entire class.
Introduce each Social Studies Skill Builder by quickly modeling the skill you want your students to practice. Modeling consists of carefully demonstrating each step students must follow as they develop the skill. When you teach students how to analyze propaganda posters, for example, project a slide of a propaganda poster and show them how to look for visual symbols, how to create a simple drawing of the poster, and how to use the poster to answer higher-level questions such as: From which country does this poster come? What does the artist want us to do or to believe? During which period of the war was this poster created?

4. Place students in mixed-ability pairs.
Since the skill tasks require the use of the multiple intelligences, it makes sense to pair students with complementary abilities. This helps ensure that each partner has something of value to contribute and that interaction is more equitable. Carefully assign students to mixed-ability pairs in advance of the lesson: put a student with strong linguistic skills with a student with strong visual skills, a logical-mathematical thinker with a body-kinesthetic thinker, or a musical-rhythmic learner with an interpersonal learner. Prepare an overhead transparency showing who sits together and where.

5. Challenge students to use the skill repeatedly, and give them immediate feedback on their progress.
Once students are in pairs, clearly state what you expect from them so you can fairly evaluate their work and award points for each part of an assignment they complete. Checking student work and awarding points in this fashion motivates students to work quickly and accurately in a game-like atmosphere.

6. Debrief the lesson with the entire class, and make historical connections.
After you have stopped the activity, begin the debriefing by asking pairs to share their responses about one placard with which they have become particularly expert. By quickly reviewing all the placards in this way, all students will be exposed to the content. Next, challenge the class to think holistically about the fragmented bits of history they have learned, by challenging them to put all the placards in some type of order. For example, you might want them to put a series of placards depicting the events that led to the fall of the Roman Empire in chronological order, or a series of Mexican murals into groups according to artist.

Discovering the Southwest Heritage

In this Social Studies Skill Builder, students examine images representing Mexicano contributions to Southwest culture to create a mural showing the contributions throughout the Southwest.

The Challenges of China’s Geography

In this Social Studies Skill Builder, students identify and label 16 key physiographic features of China. Afterward they discuss the challenges that this unique geography posed for unification during the dynastic period.