Social Studies is off to a great start with a neat change to an old idea. In the past, grade 9 students completed an Interactive Activities Notebook (IAN) as part of their Asian Studies class. All grade 9 students at ISB are required to take this class.
This year the Social Studies department started to look at alternatives to this assessment and some of the ideas were amazing. I the first meeting, which was held on Aug 14 the member that teach this class thought up a whole new approach to this.
Basically it will be a journey through the year and involve more of a project based model. Students will look at questions that are important to them, through the lens of Asian Studies, determine the areas they are interested in and then propose changes or alternative to help answer the questions. They will research these questions and keep notes, interviews, action plans, reading and reflections on what they find.
And the best part of this to me, it will all be completed electronically. At the moment the final product has not be determined as there are some updates to essential questions and enduring understandings that still need to be worked through. One of the teachers of the class will look at preparing an introduction to the students as this new model is moved forward in the class this year.
The learning that could come from this may be in the areas of individualized learning (students will be more engaged in something they have a personal stake in), project based learning (steps will be taken to arrange this assignment in this form of model which emphasizes and orderly progression from pertinent question through to suggested solution), problem solving in a real world (the topic will be current and pertinent to the student) and creativity (solutions can be formed from a myriad of research).
Watch as this unfolds and there is more work on it.
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