ABSTRACT
My goals for my social studies methods course are to connect my students’ college majors with their classroom planning, and to push them away from mere coverage of topics toward an engagement with questions and ideas that cohere around a single worthy theme. I push them to consider how their students could become smarter aft er a semester, not what their students will know. I thus want assignments that demand more disciplinary capability, more complex ideas, and use ideas and documents that reappear and are compared against new material as the semester goes along. I’ve craft ed three interlocking assignments that achieve these goals: a semester-long curriculum, a thematic essay, and a “Change over Time” essay explaining how their curriculum grows more challenging.
