Secondary Social Studies Standards

My career path has brought me towards teaching. I will be Secondary Education, primarily grades 9^th-10^th, at my alma mater Mount Vernon High School in Mount Vernon, WA. In order to understand the requirements needed I chose to look at the Washington State Standards for teaching Secondary Social Studies. Those requirements can be found here http://www.k12.wa.us/SocialStudies/EALRs-GLEs.aspx.

I chose the standard History 4.4.1 where students will: Analyze how an understanding of world history can help us prevent problems today. I chose this standard because I believe it is crucial in understanding history so that we do not repeat the same mistakes. I also believe it is important because it helps the students understand different issues that people have faced around the world. I finally chose this lesson because it gives the students a ton of material and projects to work with due to the vast extensive material.

There are three proficiencies that my students will learn from this and they are as follows:

1. Identifying major world history events (WWII, The French Revolution, The Trial of Socrates)
2.  Analyzing what events occurred that lead to these events
3. Relating these historical moments to current events and analyze how we can prevent past events from reoccurring

Next I will discuss three assessments my students will complete so I know they have met the standard.

1. Students will pick a topic of predetermined events where they will write a research paper on said topic. They will write about how either as a state, country, or world can prevent the problem today.
2.  Students will get into groups and research major wars. Then they will present these wars and why they occurred to the class.
3.  I will have students act as major world leaders in past disasters or major events and deliver a speech.

I will finally describe three learning experiments/activities I will use to help students meet the standard.

1. I will set up a field trip where we visit a local museum to see if there are any historical events in our own city that may give us lessons on what to prevent.
2.  Have them create a poster or big board of pictures and points on historical events.
3. Watch a movie about a historical event. After we as a class watch the film, they will write a paper on the major differences from the actual event. Finally discuss why changing the film adaption is necessary or useless. An example would be watching Pocahontas and pointing out the differences such as her real age.  

I believe that this standard is crucial and understanding it can really benefit the students. I think that it is one of the more difficult ones and I as an educator must be able to set up amazing proficiencies, assessments, and learning experiments. In order to not repeat our mistakes we must learn from our history.