The revised Illinois Social Science Standards develop six competencies in students in grades K-12. According to the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE), these competencies include:

• Recognize perspectives
• Evaluate systems, inequity, and power
• Investigate the world
• Conduct analyses and draw conclusions
• Communicate effectively
• Take action to effect change and reflect

This week, the Illinois Civics Hub (ICH)  hosted Dr. Joel Breakstone, Director of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), to demonstrate resources and strategies to help students develop these competencies. If you missed our webinar, Reading Like a Historian to Teach Inclusive History, visit our ICH Webinar Archive to view this webinar and others from Dr. Breakstone around Civic Online Reasoning.

SHEG explains that reading like a historian:

teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence.

Reading Like a Historian from SHEG is one of many resources that ICH features in our toolkit to help teachers develop the six competencies of the revised social science standards. 

The theme of teaching inclusive history will be revisited next month as we welcome the American Bar Association Division for Public Education for a webinar on February 15th at 3:30 p.m. CT to focus on How to Use SCOTUS Cases to Teach Inclusive History. For information on this and other professional development opportunities, visit the ICH website and subscribe to our monthly newsletter.