Why use the Choices Program’s materials?
Learning Science and Standards
The Choices Program applies current evidence-based research in learning science to create engaging and effective readings, lessons plans, and video content. The Choices approach aligns with national expectations and outcomes in student skills and content knowledge, such as those from NCSS, NCHE, AHA, and the C3 Framework.
As educators, Choices’ curriculum staff understands the possibilities and constraints of teaching and learning in a wide range of classrooms. We develop lessons that use effective pedagogical tools to enable students to attain, retain, and apply content knowledge and to master essential skills.
Skills
All Choices units include appropriately challenging tasks; inquiry-based texts and lessons; self-reflective exercises; opportunities to connect and transfer content and conceptual knowledge; and primary sources and tasks that provide students with a personal connection to the materials. The readings and lessons employ these cognitive processes in a variety of pedagogical ways—such as through deliberation; scaffolded source analysis; guided discussions; creative expression; collaborative group work; map, timeline, and chart generation and analysis; and argumentative writing.
The Choices Program’s pedagogical approach ensures students gain skills such as critical and creative thinking, historical empathy, analysis and problem-solving, effective communication and collaboration, comfort with complexity, knowledge transfer, perseverance, and self-awareness. Choices provides students with multiple perspectives, giving them agency, cultivating a deep understanding of historical and current events, and encouraging them to develop their own informed opinions. By doing so, we empower them to engage in thoughtful, informed discussions about history and contested contemporary issues.
What should students be able to do after using multiple Choices units?
- Understand that history is a contested, complex, and evolving account of the past
- Think critically about the past and consider how it shapes the present
- Apply historical knowledge and critical thinking skills to gain understanding of current issues
- Propose and consider questions about the past
- Build research skills
- Become critical consumers of information and engaged global citizens who act with empathy and an awareness of historical and current systems of power
- Develop an understanding of issues, events, and policy choices in the context of a historical time period
- Understand the roles of individuals, groups, and institutions as well as elite decision makers in history and current events
- Consider political, social, cultural, and economic perspectives and understand how these factors influence one another
- Identify continuity and change across places, events, and time periods
- Seek out and evaluate diverse and conflicting perspectives
- Identify “silences” in the historical record and assess what they may mean
- Analyze a range of primary sources, including written documents, artifacts, works of art, and oral histories
- Understand the role of secondary sources; consult and evaluate competing and complementary secondary sources
- Analyze sources to determine their perspective, bias, and reliability
- Closely read sources and identify claims and evidence
- Develop evidence-based interpretations of sources
- Use multiple sources to corroborate information
- Realize that all individuals are decision makers, but that personal and public choices are often restricted by time, place, and circumstance
- Assess how values inform perspectives, policy choices, and decision-making
- Build deliberative dialogue skills to learn how to engage in civil discussion about controversial issues
- Develop speaking, listening, and persuasion skills when articulating their own viewpoints about history or contemporary policy issues