Social Studies Curriculum Council Meeting Minutes –Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Attendees:
Chris Heath, Jay Shipinski, Jamie Vonhoff, Jeff Simpson, Lin Lang
Minutes:
 DBQ Project Overview
 Available in two volumes each for World History and U.S. History
 Takes the AP model and breaks it down to make it applicable to middle school
 CV is the “clean version” – for average students
 EV is the “enhanced version” – with more scaffolding
 Uses 4-7 documents per lesson
 Almost all documents are primary sources
 Includes step by step teacher directions
 Each lesson should take around one week
 Rubrics are included for each lesson
 The purpose/goal is to write an argumentative essay
o Could do a class debate instead of an essay
 These lessons can be used as our common assessments
 They align with our scope and sequence
 They also fit Common Core and the C3 Frameworks
 Will help prepare students for the PARCC writing
 Each binder is about $350
 We could possibly buy 1 set of all 4 binders for each school, which would give us
a site license to copy all we want
 They are in the process of getting everything digitized
 They also have Civics and Literature DBQ’s available
 Middle School
 We will not be getting new textbooks, so we need to look for other resources
we can use.
 Free is always good!
 Look for things we can pilot/play around with and then roll into our budget
request to the Board in January.
 Examples:
o Library of Congress resources
o Junior Scholastic Magazines
o Teaching Tolerance
o Genocide Institute (out of NIU)
o iCivis.org
o iPad apps
 We need to consider whether or not we want to include Native Americans in
our Genocide unit in 8th grade.
 Staff Surveys
 We brainstormed questions for both the Elementary and Middle School surveys.
Chris will send out a draft of each for us to review before sending them off to all
staff.