The TEKS are the guiding force for how a teacher is supposed to teach in a class as well as what the student is expected to learn. Not only do they supply the subject matter, but also give the teacher instruction on what students are expected to do with the subject. Each strand (topic) of the TEKS provides different content and different ways to approach the content. Texas sixth grade social studies, commonly known as World Cultures, has eight strands and 23 TEKS, with a number of expectations (what the student is expected to do or know) for each one. My purpose here is to examine each TEK in order to help myself better understand them. After all, a good teacher should not just know the content but how it is supposed to be delivered to the students. The TEKS are how the state wants the information to be taught.
When discussing the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) for sixth grade social studies, one of the most intriguing things about them is that you don’t start at the beginning. 6.1 is all about history, which is surprising, I know that the history TEKS start with history. If you are teaching sixth grade World Cultures, the history is in a vacuum. Let’s compare Texas History TEK 7.1 and World Cultures 6.1 to show the difference.
7.1 The student understands traditional historical points of reference in Texas history.
6.1 The student understands that historical events influence contemporary events.
So teaching history out of the gate in sixth grade is unlikely to happen. History of where? What does contemporary mean? Seventh grade, while the rest of that TEK goes off the rails, at least gives you the format: Texas history.
That’s fine, you pop ahead to 7.2(A) and move along from there.
World Cultures is bit of a running start. Texas’s insistence on testing certain grade levels on certain things (STEM things, if you know what I mean) means that even really good schools; your academies, your magnet schools, your schools with social studies teachers that think it’s a really important subject; tend to give it short shrift. During the two years I was teaching third grade they just stopped teaching it all together; first because the social studies teacher left and they chose not to replace her, the second year, because they pulled me from my class and made me teach math, because, well, math is tested, social studies isn’t. (The irony of them pulling me from math, which I had taught the previous year and placing me in social studies because the principal at the time thought I wasn’t a good math teacher was not lost on me.)
That means that students often come into sixth grade with very little background knowledge in social studies. Not “History isn’t my favorite subject” lack of background, but “What’s a map?” lack. So, the running start . . . . We jump straight over the two history strands and find ourselves right square in the land of geography. The reason is fairly simple. We can’t very well teach students even the watered down version of history we’re allowed to teach (more on that at a later date) if they don’t understand the basic concept of where these societies are.
Now to be fair, history is the first strand for the TEKS for all years. A discussion of the seventh grade TEKS, as indicated above, would almost assuredly point out that a teacher has to leap the first TEK to begin teaching. True and fair, and should I ever discuss those TEKS I point out how broad, yet narrowly focused they are, and how they cover information taught throughout the year. For sixth grade, the TEKS are strangely focused on what is expected and next time we’ll take a long, hard look at how TEK 6.1, while broad is strangely constricting when taught in the classroom.
Random Thoughts of Little Interest 