National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)

THEME II:

TIME, CONTINUITY, & CHANGE

Jamestown: The First Permanent Settlement

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Description: Social studies programs should include experiences that provide for the study of the ways human beings view themselves in and over time. Human beings seek to better understand their historical roots and to locate themselves in time. Knowing how to read and reconstruct the past allows one to develop and historical perspective and to answer questions such as: Who am I? What happened in the past? How has the world changed and how might it change in the future? Why does our personal sense of relatedness to the past change?

Reflection:

The theme time, continuity, and change is the most essential part of teaching history and social sciences. This is the basis for all aspects of history. Therefore, I included in every lesson plan that I developed questions that led to students contemplating how we, as a nation or civilization, got to where we are at today. Every history class should have students asking questions pertaining to who we are, how has the world changed, why and how did events occur in the past, and how do those past events affect the present and the past.

Every lesson included some aspect of time, continuity, and change. I implemented this theme by using timelines, constructing guiding questions, written responses, and class discussions. I felt as though the timeline the students did concerning turning points of World War II after 1941 was effective because it gave students the chance to seek out historical knowledge on the subject matter. Students worked in pairs to find the significance of each event and how these events led to the allies becoming victorious over the axis powers. I had a timeline on the chalkboard and when they were done, students came up and wrote an event along with its significance on the board. Afterwards, we had a short discussion of each event and why they believed what important of each one. Students seemed to enjoy working on this activity since it allowed them to find out what was significant concerning how events in time change which lead to another event and so on.

In the future, I am going to always include time, continuity, and change within my lesson plans, because it is what I consider to be the most important theme that students will learn throughout their course of studies within the subject of history. The magnitude of learning about one’s culture, beliefs, and how we all got to this point in time is relevant to what is occurring in today’s world.