The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework continues the long tradition of inquiry-based learning in the social studies by merging disciplinary and critical inquiry approaches. Using the Inquiry Design Model (IDM), an instructional design tool, teachers guide students through a series of formative tasks to address supporting questions. By…

Deliberation and inquiry can go hand-in-hand. Inquiry-based learning calls on teachers to facilitate student-led discovery, something that can only happen when students ask questions and weigh possible answers before settling on a plausible and evidentiary answer. Teaching through inquiry is about setting students up to wrestle with the issue at…

Critical inquiries--those seeking to disrupt and alleviate injustice--amplify the stakes and challenges of designing effective compelling questions. Teachers must navigate decisions about what constitutes an injustice, which perspectives are legitimate, and how to maintain a focus on justice and equity while neither indoctrinating students nor…

Most of what students discuss and write in school is in response to questions their teachers pose. Class discussion usually revolves around teacher-generated inquiries. On homework assignments, teachers design questions to assess students' reading comprehension, or to foster their ability to synthesize information. However, it is important that…

Project-based learning (PBL) is a powerful way to make learning meaningful to students and to promote student questions and ownership of the inquiry process. It is a useful way to design and deliver curriculum that is similar in many ways to the Inquiry Design Model (IDM). Although PBL and IDM both value inquiry and student questioning, PBL…

Successful inquiries using the C3 Framework depend on compelling questions that structure an inquiry and supporting questions that allow the inquiry to unfold coherently. The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) reflects the three elements common in inquiry teaching and learning. Those elements--questions, tasks, and sources--are represented in a one-page…

Students are taught about the foundations of inquiry--questions, tasks, and sources--and how to build inquiry-based curriculum and instructional strategies for social studies. They begin their student teaching experiences knowing the difference between a compelling and supporting question, the role of a formative and summative performance task,…

When the author encountered the C3 Framework, she saw an opportunity to develop a different approach that she hoped would encourage all her students to reach their highest potential. The approach she created--The Deliberative Classroom--has pushed her as much as it has pushed her students. The benefits have been powerful: better academic…

A set of questions developed as an analytical tool can energize and deepen student investigations of historical maps.

The 2016 presidential election was the first since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in which full voting protections were not in place for historically marginalized voters. This shift was largely due to a 5-4 decision in "Shelby v. Holder" (2013) in which the Supreme Court ruled that states with a history of voter discrimination…

Students get a valuable opportunity to debate the significance and purpose of Miranda rights by examining the Supreme Court case that led to the warning that police routinely issue.

This guided inquiry combines a structured approach to collecting and organizing data with substantial student autonomy in the important cognitive tasks of analyzing and drawing conclusions from the data. While the teacher decides on the compelling question, students are responsible for generating supporting questions. The detailed emphasis on…

The C3LC project produced a distinct body of knowledge and resources for teachers, which have been reflected in the contents of this special issue of Social Education. The project also provided important lessons about professional learning through teacher-driven collaborative inquiry. I will summarize some of the most important ones in this…

In 2011, Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana of the Right Question Institute first wrote about the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a simple yet rigorous stepwise process to teach all students how to ask better questions, in their book "Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions". Through the QFT, students learn how…

Teachers can successfully integrate student-centered, disciplined inquiry, and technology into their classroom using the three-part approach to monitoring instruction described in this article.