Summary
“Students can find facts on the internet; we should focus on teaching skills.” This observation is common, but it is also naive and dangerous. If students lack a framework of accurate and well-connected facts for comparison, it is hard to teach a skill of evaluating new facts for accuracy or relevance. The key word in that sentence is framework. A remembered fact might contradict a new observation or internet page, but the key test is how each new fact fits with accepted knowledge. A discussion like this might seem abstract, but it has gained new urgency as the internet makes all kinds of “facts” both easier to access and more memorable. One plausible response is to create spiral curricula — to build knowledge frameworks by deliberately revisiting core topics in different grades, building a foundation of basic skills and facts in early grades and then refining and extending in later grades. A short presentation, handouts, and a website provide examples that deal with topics as varied as climate change
NCGE 2025 Conference Session Proposal 50 Abstract continued:: , pre-Columbian trade, and redlining. Participants in small groups then use templates to build learning progressions for topics of personal interest.
Session Focus
All Grade Levels | Curriculum and Instruction | Activities, Curriculum, Learning progressions
Conference Room
Clark
Meet the Presenter
Phil Gersmehl is in the third generation of “Teacher Gersmehls.” He earned a BA in Education from Concordia Teachers College, Illinois, and a PhD in Geography from the University of Georgia, then taught at Concordia for five years before moving to the University of Minnesota. There, he helped develop several distance-learning courses and large-enrollment classes (300+ students). These included a new general-education course on the Language of Maps, which led to an Annenberg Public-TV project and a course manual that is now distributed by the National Council for Geographic Education. In 1990, the Association of American Geographers asked Phil to serve as Director of ARGUS (Activities and Readings in the Geography of the United States), ARGWorld (Activities and Resources in the Geography of the World), and the Teaching Geography Project. During 12 years of funded projects, Phil authored a number of interactive computer simulations and made presentations in summer institutes and other teacher workshops in 34 states, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Russia. A third edition of his book, Teaching Geography, was published by Guilford Press in 2014. Recently, he has been working with teams of Michigan teachers to develop and test lessons and online resources to meet the new social-studies standards in that state.
