How Transferable is Your Social Studies Class?

What are the big ideas, essential questions, and key thinking skills in your social studies classroom?  How transferable are they? 
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"We don't learn in school just to stay in school for the rest of our lives. We have to be able to transfer what we learn in one setting and use it somewhere else. In order to transfer our knowledge we have to be able to learn things in a way that is flexible, that sees the connections between one use of the knowledge and another use of the knowledge.”

- Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford University


“The challenge of education is always to ask: What is the least amount of material we can teach really well that will, in turn,  make it possible  for students to use that knowledge in the widest possible range of situations,  not only situations that we can anticipate, but also situations that no one can anticipate. That is, abstractly, the problem of transfer: how can you learn less, and make much more of it?”
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​- Lee Shulman, President of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching