This is the teacher-facing companion to mrbsocialstudies.org. It's a slowly growing collection of classroom resources — plans, protocols, posters, references — written for colleagues, grounded in research, and shaped by what actually holds up in a middle school classroom.
I’m Shie Benaderet, 8th grade Social Studies at Alderwood Middle School. I build these as I go — usually because I needed one and couldn’t find the version I wanted.
Everything here is what I’d want a first-year me, or a colleague down the hall, to have on their desk. If something helps, take it. If it’s wrong or outdated, tell me.
Two resources so far. More below, once they’re built. Each one lives in its own folder and is designed to stand alone — open it, print it, share it.
A path-tailored guide to building meaningful academic discussion in middle school Social Studies. Four starting points (build, refresh, extend, plan), a categorized strategy library, and a companion reference with thirteen core moves in a WalkThrus-inspired format.
A staff-discussion reader on minimum grading: the arithmetic both sides start from, three pieces arguing for the floor and three raising concerns, what the peer-reviewed research does and doesn’t show, and four questions worth bringing to the table.
A printable, large-format reference — stems color-coded by discourse skill, built for the wall behind the whiteboard.
A Tier 1 / 2 / 3 working guide, pulled out of my own binder and cleaned up for sharing.
These are the student- and public-facing sites this one sits alongside. Different audiences, same classroom.
The student-facing home for the year: unit pages, assignments, study guides, and class-wide reference.
A browseable, student-friendly catalog of landmark Supreme Court cases and the questions they turned on.
Ongoing current-events coverage tied to class: what’s happening, why it matters, how to read it.