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 If it’s wrong or outdated, tell me.
Five 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.
Every middle school Social Studies standard — Grade 7, Grade 8, and Since Time Immemorial — rewritten so students can actually read the proficiency levels, and packaged as CSVs you can import into Canvas as outcomes in one pass. Each outcome carries a WALT and an I-can statement, so the objective on the slide, the criteria on the handout, and the row in the gradebook finally say the same thing.
Twenty-six MTSS supports across academics, behavior, and the whole child, organized by tier and filterable by category, department, and effectiveness. There’s a “find a strategy” path that starts from what you’re actually seeing with a student rather than from a list, plus what each AMS team committed to, how the Student Study Team fits in, and which groups this year’s data says need a strategy.
Paraphrase, clarify, build, evidence, challenge — the five things that keep an academic conversation alive, each with five sentence stems and an example of what the move sounds like carrying real content. Printable at 18×24 for the wall or 11×17 for a table tent, and readable on screen when you want it mid-lesson. After Zwiers & Crawford; taught as WalkThru 04 in the hub.
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.