Mission, Vision, Competencies, Standards, and Benchmarks

Core Understandings:
Students will understand that…
‣ Human desires often exceed the limited resources available to them.
‣ Just as resources are scarce, distribution of those resources is unequal. Likewise,
those who labor are usually not the direct beneficiaries of the goods and services they
produce.
‣ Having wealth begets influence, but also responsibility for others.
Competency: Media Fluency
Description: Students will work to master…
‣ The use of various forms of media to build an awareness of how events in one part of
the world influence other parts of the world.
Essential Questions:
‣ What is the message of the video/film/song, etc? What points-of-view are we
seeing/hearing?
‣ What is the bias of the medium here? How does that bias affect the reliability of the
message? The credibility of the source?
Core Understandings:
Students will understand that…
‣ Art, music, film, video are artifacts of the viewpoints of a given time. Identifying pointof-view
and bias in media gives us insight into historical contexts.
Competency: Information Fluency
Description: Students will work to master…
‣ Skills in finding, analyzing, and interpreting various types of information sources.
Essential Questions:
‣ What kinds of evidence do we have to help us discover "what happened?" What
evidence are we missing? Where can go to we find the missing pieces?
‣ What makes a piece of evidence reliable? What makes it relevant for what we're
studying?
‣ How do we know which sources speak for a given time period?
‣ How do we know which sources are most accurate when authors or scholars
disagree?
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