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Tier I: Building

The Tier I: Building phase sets the stage for deeper instructional growth by empowering educators, supporting effective practices, and transforming mindsets. Key focus areas include understanding one’s role as a scholar, exploring the role of inquiry, and defining history as a discipline. It also emphasizes core teaching strategies such as historical thinking, backwards design, and classroom structures. Finally, this tier encourages transformative thinking through defining civic dispositions, integrating literacy into social studies, and unpacking educational context. Together, these components lay a strong groundwork for meaningful and impactful social studies instruction across future tiers of teaching, assessing, and empowering within the Thinking Nation framework.

LAIRP Tiers (1)-1

Tier II: Teaching

This Tier II: Teaching focuses on deepening instructional practices by empowering teachers with strategies such as document analysis, use of historical skills, and questioning like a historian. It supports effective pedagogy through modules on teaching history as a discipline, embedding best practices, and incorporating inquiry into the classroom. In the transformation phase, educators are encouraged to establish a common language, shift traditional paradigms, and promote student agency. Tier II builds upon foundational knowledge and equips teachers with the tools and approaches needed to implement rigorous, inquiry-driven, and student-centered social studies instruction.

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Tier III: Assessing

Tier III: Assessing centers on evaluating student learning and refining instructional impact. Educators are empowered to use and evaluate evidence, engage in historical thinking, and support students in writing with purpose and persuasion. The support pathway emphasizes measuring disciplinary success, collaborative goal setting, and effective data use. To transform practice, this tier promotes enabling civic discourse, establishing a shared language for success, and cultivating a data-driven discipline. Tier III helps educators move beyond content delivery by embedding assessment practices that foster deeper thinking, reflection, and instructional improvement.

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Tier IV: Empowering

This final phase of the framework - Tier IV: Empowering- is where transformational change truly takes root. In this tier, educators are equipped to lead with confidence and drive systemic impact within their classrooms and schools. Empowerment comes through interdisciplinary analysis, fostering complex writing and thinking, and engaging in meaningful disciplinary discourse. Support strategies focus on aligning curriculum vertically, managing complex change, and building educator-led movements that sustain progress. The transformation pathway brings it all together - cultivating thinking citizens, enabling rich civic discourse, and advancing full community transformation. Tier IV is about turning vision into action, equipping teachers not only to inspire students but to lead change in schools, districts, and communities. 

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