Grade 5 · US History · §113.16 · Problem-Based Learning
Head West, 1846 — Should Our Family Go?
A Problem-Based Learning unit. Students step into a farm family's kitchen in 1846, take on a stakeholder's point of view, and work a real, ill-structured question — building from surface to deep to transfer learning. The teacher is a guide, not the answer key.
Driving question: It is 1846. Newspapers are full of stories about rich farmland and fresh starts in the West — Oregon, California, the trails leading out past the frontier. But the journey is long and dangerous, it crosses lands where Native nations already live, and the family would leave everything familiar behind. Should our family join the wagons heading west, and how should they prepare?
The three-phase path (do them in order)
Problem-solving is a transfer move — it only works once students have knowledge to reason with. So the problem in Phase 3 is deliberately gated behind Phases 1 and 2.
⛔ Gate: don't open the Phase 3 problem until students have finished the surface and deep activities. Meeting the problem too early turns inquiry into guessing.
Big idea & objectives
Big idea: U.S. territorial expansion drew families west with the promise of land and opportunity, but it was risky — and it deeply affected the Native peoples whose homelands lay in the way.
Know: the key events and ideas of U.S. territorial expansion (the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and Manifest Destiny), the regions and physical features of the country, and the overland trails families followed.
Understand: the same choice looked different from each stakeholder's point of view — a hopeful settler and a member of a Native nation whose homeland lay along the route did not see it the same way.
Do: run the problem-solving process end to end — define a problem, gather information, weigh options, choose and defend a solution, and evaluate it (§113.16(c)(26)(B)).
Standards this unit is aligned to (§113.16)
TEKS SE
Where it lives in the unit
(c)(4)(C)
U.S. territorial expansion — Louisiana Purchase, Lewis & Clark, Manifest Destiny — Surface jigsaw, Deep concept map
(c)(4)(F)
Contributions & challenges of American Indian & immigrant groups settling the frontier — Surface jigsaw, Transfer investigation
(c)(6)(A–D)
Regions & physical features of the United States — Surface map work
(c)(7)(A–C)
Patterns & geographic factors of settlement — Surface map, Deep concept map
(c)(8)(A/B)
How people adapt to & modify the physical environment — Deep concept map, Transfer investigation
(c)(23)(A–H)
Source analysis, points of view, claim + evidence — Deep & Transfer
(c)(25)(E)
Civil discourse, multiple perspectives — Deep argument, Transfer debrief
(c)(26)(B)
The problem-solving process — the entire Transfer phase
Teacher prep & materials
Print the facilitator guide (teacher moves, map of possibilities, role cards, debrief prompts) and the assessment pack (rubric + individual-in-group).
Chart paper or a projected space for three shared columns: Hunches · Know · Need-to-Know (the KWHL chart).
Vetted sources for investigation (district-approved). Suggested public-domain sources are listed in the facilitator guide.
No logins, no accounts — every page runs in the browser. Student writing and products live on paper or in tools your district already vets.
Aligned to (not reproduced from) 19 TAC Ch.113 §113.16; effect sizes from Visible Learning MetaX. This narrative is a teaching fiction based on the era.