People who study memory know that drawing a picture is one of the best ways to remember something. But how often do history teachers use this powerful memory tool with their students? Most of us don’t do it often enough. An intentional use of student-generated images can help students to remember important historical events much… Read more »
When I was a brand new high school teacher — at age 39 — a colleague gave me some excellent survival advice. It had two parts. First, kids love moral dilemmas. Whenever you get a chance to introduce one into a lesson, do it. Second, the textbook is your friend. When you’re not sure what… Read more »
We coach history teachers who use the Four Question Method for unit planning to start by defining the “story of the unit:” decide what actual content you will include in the unit, and in what order. (If the 4QM were reduced to a bumper sticker it would say, “Story First!”) But this imperative poses a… Read more »
My school is creating a 9th-grade Academy, of necessity. We’re shipping our freshmen to an annex next year while we do construction on our main building. We’ve decided to think of this as a crisis-opportunity: the annex is old and musty, and we’re already complaining about going there, but we also know that this is… Read more »
“Ridin’ in a Stutz Bearcat, Jim Those were different times” -“Sweet Jane” by Lou Reed The public reaction to the death of President George Herbert Walker Bush two weeks ago got me thinking about the phrase, “those were different times.” Bush 41 was the last of his generation to serve as president. He was a… Read more »
We all know the story, and many of us teach it. Hitler, a failed Austrian art student and Great War veteran rose to power in the land of Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven. He and his Nazi Party dismantled German democracy and instigated the Second World War. Under the cover of war, Hitler’s Germany orchestrated the… Read more »
Earlier this year I committed a very common history teacher error: I overstuffed a lesson. I was teaching my French Revolution unit, and I had assigned students to look for evidence of Locke and Rousseau’s ideas in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. I figured I’d just “go over it quickly”… Read more »
Ms. R came to me with a problem. She teaches Social Studies in an alternative program at my school. Her students are an extraordinarily diverse group, but all have this in common: they’ve traveled a complicated road to get to her program. At the end of a unit on the American Civil War, Ms. R… Read more »
The November 2018 edition of The American Historian, a publication of the Organization of American Historians, features an article titled “What’s The Question? Naming and Teaching Thinking Skills in Secondary History Classrooms.” Normally you’d have to be an OAH member to access it, but because you are on our blog page you can read it here!
Many world history teachers are familiar with a handy acronym for teaching the causes of World War One: “MAIN.” Its letters stand for Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism. But unfortunately for history teachers and students, the MAIN causes of World War One really aren’t: none of those things actually caused the war. We can demonstrate this… Read more »