Right before my school was shut down two weeks ago I assigned my AP World History students to write the 2015 World History AP exam DBQ, which is about the flu pandemic of 1918-1919. (At the time the coronavirus was still just a major current events story, not a full blown global crisis.) As I’ve… Read more »
My departmental colleagues and I spent the past week scrambling to put together online learning activities for our students. We decided to approach the task by grade-level course. For our 9th-grade team, that was light lifting. We’ve been planning together the whole year. For 10th-grade Modern World History and 11th-grade US History, we decided that,… Read more »
In January I posted about how I’m using The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler to help me teach writing. I often use 4-sentence stories as formative assessments to see if my students have understood the story that is at the heart of a unit, and this week I want to share another… Read more »
In my first year of high school History teaching, Jon, now my partner in 4QM Teaching, was my supervisor. One of the first pieces of feedback he ever gave me was that I was committing an error called “lecto-scussion.” A lecto-scussion is a mix of lecture and discussion. That means that you, the teacher, talk… Read more »
A few weeks ago I wrote about the historical thinking skill of “contextualization.” Contextualization is most often employed when we’re working with a document, although the College Board also gives a point for it on their no-documents Long Essay Question, acknowledging that we can (and should) contextualize historical events, people, and ideas as well as… Read more »
I wrote a couple of times last year (on 1/6/19 and 5/19/19, to be exact) about my school’s plans to create a temporary 9th-grade academy. My department took that opportunity to revisit our 9th-grade World History course, which was badly in need of an overhaul. We call our new course WHISP, for World History: Identity,… Read more »
There are a bunch of ways a history lesson can go wrong. One way is deceptive, and perniciously common: students are “engaged” in an activity that they “enjoy.” I don’t mean to sound like a grouch, but so what? The money question is: what are students thinking about? Even better: what are they *learning* to… Read more »
In the United States the big players in the “historical thinking skills” space are the College Board and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). Both identify “contextualization” as a key skill that history students should learn, and at 4QM Teaching, we agree. But we think we’ve got an easier way to make that thinking skill… Read more »
How do you start your units? Do you hook them? Textbooks, and textbook teachers, start their units with tasks. Make a map. Copy the vocab. Memorize the main “causes.” Don’t do it. Start with a hook. If you’re introducing a new unit, hook the story that frames the unit. Something new and notable happened. British… Read more »
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or if you’ve attended one of our workshops, you know that we believe that good history teaching starts with teaching the story first, and you know that we believe that you should make time to formatively assess your students’ abilities to tell the story you taught them.… Read more »