Great TED Talks for History Teachers

One of the most popular posts that I've written on this blog is Great TED Talks for English Teachers from 2010. Sure, it's a listicle, but given the sheer number of TED talks, folks have said that the post has been helpful to them in suggesting some talks with which to start. I'm currently teaching history …

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Millard Fillmore for Life!

Perhaps the biggest hit of the Forgotten Presidents mini-unit was making paper hats, inspired by this piece of McKinley campaign paraphernalia. As silly as this may seems (and there's nothing wrong with some silliness, mind you), the neat thing was that students seemed to really latch on to the presidents they chose to make hats for. A …

Forgotten Presidents

In the last weeks of school, the other 8th grade US history teacher and I survey students to gauge their interest in topics we've haven't covered that year. We then compile their responses and the teach classes on the topics that emerge as the favorites by class. Since we teach overlapping periods for most of …

Primary Sources

I received an email last night notifying me that I'd been accepted to the Library of Congress's Summer Teacher Institute. The STI focuses on helping teachers develop lessons based on the primary sources available in the LoC's collection. I am super-excited about the opportunity, both for the work we'll do at the STI and the …

(De)Constructing Texts

Over the next several weeks, students in my Upper School class will begin teaching the class on their self-selected topics. Teaching the class is part of the cumulative project for the class. Students have been researching their topics and interviewing an expert about the topic. One of the challenges of asking students to select topics that …

Seeing the Connections

Prior to a quiz on the early and mid-1800s (primarily focused on events leading to the Civil War) in 8th grade history, I asked students to make conceptual maps of the people, places, and ideas that we had studied. I broke students into groups of three or four and gave each group a large piece …

For Learning or Fun?

As part of our Revolutionary War unit in the 8th grade, students have a choice of different projects to give them the opportunity to explore aspects of the war we don't cover in class. This year I added an option that asked students to play the game For Crown or Colony? and write a review …

NCSS 2012 Blended Learning

Below is the information I'm sharing at the National Council of Social Studies meeting in Seattle. It was a poster session, so the PowerPoint is more text heavy than it would have been otherwise. Diana Laufenberg and I wrote the proposal together, but she couldn't make it, so I included her information in the presentation …

Learning Through Them

On Friday, US History students submitted their Immigrant Experience letters. This project is the first substantial independent work students do in the blended learning class. This year I asked them to submit an evaluation of three sources they planned to use a week before the letter was due, just to ensure that they'd given it …

Tweeting About History

For class on Monday, I'd asked my students to read a selection from or review of A Patriot's History of the US and A People's History of the US. In class, we looked at passages describing Columbus from each of those texts and compared them. Before class, I'd checked to see if Larry Schweikart (one …