Best Practices

Teaching is hard. And for too long, it was basically a very solitary activity that forced us to sink or swim all alone in the deep end. Sure, there were face-to-face conferences and a few scholary journals floating around that provided some help but, for many of us, our teaching suffered because we had too few professional resources available.

But now we have the internet, Personal Learning Networks and digital information to support what we do. Great ideas and lesson plans are at our fingertips and it's just a matter of finding the right ones.

I'll highlight and link to various articles and lesson plans from a variety of online experts and teachers. My hope is that these longer articles can supplement the shorter posts at History Tech and, taken together, make us all better educators.

 

How to Breathe Life into History

"Many students, particularly young ones, have an abstract view of history. Putting artifacts in their hands and giving them characters, chores, language, and events to reenact adds a three-dimensional aspect to the textbook page, injecting knowledge with empathy and understanding." 

 

Reading & Thinking Aloud to Understand

 

"This 11th-grade honors U.S. history class shows students engaged in the process of reading primary source documents as a means of better understanding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. While the students in this video are in an honors classroom, the class is in an ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse school in a high immigrant, rural community."

Letters as Primary Sources—Prologue to Studying the Emancipation Proclamation

"This website shows an 8th-grade teacher in Maryland teaching a lesson based on Civil War letters.

Two sections show a lesson that asks students to examine what a Union and a Confederate soldier thought about the Emancipation Proclamation. In order to investigate this, the teacher asks students to study two letters written by soldiers during the Civil War."

Making Sense of Documentary Photography

"A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you need to know how to analyze the picture to gain any understanding of it at all. This site provides a place for students and teachers to grapple with the documentary images that often illustrate textbooks but are almost never considered as historical evidence in their own right. This guide offers a brief history of documentary photography, examples of what questions to ask when examining a documentary photograph, a bibliography and list of online resources. "