Good history lesson recipes work. This one mixes pictures that demand explanation with three compelling stories threaded together with whole-class discussion and primary source analysis, topped off with a direct connections to students’ lives today.
Practicing reading with this one paragraph helps students recognize the broad horizon of options available to writers when they make choices to use certain people, quotes and events to give you an understanding of the past.
Primary and Secondary source identification is a staple of history lessons, but like history, the difference isn’t as clear cut as it first appears. This simple exercise will generate interesting discussions with students and adults.
Shifting back and forth between the book and the primary sources upon which its drawn often yields interesting results. Not only does this capture dozens of primary sources for lessons, along with side stories, and powerfully illustrative quotes, it also exposes a book’s mistakes.
Labeling people, events and eras marks a difference between the history as it operates as discipline and history as it appears in the classroom. The vocabulary we use to talk about the past has a historiography all its own. Exposing students to the power-plays that advanced one label over another is admittedly harder and more abstract than memorizing a list of terms, but it is far more rewarding.
The NY Times ran dozens of stories on the five lives lost to adventure tourism and only a few on the hundreds of lives lost in an overcrowded boat of migrants. How should history teachers decide what stories make it into their classroom?
There’s an avalanche of AI advice and alarm, but there’s a lot that can be learned by just fooling around with it. Instead of using AI to write a paper, I asked Google Bard specific questions about the text of an article to help measure bias and the way language is used to shape a reader’s understanding of the past.
We shouldn’t be talking about “reliable sources”, we should be talking about “reliable information”
Back in the old “chalk and talk” days of textbook homework and worksheets, anyone suggesting document analysis would be seen as an outsider. Today, it’s just the opposite, DBQs are commonplace. But are they any better?
What would happen if we taught students that writing is mind control?