The magnitude of change in the few years following 1858, 1938 and 1985 is barely comprehensible, let alone believe. Even though we can’t predict our future, we can get a better sense of scale of what we’re facing in comparison to other periods of massive change.
Placing the topic event of a lesson in a contextual calendar that centers that event in the chronology of what happened just before and what happened just after helps understanding
If you’ve had it with reading whatever’s coming out of corporate and social media’s chum machine, then reading Walter Lippman, Neil Postman, and Carl Sagan are better for your reading diet right now
If you’re a teacher who happens to stumble across this post and haven’t yet heard a AI generated podcast from Google NotebookLM, you can be the first in your school or district to impress your colleagues with the AI’s latest shiny thing.
Prank your students with a Halloween history lesson framed around the story of a 23 year-old using new technology to prank thousands of people in 1938 and leave them a little more skeptical of what they hear and what they’re taught.
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.