Top 10 best teaching history 2019
Finding the best teaching history suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best teaching history
1. A History Teaching Toolbox: Practical classroom strategies
Description
A History Teaching Toolbox is the perfect handbook for busy classroom teachers eager to try out some new strategies with their students. More than 60 tried and tested activities and approaches are organised into helpful categories and explained with step-by-step instructions and topic-specific examples to illustrate how they can be immediately employed. A History Teaching Toolbox is written for both new and experienced classroom practitioners keen to bring history alive for their students and is written by award-winning history teacher Russel Tarr.2. Teaching U.S. History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom
Description
This book offers the tools teachers need to get started with an innovative approach to teaching history, one that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives today, and meets Common Core State Standards (grades 712).
The author provides over 60 primary sources organized into seven thematic units, each structured around an essential question from U.S. history. As students analyze carefully excerpted documentsspeeches by presidents and protesters, Supreme Court cases, political cartoonsthey build an understanding of how diverse historical figures have approached key issues. At the same time, students learn to participate in civic debates and develop their own views on what it means to be a 21st-century American. Each unit connects to current events and dynamic classroom activities make history come alive. In addition to the documents themselves, this teaching manual provides strategies to assess student learning; mini-lectures designed to introduce documents; activities to help students process, display, and integrate their learning; guidance to help teachers create their own units; and more.
Book Features:
- A timely aid for secondary school teachers confronted with Common Core and other state-level quality requirements.
- An approach that promotes student engagement and critical thinking to replace or augment a traditional textbook.
- Challenges to the master narrative of U.S. history from figures like Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X, and Cesar Chavez, as well as traditionally recognized historical figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
- Essential questions to help students explore seven of the most important recurring themes in U.S. history.
- Role-plays and debates to promote interaction among students.
- Printable copies of the documents included in the book can be downloaded at tcpress.com.
3. "Why Won't You Just Tell Us the Answer?": Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7-12
Description
Every major measure of students historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history. Bruce Lesh believes that this is due to the way we teach historylecture and memorization. Over the last fifteen years, Bruce has refined a method of teaching history that mirrors the process used by historians, where students are taught to ask questions of evidence and develop historical explanations. And now in his new book Why Wont You Just Tell Us the Answer? he shows teachers how to successfully implement his methods in the classroom.
Students may think they want to be given the answer. Yet, when they are actively engaged in investigating the pastthe way professional historians dothey find that history class is not about the boring memorization of names, dates, and facts. Instead, its challenging fun. Historical study that centers on a question, where students gather a variety of historical sources and then develop and defend their answers to that question, allows students to become actual historians immersed in an interpretive study of the past.
Each chapter focuses on a key concept in understanding history and then offers a sample unit on how the concept can be taught. Readers will learn about the following:
Exploring Text, Subtext, and Context: President Theodore Roosevelt and the Panama Canal
Chronological Thinking and Causality: The Rail Strike of 1877
Multiple Perspectives: The Bonus March of 1932
Continuity and Change Over Time: Custers Last Stand
Historical Significance: The Civil Rights Movement
Historical Empathy: The Truman-MacArthur Debate
By the end of the book, teachers will have learned how to teach history via a lens of interpretive questions and interrogative evidence that allows both student and teacher to develop evidence-based answers to historys greatest questions.
4. Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History: Teaching Argument Writing to Diverse Learners in the Common Core Classroom, Grades 6-12 (Common Core State Standards in Literacy Series)
Feature
Teachers College PressDescription
Although the Common Core and C3 Framework highlight literacy and inquiry as central goals for social studies, they do not offer guidelines, assessments, or curriculum resources. This practical guide presents six research-tested historical investigations along with all corresponding teaching materials and tools that have improved the historical thinking and argumentative writing of academically diverse students. Each investigation integrates reading, analysis, planning, composing, and reflection into a writing process that results in an argumentative history essay. Primary sources have been modified to allow struggling readers access to the material. Web links to original unmodified primary sources are also provided, along with other sources to extend investigations. The authors include sample student essays from each investigation to illustrate the progress of two different learners and explain how to support students development. Each chapter includes these helpful sections: Historical Background, Literacy Practices Students Will Learn, How to Teach This Investigation, How Might Students Respond?, Student Writing and Teacher Feedback, Lesson Plans and Materials.
Book Features:
- Integrates literacy and inquiry with core U.S. history topics.
- Emphasizes argumentative writing, a key requirement of the Common Core.
- Offers explicit guidance for instruction with classroom-ready materials.
- Provides primary sources for differentiated instruction.
- Explains a curriculum appropriate for students who struggle with reading, as well as more advanced readers.
- Models how to transition over time from more explicit instruction to teacher coaching and greater student independence.
5. Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series)
Description
In this follow-up to his landmark bestseller, Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen continues to break silences and change our perspectives on U.S. history. Loewen takes history textbooks to task for their perpetuations of myth and their lack of awareness of todays multicultural student audience (not to mention the astonishing number of facts they just get plain wrong).
How did people get here? Why did Europe win? Why did the South secede? In Teaching What Really Happened, Loewen goes beyond the usual textbook-dominated viewpoints to illuminate a wealth of intriguing, often hidden facts about Americas past. Calling for a new way to study history, this book will help readers move beyond traditional textbooks to tackle difficult but important topics, like the American Indian experience, slavery, and race relations. Throughout, Loewen shows time and again how teaching what really happened connects better with all kinds of students to get them excited about history.
6. Future-Focused History Teaching: Restoring the Power of Historical Learning
Description
- Five basic principles of history education,
- A coherent and useful purpose to guide instruction,
- Four kinds of historical knowledge relevant to the future,
- Criteria for weighing the importance of historical events,
- Four essential cognitive learning strategies.
7. A History Teaching Toolbox: Volume Two: Even More Practical Classroom Strategies (Volume 2)
Description
This second volume of A History Teaching Toolbox is an ideal handbook for busy classroom teachers eager to try out fresh strategies with their students. More than 65 tried and tested activities and approaches are organised into helpful categories and explained with step-by-step instructions and topic-specific examples to illustrate how they can be immediately employed. A History Teaching Toolbox Volume Two is written for both new and experienced classroom practitioners keen to bring history alive for their students and is written by award-winning history teacher Russel Tarr.
Chapter outline
1. Imparting knowledge to students
- Escape the room!
- Three effective role-play techniques
- Hand gestures to reflect changing relations between groups
- Unlock the box
- Mysterious moments
- Image flash
- Time-wipes
2. Debate and Discussion Strategies
- Chat-show challenges
- Tell us something we dont know!
- Protest placards: design, anticipate, react
- Brilliance or Baloney?
- Guess the statistics
- Sticky notes for silent presentations
- Boxing match debates
3. Transforming and applying knowledge
- TripAdvisor graphics showing impact in various places
- Design a theme park based around the topic
- Convert statistics into infographics
- Design / destroy a banknote
- Create a Google Doodle
- Produce a board game
- Guess who?
4. Comparing, contrasting, linking
- Sports commentaries
- Crime boards
- Dialogue poems
- Speed dates / Blind dates
- Top trumps
- Which one doesn't belong?
5. Judgments and interpretations
- Relationship webs
- Living graph
- Factor auction
- How would geographers approach this question?
- Design a DVD Inlay
- Time travel agent: complaint letters v. advertising blurb
6. Group work approaches
- Destroy or deploy?
- Random name picker
- Re-enact a conference
- Which part of the body were you?
- Image jigsaw
- Peer assessment slips
7: Tests and revision
- Takeaway mark scheme
- How certain are you?
- Plot holes in history
- Spiced-up cloze exercises
- Alphabet challenge
- Rhyming timelines
- Exam questions from hell
8: Classroom display
- Knowledge cubes
- The big picture
- Rice above the statistics
- Affordable props
- Meme posters
- Turn the topic into objects
9: Essay skills
- Sketch-noting and beyond
- Backward rainbow essays
- Student vocabulary bookmark
- Biased words knockout challenge
- Online essay-writing tools
- Compare opening paragraphs of several books
10: Other ideas
- Build history into the school calendar
- Wheel of emotions
- Using Emojis
- Dream sources
- Fake news
- Breaking news / Click bait
- Biographies beyond the syllabus
- Five ways to use music effectively
8. Teaching History with Film: Strategies for Secondary Social Studies
Description
Visit any school in the United States and chances are that you will find at least one of the social studies teachers showing a film about history. Along with the textbook, movies are one of the most prominent teaching aids in the history classroom. Yet, when middle and high school history teachers look for models of the effective use of motion pictures in history classrooms, the cupboard is surprisingly bare. Teaching History with Film provides a fresh, engaging, and clear overview of teaching with film to effectively enhance social studies instruction. Using cases of experienced teachers to illustrate accomplished history teaching through the use of movies, this text provides pre- and in-service teachers with ideas for implementing film-based lessons in their own classrooms and offers a deeper understanding of the thorny issues involved in using film to teach history.
Each section of the book focuses on how teachers can effectively support the development of students historical film literacy through topics such as using film to develop historical empathy, to develop interpretive skills, and to explore controversial issues. By developing the skills students need to think critically about the past or what they think they know about history, the lessons in this book illustrate how to harness the pedagogical power of film to provide the tools necessary for rigorous inquiry and democratic citizenship.
Special features include:
- "Reflection on the Case," following each chapter, analyzing and discussing the strengths and limitations of the teachers approach as well as providing strategies for using and choosing films specific to the educational outcome
- Sample unit outlines, descriptions of class texts and films, worksheets, essay questions, viewer guides, and exercises for the classroom throughout
- Discussion of the practical considerations facing classroom teachers, including juggling time restraints, issues of parental permission, and meeting standards
9. Teaching World History in the Twenty-first Century: A Resource Book (Sources and Studies in World History)
Feature
M E SharpeDescription
This practical handbook is designed to help anyone who is preparing to teach a world history course - or wants to teach it better. It includes contributions by experienced teachers who are reshaping world history education, and features new approaches to the subject as well as classroom-tested practices that have markedly improved world history teaching.10. Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (Multicultural Education Series)
Description
Should be in the hands of every history teacher in the country. Howard Zinn
James Loewen has revised Teaching What Really Happened, the bestselling, go-to resource for social studies and history teachers wishing to break away from standard textbook retellings of the past. In addition to updating the scholarship and anecdotes throughout, the second edition features a timely new chapter entitled "Truth" that addresses how traditional and social media can distort current events and the historical record. Helping students understand what really happened in the past will empower them to use history as a tool to argue for better policies in the present. Our society needs engaged citizens now more than ever, and this book offers teachers concrete ideas for getting students excited about history while also teaching them to read critically. It will specifically help teachers and students tackle important content areas, including Eurocentrism, the American Indian experience, and slavery.
Book Features:
- An up-to-date assessment of the potential and pitfalls of U.S. and world history education.
- Information to help teachers expect, and get, good performance from students of all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.
- Strategies for incorporating project-oriented self-learning, having students conduct online historical research, and teaching historiography.
- Ideas from teachers across the country who are empowering students by teaching what really happened.
- Specific chapters dedicated to five content topics usually taught poorly in todays schools.
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