I am a veteran high school history teacher interested in decolonizing history curricula, anti-racist pedagogy, and e-learning.
In a decade of teaching AP History, first Euro and now World, I have developed an appreciation for the Document-based question. Students will ultimately forget many of the historical facts that we cover in AP History. The skills developed practicing and writing DBQ should be much more durable and transferable, because students practice in my […]
Just in time for the 2014-15 school year I’m rolling out Rubric 2.0: Historical Thinking. In collaboration with colleagues in my school distict and in my twitter-based PLN, I plan to do action research with this rubric this year. Three of the five lines are the same from last year’s Rubric 1.2: Writing with Evidence. Adding “Corroboration” […]
Recent events have reminded me that as a white teacher engaging students in many racially tinged topics I need to foreground my own privileged social position. Part of this privilege is the possibility of dismissing race as something that happens elsewhere and to other people. My daughter just turned thirteen, and the guidance that I […]
The following was originally posted elsewhere on 5/19/2012. I took a first shot at adapting and implementing Bruce Lesh’s lesson on Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur on Thursday and Friday. The first day was mainly establishing context using maps, notes, and political cartoons. I found this to be fairly labored, and my large 4th period class in particular […]
It is as if for all of these years I have been giving students information as context for critical thinking activities that rarely come.
As part of my summer reading program I recently finished Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for History. I found it worthy of the award: scholarly, insightful, and engaging. As many things do, it got me reflecting on teaching historical thinking. I particularly appreciated Taylor’s very transparent use of […]
In May shortly after returning to the classroom from covering a maternity leave elsewhere in the building. I facilitated student inquiry into the Montgomery Bus Boycott using SHEG’s activity I had been out when the trimester began and had not taught US History earlier this year. So, the students were all new to me, and it was […]
Contribution to April’s History Blog Circle: Historical thinking is important, but it’s hard, even “unnatural”. Likewise, assessing historical thinking is daunting, but very necessary. Both doing and assessing historical thinking require practice. Lots of it. This practice is worthwhile because reading and writing like historians are skills that students will use in college, career, and civic […]
In February with time running down in the second, and final, trimester of AP Euro I did something that I should have done long before: I devoted two class periods to student textbook reading. This seems to fly in the face of my embrace of constructivism, my desire for students to meaningfully engage in […]
I use teacher candidates to differentiate classes more frequently, because we can provide supervision and instruction for two groups simultaneously.