I am a veteran high school history teacher interested in decolonizing history curricula, anti-racist pedagogy, and e-learning.
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.
There is more than one way to flip a classroom. While my classroom is currently far from flipped I have been pleased with the results from employing some e-learning strategies. Blending traditional, f2f classes with e-learning creates additional possibilities for the differentiated instruction that is all the rage in education these days, and curating stand […]
Parenting a toddler can yield surprisingly rich metaphors for thinking about teaching history. My two-year old can identify Bob Dylan on two of my t-shirts (she asked). I have taught her to connect his name with the phrase “American genius.” This amuses me and confounds her mother who views Dylan as manically self absorbed. Of […]
I have a somewhat deserved reputation for tardiness. Just after I finally read Sam Wineburg’s critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and began drafting some thoughts, Zinn and Wineburg were in the news thanks to Purdue University President Mitch Daniels. Then, I went on vacation…So, here are my belated thoughts on […]
Presenting at a stimulating Minnesota Council for History Education workshop this week, I stressed the importance of establishing classroom routines around historical inquiry. I know this is important, because I have yet to do it fully and know the consequences. Students still find the task of critically approaching sources strange and opaque. Establishing a frequently […]
Recently, I spent a period (67 minutes) on the Zoot Suit Riots with four classes of regular level, 10th grade US History students, using SHEG thinking like a historian materials and clips from PBS American Experience documentary, available on youtube. The documentary used a lot of witnesses to and participants in the events around the […]