Best Practices

Teaching is hard. And for too long, it was basically a very solitary activity that forced us to sink or swim all alone in the deep end. Sure, there were face-to-face conferences and a few scholary journals floating around that provided some help but, for many of us, our teaching suffered because we had too few professional resources available.

But now we have the internet, Personal Learning Networks and digital information to support what we do. Great ideas and lesson plans are at our fingertips and it's just a matter of finding the right ones.

I'll highlight and link to various articles and lesson plans from a variety of online experts and teachers. My hope is that these longer articles can supplement the shorter posts at History Tech and, taken together, make us all better educators.

 

Ten Steps to Better Student Engagement

"As teachers, we can feel overwhelmed when we try something new and experience chaos instead of flow.

The good news is that the strategies for creating and managing high-quality project-learning environments are productive in any classroom. Here are ten ideas that you can start practicing in your classroom today to help you create more moments of flow"
 

Seeing (and Engaging in) Historical Thinking

 

"In this tutorial, viewers practice the SCIM strategies—Summarizing, Contextualizing, Inferring, and Monitoring—through analyzing a letter written by George Washington to a spy for the Continental Army.

Historian Tom Ewing narrates this interactive tutorial and asks viewers questions requiring them to apply each strategy."

 

Reading and Thinking Aloud to Understand

"This 11th-grade honors U.S. history class shows students engaged in the process of reading primary source documents as a means of better understanding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. While the students in this video are in an honors classroom, the class is in an ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse school in a high immigrant, rural community."

Making Sense of Letters & Diaries

"In an attic or an online archive, coming across personal correspondence and diaries can open a tantalizing window into past lives. Few historical texts seem as familiar – or as compelling to read – as personal letters and diaries. This guide offers an overview of letters and diaries as historical sources and how historians use them, tips on what questions to ask when reading these personal texts, an annotated bibliography, and a guide to finding and using letters and diaries online."