By Bennett Sherry At this point in the year, if you were to ask your students to draw a picture of collective learning, I’m guessing they’d draw something like this: Over time, people pass on knowledge to their descendants, each generati...

By Trevor Getz My favorite teacher in high school wasn’t actually my teacher. That is to say, when it came time for me to take AP® US history, I was assigned the boring instructor whose students always passed the test, rather than the guita...

By Sharon Cohen In Unit 5 of the World History Project AP® course, students must grapple with this question: How were new national communities imagined and contested from 1750 to 1900 CE? Students might find it easy to recognize “new nation...

By Eman M. Elshaikh How do we know what we don’t know? If you’re a world history or Big History teacher, you’ve probably realized by now that there are one or two moments during the past 13.8 billion years of our Universe’s hi...

By Rachel Phillips OER Project Learning Scientist If someone asked you, “What does teaching mean to you?” how would you respond? Perhaps with a somewhat vague response—it is, after all, an incredibly open-ended question. However, i...

By Trevor R. GetzOER Project Team Who doesn’t like teaching about resistance? What teacher—or student—doesn’t feel excitement and isn’t inspired by the stories of an underdog fighting against a system of oppression? Of c...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor  We live in a world that bombards us with data. News organizations include charts and graphs as evidence to support their arguments. Politicians haul out poster-size charts when they debate bills. You can even si...

By Dr. Deb L. Morrison  Do you want to teach about climate change but worry about how parents may react?  You’re not alone.  Research tells us that approximately 30% of all teachers are concerned that parents may complain if thei...

By Eman M. Elshaikh and Bridgette Byrd O’Connor Collective learning doesn’t develop along a straight line. Our discoveries and innovations often come from unexpected places, and they sometimes take a while to be accepted. How do new ideas...

By Heather Nice If the goal of history education is teaching our students to embrace disciplinary practice, a paradigm shift in how we teach writing in the history classroom is necessary. Although historians understand their role in the interpretatio...

By Molly Sinnott and Judith Jeremie, OER Project Team Anyone who tracks their step count as fanatically as we do knows that teaching is not a profession for the idle. While not everyone may be as committed as we are to high-cushion soles, no one can ...

By Terry Haley, OER Project Team Stop me if I’m being sesquipedalian, but let’s face it: teaching and learning vocabulary is not always easy. How many times have you read past something like “she was unmoved by his fulsome reading o...

By Sharon Cohen, AP® World History TeacherMaryland, USA  As you plan to focus on the government theme in Unit 3, you might not be sure which case studies to use to introduce Learning Objective 3.1: “How and why various land-based ...

By Rachel Phillips, OER Project Learning Scientist Technology has helped ensure that our day-to-day lives are maximized for each of us as individuals. Your morning might start with an Alexa- or Siri-delivered weather report for your ZIP code, follow...

By David Sherrin, Social Studies TeacherScarsdale High School Why do we teach about the Paleolithic era? How much time should we spend engaging with the most ancient of human histories, and how do we convince students that this stuff matters? Many wo...

By Molly Sinnott, OER Project Team  It’s a tough time to be a social studies teacher, but this work has never been more valuable to your students, your community, and the world. None of the challenges facing this generation of students can...

By Trevor Getz, OER Project Team  One of the greatest challenges of teaching world history can also be an opportunity.    As teachers, we can help students identify the familiar in societies other than their own, and at the same t...

By Mike Zis and Trevor Getz  This week, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While you wouldn’t know it from its name, this bill includes the largest package of climate-related policy in US history. Policy experts say ...

By Rachel Phillips, OER Project Learning Scientist   Calling all Big History Project teachers! Along with the new overview videos, graphic biographies, and claim-testing activities, we have one more very important update for you regarding I...

By Sharon Cohen, AP® World History Teacher, Maryland  Many AP® teachers, particularly those new to AP, think that they must cover every illustrative example listed in the College Board’s Course and Examination Description (CED). Th...

By Molly Sinnott, OER Project Team  Climate change is happening. But it’s such a huge problem that it can feel impossible to figure out what we can do about it. As a teacher, you face a particularly difficult challenge when it co...

By Bennett Sherry, OER Project Team  “What are we gonna learn this year?” As we stare into the abyss of a new school year, it can be a thrilling—and scary—question. One of the key learning objectives for Big History Proje...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor, OER Project Team  Take a moment to think back to what made you decide to become a social-studies teacher. Did a particular historical event pique your curiosity? Maybe you read a historical narrative that led yo...

By Bob Regan OER Project Director Ten years. It’s been 10 years since the first eight teachers rolled out the very first pilot of the Big History Project (BHP). Six of those teachers were in the US, two in Australia. Things have scaled a b...

By Mike Zis, OER Project Guest Contributor Most teachers want to address climate change. Our supplemental climate unit, developed specifically for civics and social studies classrooms, can help. If, like me, you went to school in the 1980s, you may ...