By Kristen Potter In the Climate Project, students research “big thorny” climate problems and then make plans to take action in their communities in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But which specific group of people do they ...

By Bennett Sherry “Artificial intelligence has a long history, dating back to the 1950s when early experiments aimed to create computer programs that could learn and reason like humans. Over the decades, AI has made significant strides, revolut...

By Rachel Phillips Assessment is vital for learning. It’s important to know where students are, how they’ve grown, and what they need to do next to continue to improve. Assessment also helps drive instructional decisions. Assessment is an...

By Eman M. Elshaikh and Farhad Imam  As human societies have changed, so too have the diseases that afflict us. In Unit 9 of the AP® World History Modern Course and Exam Description, students are expected to understand how the changing natur...

By Michael Zis How do we eliminate 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases from the world? That is a huge thorny problem, and finding answers is profoundly important. But those answers can’t just be inferred or deduced. They require research! Many ...

By Bennett Sherry Human scales History is written by the victors, or so it’s said. And there have been few victories so resounding as that of humanity over our natural environment. Yet, as we’ve reluctantly learned over the last century, ...

By Bennett Sherry Flows, waves, and swells Migration is a little bit like water. We even use words like flow and waves to describe migration patterns. Like water, migrants tend to follow established paths. Of course, people move for all sorts of reas...

By Trevor R. Getz How do you build a climate course for the twenty-first century? One that doesn’t just focus on the science but also helps students engage with the social, economic, and political realities we face? Oh, and that also encourages...

By Natalie Martinez Join Natalie Martinez at Fundamentals: The OER Project Conference for Social Studies on March 23! There's still time to register for the free webinar and see her keynote! Imagine you’re looking at someone through a two-sided...

By Rachel Phillips We’re used to associating timelines with history, particularly as a way to visualize when important dates happened in relation to one another—and this is likely what many students assume is the sole purpose of a timelin...

By Michael G. Vann Why did the Japanese Imperial Navy attack Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941? Many Americans thought—and many still think—it was the start of an invasion of the United States. Japan’s focus, however, was the invasio...

By Bennett Sherry The collective learning behind collecting gases Humans first inferred long ago that changes in our climate affect our lives. Foraging societies have been adapting and migrating in response to climactic changes for millennia. Ancient...

By Heather Nice History starts with a question. Although it might seem counterintuitive to the way we’re expected (or perhaps required?) to teach—breadth over depth; textbooks and tests over inquiry and sources—the idea of starting ...

By Trevor R. Getz I became a historian because of the stories my grandfather told me of “the war.” Sitting beside him at the dining-room table as he sketched campaign maps and showed me photographs from his brief leave to marry my grandmo...

By Noah Ramage When you think of Native Americans resisting European foreign invasion, what do you picture? Do you see men on horseback encircling a federal outpost? Do you see women leading their communities while absent warriors raid deeper and dee...

By Bridgette Byrd O’Connor How can studying historical causation help us draw a line from the past to the present and into the future? One of the main learning objectives of OER Project courses is for students to understand how the history that...

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 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 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 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 ...