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Teacher tips for how to teach skills + content

Bridgette OConnor

Does this scenario sound familiar to you: You’re planning for the start of school and trying to figure out how you’re going to cover all the required content and teach students how to make and test claims, analyze continuities and changes, source documents, and write essays. How do you do it all without losing your sanity?!

Let’s kick off the year with some tips for teaching historical thinking skills. How do you teach these skills and cover the content in your classroom without overwhelming students or drowning in grading? Share your top tips and tricks that you wish someone had shared with you at the start of the year.

Thanks for joining our PD Event on August 5th! Here are all of the resources shared, and there's lots to explore whether you were able to join us live or are catching up.

Parents

  • I teach charged and challenging topics that certainly can bring about emotional responses/withdrawal over the semester , i.e. transatlantic slave trade and its legacies, human trafficking, immigration, gentrification, etc. Do you have tools/tips to help manage various emotional charges while encouraging critical thinking to wade through the muck? These are music history courses, so that does help, but more tips and tools would be helpful. 

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  • I teach charged and challenging topics that certainly can bring about emotional responses/withdrawal over the semester , i.e. transatlantic slave trade and its legacies, human trafficking, immigration, gentrification, etc. Do you have tools/tips to help manage various emotional charges while encouraging critical thinking to wade through the muck? These are music history courses, so that does help, but more tips and tools would be helpful. 

Children
  • in reply to Courtney-Savali Andrews

    Hi  and thanks for your question. I completely understand how these topics would be challenging for students. We do have a Teaching Sensitive Topics Guide with some strategies you can use with your students. We also have activities for many of these topics that were created to help students understand the sensitive nature of these historical events. These lesson materials on the Middle Passage include a video filmed in Ghana, a graphic biography that helps students zoom in on the life of one person, and an activity that asks students to curate a museum exhibition about this topic in a thoughtful way. In addition, we have videos and graphic biographies that focus on how people resisted against the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and European colonialism. There's a graphic biography on the abolitionist Harriet Forten Purvis, which can be found in our lesson on Abolitionists and another on Queen Nanny, who founded a maroon society in Jamaica. Then, we have two additional videos filmed in Ghana (Experiencing Colonialism and Resisting Colonialism) on how people resisted colonialism. For more modern history, we have these materials on Indigenous Resistance, which includes a video filmed with Pueblo experts about repatriation efforts as well as an accompanying activity. These materials provide students with information about the perils experienced during these historical eras but also highlight ways that people persevered in the face of harsh conditions.