Vetted Resources: Teaching Methods

This resource was developed as part of the AHA’s Remote Teaching Resources initiative.

 

Being “Present” in Your Online Course

University of California, Davis

Being “Present” in Your Online Course offers strategies and multiple links to resources on humanizing and managing online courses. These include time management for instructors so as to avoid “grading jail,” helpful tips for encouraging student engagement, handling conflict, and assessment. Of note is a short video on moderating discussion where instructors relate suggestions derived from their own experiences.

Berkeley History-Social Science Project

UC-Berkeley History-Social Science Project

The Berkeley History-Social Science Project offers teacher-tested lesson plans, teaching strategies and instructional support for K-12 teachers. This site also features “History Instruction in a Time of Disruption,” with links to resources for engagement, reflection, and “Why History Matters” in times of crisis.

Beyond Memorization: Rethinking Maps in the History Classroom

Clara Webb

Beyond Memorization: Rethinking Maps in the History Classroom offers strategies in teaching and assessing map skills in the history classroom. This includes how to engage students in mental mapping, an assignment with examples of student work on “annotated” mapping, a list of mapping resources, and a curriculum guide.

Beyond the Bubble

Stanford History Education Group; Library of Congress

Beyond the Bubble unlocks for classroom use the vast digital archive of the Library of Congress. Instructors can choose from over 100 Historical Thinking Assessments (HATS), including 10 “flagship” assessments (e.g. “The First Thanksgiving”) with extended features, including annotated sample student responses and “Going Deeper” videos. Instructors can kick off a lesson with a HAT or build an entire class around it. Registration (free) is required.

Civic Online Reasoning

Stanford History Education Group

The Civic Online Reasoning (COR) curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help instructors teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world. Core questions, such as “Who’s behind the information?” “What’s the evidence?” and “What do other sources say?”, prepare students to engage more deeply in primary source analysis and historical thinking via lateral reading and other strategies. COR for the History classroom offers lessons and tasks that present students with history–related sources, such as those on Hurricane Katrina and the Porvenir Massacre of 1918. Registration is required to access the free resources.

Cleveland Teaching Collaborative

Founded by Molly Buckley-Marudas and Shelley Rose

The Cleveland Teaching Collaborative is a working group for research, reflection, and support for pandemic pedagogy and beyond. This site includes an academic blog, a crowdsourced Resource Referatory and serves as a professional development arena for instructors at all levels. Remote instruction materials include select free access digital collections, oral history for educators, and interdisciplinary digital learning. While this site serves as a partnership between higher education instructors and K-12 educators in Northeast Ohio, its open source content may help other instructors in remote teaching practices through the above mentioned resources, as well as community and live chats.

Digital History: Critical Issues and Simulations Units in American History

Tom Ladenburg

Critical Issues and Simulations Units in American History contains more than 140 lesson plans across twelve units, from colonial beginnings through the Vietnam War. Student activities can be done during class or as pre-class/post-class work.

Digital Pedagogical Design and the Humanities in the Age of COVID

Center for Renaissance Studies, The Newberry Library

This Newberry Library session on Digital Pedagogical Design and the Humanities in the Age of COVID presents strategies for online course design that center student interaction and engagement in order to re-create the humanities classroom experience and improve retention in online courses. The presenters introduce flexible pedagogical practices that can be adapted for varied modalities, including asynchronous, synchronous, and hybrid online and face-to-face instruction.

The session is presented by former CRS postdoctoral fellow and Assistant Professor of History at the College of Charleston, Elisa Jones, along with e-learning, pedagogy, and course design expert and consultant, Melissa Wong, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Information Sciences.

Edsitement! Teacher Guides

National Endowment for the Humanities

Edsitement! Teacher Guides explore a broad range of topics in history and heritage, digital humanities, and online learning. Each features guiding questions and links to collections, interdisciplinary enrichment short embedded videos, primary sources, DBQs, seminar set-ups, activities and more. While originally designed for synchronous instruction in Grades 6-12, the Teacher Guides may be adapted for the remote classroom.

Goldberg Center, OSU

History Department, Ohio State University

The Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching links to resource-rich sites such as eHistory, a collection of primary sources and documentary material, and Outreach which connects to OSU’s History Teaching Institute. Outreach features lesson plans written by NEH Institute teachers for middle through high school instruction. The eHistory exhibitions cover a wide range of topics such as “Human Machinery” on disability in industry and war, and “Beyond Thucydides: An Interactive Exploration of the Peloponnesian Way.”

Historiana

EuroClio, Webtic, and Use

Historiana offers ready-to-use learning activities and innovative digital tools made by and for history educators across Europe. The lesson plans and primary source collections may be used at the high school level or integrated into undergraduate survey courses. Free site registration, while not required, may afford access to a broader range of instructional resources and full use of the e-learning lesson plans. The lesson plans, primarily offered in English, address topics related to European History but are also connected to world history topics, including the Cold War, WWI, the rise of coffeehouses, and more. This site also features lesson plans in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, and other languages.

History of Cartography Project

Matthew H. Edney, Project Director; David Woodward and J.B. Harley, Founding Editors

The History of Cartography Project is a research, editorial, and publishing venture on the history of maps and mapping. The project’s volumes 1-3 and 6 are freely available online. The series provides students with the interpretive structure necessary to assess, appreciate, and analyze maps from all periods and cultures.

How to Listen to a Podcast for Class

Abby Mullen, George Mason University

How to Listen to a Podcast for Class offers tips and strategies for active listening to podcasts. These include what one can do before, during, and after listening for maximum learning potential.

How to Teach Remotely

Sam Kary

How to Teach Remotely, a guide from the New EdTech classroom, offers a strategic plan to create a structured, engaging, rigorous, community-oriented learning experience when teaching remotely. Tools include a list of and links to free apps and how and when to use them. This site also includes detailed instructions and  practical guidelines on topics such as teaching synchronously with video conferencing, using hyperdocs, providing instruction asynchronously with prerecorded tutorials using personalized learning and engagement platforms, and making student thinking visible.

How to Teach Remotely

Maayke de Vries

How to Teach Remotely is a EuroClio article that offers five tips for teaching remotely. These include strategies for students to engage in collaborative writing, free tools that can be used for asynchronous and/or synchronous teaching, and using social media for resources and engagement.

IEEE REACH (Raising Engineering Awareness through the Conduit of History)

IEEE History Center

Understanding that technology and history are not mutually exclusive subjects, IEEE REACH provides history teachers with free educational resources that situate science, technology, and engineering in their social and humanistic contexts. Lesson plans offer an experiential approach to topics such as the printing press and early maritime navigation. The inquiry units and lesson plans are geared primarily to secondary school instruction. However, select site videos (approx 3-7 mins each) and primary sources can be adapted for and integrated into an undergraduate survey class.

New EdTech Classroom

Sam Kary

New EdTech Classroom video tutorials demonstrate how to use the most important features of current education technology. In addition to the nuts and bolts of free tools such as Padlet, whiteboard.fi, FlipGrid, Newsela and more, veteran teacher Sam Kary also shares lesson plan ideas and implementation tips to help you start using technology in your classroom right away.

Into the Archive: A Free Online Course on Archival Research Methods

Jessica Mack

Into the Archive is a free, asynchronous, historical research methods course created at Princeton University that introduces college-level students to the process of conducting archival research. Students will gain familiarity with approaches to archival research and learn how to plan their own research projects. At the high school level, this site can serve to refine IB History HL OPVL skills and spark IA and EE research. Learners access the course by creating a free edX account. Registration with email required.

The K. Patricia Cross Academy: Practical Lessons for Passionate Professors

Faculty2Faculty

The K. Patricia Cross Academy: Practical Lessons for Passionate Professors promotes engaged online student learning and community-building in virtual classes. The site’s short videos and explanatory downloads of evidence-based teaching methods include guided notes, jigsaw, think-pair-share, and online teaching adaptation for active reading. This free, open-access academy also explains how to document student learning in ways that provide the information instructors need to improve their teaching such as remote community building and creating an engaging online teaching persona.

Lockdown Lectures: Q&A With History Authors

fifteen eightyfour, Cambridge University Press

The Lockdown Lectures with Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Kris Lane, and Matthew Restall reveal the historians’ approach to teaching online and, in particular, how to engage working and commuter students who may not have access to extensive resources. The scholars’ discussion, centered around viewer questions, offers practical advice which may be helpful to the instructor who is new to teaching and/or grappling with the uncertainties of remote instruction.

Reading Like a Historian

Stanford History Group

Reading Like a Historian offers a free, downloadable curriculum which engages World History and US History students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills. By employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading, students learn how to evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and how to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. In addition to lesson plans and classroom activities, the site includes English and Spanish language contextualization, historical thinking, and downloadable posters can prompt immediate student engagement.

Research/Craft and Workflow Hacks for Historians

Robert Karl

Robert Karl’s Research/Craft and Workflow Hacks for Historians helps students, academics, and others more efficiently organize reading material. The videos demonstrate how to store and order PDFs using multiple platforms across devices, how to digitize and organize archival sources, and more. An instructor might assign these videos for a research course, for an in-class discussion on methods, or as enrichment for students of all levels interested in learning new ways of managing source material. IB History HL and TOK teachers may find “Research Methods for Historians Part I” particularly useful.

Teaching with Historic Places

National Park Service

Teaching with Historic Places offers a series of more than 160 classroom-ready lesson plans that use historic sites as a means for exploring American history. Educators and their students can work through these online lesson plans directly on the computer or print them out and photocopy them for distribution. K-12 lesson plans can be browsed by theme, time period, state, and curriculum standards.

Timeline Assignment

Maureen MacLeod and Lauran Kerr-Heraly

Timeline Assignment, inspired by Dr. Maureen MacLeod’s presentation at the 2012 AHA conference, offers students an active learning assessment opportunity that serves as an alternative to a research paper. This instructional guide details the steps to creating a digital, annotated, research-based timeline. Here, the interactive example created by the author incorporates sample text, eye-catching visuals, and a short video.

Sensory History with Mark Smith

INIT

“Sensory History,” an interview with historian Mark Smith on tech podcast INIT, offers listeners an overview of sensory history as a method of inquiry. One highlight is a discussion about which senses have been privileged over time, by whom, and why. Other topics include historical reenactment, immersive technology applied to historical studies, and the sensory revolution brought about by the global pandemic. This site links to a short reading on sensory history and its relation to COVID-19.