It has been quite a while since I have had a chance to write about what has been going on in my classroom. As every teacher knows, sometimes things just get busy. To get back into the habit, I wanted to tackle a skill that, at least for me, is challenging to do well with frequency.
Continuity and Change over Time tends to be more difficult for students to grasp than causation or comparison. It’s also harder to practice because it requires a broader range of content knowledge. Students need to be able to get a sense of the “big picture” to engage in meaningful analysis that goes beyond assessing a single turning point.
One thing that I appreciate about CCOT is that, when I am working with modern historical content, it encourages reflection to the present-day. I’ve found that this helps students understand how history can be used to reflect on contemporary issues.
The image below includes the four guideposts for teaching CCOT that come from Peter Seixas’ book “The Big Six.” I use these to structure and scaffold my lesson activities.
Guidepost One: Continuities and Changes are Interwoven
The first guidepost is fairly straightforward. I like to introduce it using a color-coded timeline. Events and developments that represent changes are highlighted in blue, while those representing continuities are highlighted in red. Once we’ve identified turning points, students can begin to see how a significant change can itself become a continuity.
Guidepost Two: Direction and Pace of Change
Most students easily grasp the concept of a turning point. What’s more subtle—and challenging—is helping them see that change can vary in both direction and pace. I start this off with an thought-experiment about “heart-attack units.” The original idea is not mine, though I can’t remember where I heard it. The experiment begins with a question, “How far back in the past would we have to go to find someone who, if brought to our present day, would be so shocked that they’d have a heart attack?”
Students usually guess the early Middle Ages or even classical times. I suggest that it would be approximately the year 1700, just before Britain’s shift from horse power to coal power. I then repeat the question with the adjustment that we will be bringing our time traveler up to the year 1700. The length of time we would have go back to find someone who would be shocked by the world in 1700 stretches much farther into the past. This helps illustrate the exponential acceleration of change. From here, I reference Moore’s law and technological growth of semi-conductors. Technological change provides plentiful examples of both pace and direction of change.
Guidepost Three: Progress and Decline Aren’t Linear
For this one, I use an idea straight from The Big Six. Many students, especially in Western contexts, default to seeing history as a continuous march of progress. I challenge this by giving them a list of events (without dates) and asking them to arrange the events chronologically. Once they’ve done that, they research the actual dates and almost always find they’ve made errors.
This activity helps students confront the myth of linear progress. The U.S. Civil Rights Movement is a great example to use here, since it includes both gains and setbacks that defy simple narratives.
Guidepost Four: Periodization
Periodization is a particularly fun element of CCOT to teach. To illustrate this concept, I integrate thematic analysis into some lessons. The AP World unit titles offer a natural starting point as well. Using prepared timelines, we explore how specific themes like empire-building, technological development, escalation vs. deescalation evolve across periods. This helps students better understand when and why historians draw boundaries between eras.
The rest of this post includes a few strategies and activities I use to teach these four aspects of continuity and change over time.
Fine Tune Inquiry Questions
The questions we ask students matter; A poorly phrased or boring question like “What caused the French Revolution?” can quickly kill student enthusiasms. Driving questions that use CCOT can be fine tuned to include subtle hints towards direction and pace of change, periodization, or ideas of progress and decline.
Instead of asking “Why didn’t Britain experience a revolution in 1848?” ask “When did Britain come closest to political revolution in the nineteenth century?” Other examples could include:
- When did World War One become inevitable?
- To what extent did racism persist after the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
- Since 1980, has China’s economy or culture changed quicker?
- To what extent did the Atlantic Revolutions both benefit and hurt individuals and groups?
- How quickly did Japan’s government and society change during the Meiji Revolution?
- To what extent was the American Revolution revolutionary?
Then & Now Gallery Walks
In my 9th grade course, we’re currently studying the geography, history, and development of Africa and the Middle East. After students read a secondary source on colonialism in the Middle East during the 19th and early 20th centuries, I used a gallery walk with seven stations. Each included both historical context and modern-day connections, organized around a theme.
The stations are paired with a student handout that includes guiding questions focused on changes, continuities, and connections. The activity led to some interesting discussions about contemporary events as well as historical thinking.
I concluded the gallery walk with a thesis writing exit-ticket so the skill and content could be applied in some way before they left the room. I would not use this strategy to teach new content, but it worked well for building in a bit of depth and providing an opportunity to practice CCOT in a way that connects to the present.
CCOT Timelines
In my AP World sections, I recently used the Cold War Timeline activity from the OER project. I have become a fan of using this activity structure anytime I want students to think about long-term change. I’ve used it for the expansion and decline of empires, escalation/deescalation towards WWI, and trends of globalization.
In addition to the base timeline activity with multi-color sticky notes, I use guiding questions to get discussion going as time permits. Further analytical value is added by looking for turning points within the timeline and assessing how a change can become a continuity. Asking students to write or contextualize a thesis statement has become my go-to exit ticket. However, I don’t do this enough with CCOT.
Useful Resources
OER Project – Teaching Change and Continuity Over Time