Scaffolding Historical Thinking Skills

In the race to cover content it is easy to overlook the importance of scaffolding historical thinking during instruction. It is easy to ask students to analyze causes and effects, make comparisons, or effectively source documents; but harder to make sure students have a clear path to showing proficiency. Without clear scaffolding, without a system for teaching historical thinking, students are more likely to fall into "kitchen-sinkism." That is, they are more likely to think that copious amounts of detail and content, regardless of its relative significance, constitutes good history. Some students will always get to the goal on their own, but scaffolding helps all students have a clear path forward.

Historical Thinking begins with Primary Sources and Evidence

The use of primary sources has become increasingly common in history classrooms. Educators and researchers have been broadly pushing for this years. Specifically, this has been part of a call for the explicit teaching of historical thinking skills alongside prioritized content. Interestingly, the largest barriers to increased use of primary sources in the classroom that I have witnessed are not student reading ability, but a lack of teacher training and experience as well as access to materials.

AP World: Teaching Imperialism in Unit 6

Unit 6 is one of my favorite units to teach in AP World, and is arguably one of the most important for understanding contemporary global issues. The unit's content demands thinking about how we teach imperialism as much as what we are teaching. Student engagement is important, but also building historical empathy and training students to think critically about sensitive issues.

ChatGPT in AP World History

I finally tested out ChatGPT with my AP World History classes. Seeing the changes that technology brings to education is both scary and exciting; particularly as that change seems to be growing exponentially. Also includes are some great resources I have found on using AI in the classroom.

AP World History: Industrialization Spreads Lesson

For better or worse, I have grouped together some of the content from topics 5.4 and 5.6 in order to cover Industrialization's spread outside of Europe. The goals of this lesson are to establish that industrialization, modernization, and westernization are not synonyms, understanding change requires recognizing unique cultural contexts, and that within colonial encounters and imperial relationships change flows both ways affecting everyone involved.