“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing. I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”
― Howard Zinn
In my 8 years of teaching I have finally lost count of how many times I have been asked the question regarding why students should study history or even care. Quite honestly it is a hard question to answer. Normally I give them a typical teacher kind of answer. You should care because if you don’t know your past how will you understand the world around you today and other answers along the same lines as this one. However, that answer or any answers close to it are ever enough for my students. They still don’t get and for the most part don’t care BUT that’s okay because they always present me with the challenge of having to make HISTORY relevant, interesting and FUN, yes I said FUN!
Luckily for my students I’m not the kind of teacher that solely focuses on important dates and names. I mean come on, no wonder kids aren’t big history buffs. For the most part that is the kind of experience they have had in former history classes. Remember a bunch of facts and spit them back out on a test. Can anyone say BORING? My challenge is to recreate my lesson plans every year to fit the kind of students I have sitting in front of me every year. In the TEAL Center, I have a flexible schedule which allows me to be creative and try out new things without having to stress over how much time I have actually have with my kids. In the TEAL Center, students are in a self-paced, blended learning environment with their own personal learning plans. This set up allows me to break students up into small groups, pair them up into teams and even work with certain students individually.
When it comes to actual content, I like to use a thematic approach. I break the units up into decades and have students examine each decade from a political, social and economic perspective. They use videos, lectures, power points, DBQs and other similar resources to build a foundation of knowledge. Once that is established students participate in small group discussion, socratic seminars, debates or even create their own lessons to teach themselves. One thing I noticed last school year was that kids were getting what they were learning. They were actually understanding not just the content but why it was important for them to learn that content. They made connections between the past and the present. They engaged me in conversations about history and even current news events. They went from asking why they needed to study all this history to asking questions about history to learn more on their own. The answer to the question about why we should study history becomes unimportant once students simple start enjoying how its being taught to them.
Mrs. Collado's History Blog 