The methods of teaching history in grades 6-12 have changed over the last few years to be more interactive and collaborative. More and more, teaching and learning revolves around an essential triad of inquiry, primary sources, and literacy in a collaborative classroom environment. "Teaching History Today" is about placing inquiry,…

In the last three decades, history education has focused overwhelmingly on inquiry. In teacher education, the recent turn to "Core Practices" or "High-Leverage Practices" (HLPs) has been applied to history education. Despite the attractiveness of inquiry-oriented instruction, it is still absent from far too many history…

It is almost 20 years since Michael Riley first invited Key Stage 3 history teachers to 'choose and plant' their enquiry questions. Many members of the history education community have taken up that invitation, making use of overarching enquiry questions to structure students' learning. But what is meant by enquiry in this context is sometimes…

American and global history curriculum frameworks for high schools across the 50 states generally present the topic of the Cold War from the Western political perspective and contain material about the impact of the US-Soviet ideological rivalry on American society. This article argues that since the Cold War impacted the lives of people in the…

Students find it difficult to join up the different things they study into a complex account of the past. Examination specifications do not necessarily help with this because of the way in which history is divided up into different "units", a problem exacerbated by textbooks being designed for particular exam topics. Stacey-Chapman…

This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with…

This article describes an attempt to bring disciplinary historical inquiry into the social studies classroom. This work emerges from a five-school 6-month intervention in San Francisco, "Reading like a Historian", which found main effects for student learning across four quantitative measures: historical thinking, factual knowledge,…

This document presents the proceedings of the 20th Annual Research Forum held June 25, 2015, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following 21 action research papers: (1) History Lives! The Use of Simulations in a High School Social Studies Classroom (Lydia Adkins); (2) Using Francophone Music in the High…

Describes a history unit in which secondary students use the mysteriously carved Champlain's Rock (near Renfreu, Ontario) as a starting point for inquiry into the evidence of the French exploration of Eastern Canada. Students learn about hypothesis formation and testing, frames of reference, bias and prejudice, and they write two essays. (AM)

Historical interpretation is a primary responsibility of the historian in addition to discovery of the factual past. Using historiographical study as one aspect of historical study, a teacher provides a vehicle for understanding and gaining experience in the use of the reflective process. (JB)

Student understanding and motivation are increased if history is taught from the present to the past with an emphasis on current affairs and their effect on the student

Let's stop saying sorry for the Empire! Thus Mastin and Wallace introduce one of their lessons on interpretations of the British Empire. They develop Gary Howells's ideas from the previous edition of "Teaching History" to demonstrate exactly what we might get our students to do with interpretations of the past. They produce an enquiry…

Examines the frequently found gap between the teaching of facts and the learning of critical thinking skills in the history classroom. Describes how history facts can be taught through the application of critical thinking skills. Includes sample test items and teaching examples. (JDH)

It is the purpose of the assessed k-12 sequential project to help students develop skills, knowledge, and values. Although the project is structured toward development of the concepts of various social science disciplines, history and geography are the primary subject areas. (SM)

This discussion of thinking skills is designed to related historiographical meanings with the overall process of historical inquiry. Using the definitions provided as a guide, the history teacher can more adequately formulate questions and teaching objectives. (Author/RK)