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,…

A growing body of research has underscored the importance of inquiry-based methods in history teaching, yet the organisational and cultural contexts within which teachers work and how these impact teachers' practices have received little attention. This article employs the job demands-resources theory to examine factors that inform the classroom…

The aim of this article is to present a pedagogical approach for history education. This approach is called Meaningful History and it outlines the process by which upper-level secondary history students can cultivate historical consciousness. Based on the notion of learning as meaning making and historical consciousness as a disposition to engage…

This article argues that the best way to increase inquiry-based instruction is paradoxically to pay more attention to direct instruction because excessive attention to practices like close reading of texts and facilitating text-based discussions has led to neglect of content knowledge explanation as a core instructional practice. This article…

This article reports the results of a six-year longitudinal interpretative case study on the development of five elementary teachers' beliefs and practices related to historical inquiry. Using activity theory as the lens, the researcher found: (1) the teachers' conceptual tools remained relatively consistent over time, and they believed inquiry…

Since Wineburg (1999) suggested that history is an act of reasoning rather than remembering, historical thinking (or disciplinary history) has become a widely accepted and practiced vision for history instruction in the United States. Yet evidence suggests that this has not contributed to greater student learning or investment. Some scholars have…

When the author tells people that her research focuses on how people teach and learn with historic places, the first response is usually "Oh, I love field trips." This sensibility, that field trips are required to teach about a place, is the single greatest barrier to understanding what can be learned from Place. Every Place is an…

This study explores how high school and college history instructors' perspectives of experiential learning opportunities and high-impact practices influence their epistemic beliefs as history teachers. The research considers educators' pedagogical practices to align inquiry and historical thinking with experiential learning opportunities and…

Instructional coaching is increasingly regarded as an essential feature of professional development, but no research exists on content-specific instructional coaching for history teachers. The study examines data from a coaching program in which history teacher leaders served as novice coaches for their colleagues. We found that coached teachers,…

The literature on history education in the United States suggests that history teaching was and still is dominated by traditional instruction methods that have persisted for well over 100 years. Some social studies teachers defy that tradition. They use ambitious approaches and resources to create student-centered learning experiences that enable…

My biggest fear about teaching a social studies methods class with COVID restrictions was talking "at" my teacher candidates and not modeling interactive and engaging social studies education. Social studies education should be engaging and student-centered. In this article, I offer technological adaptations to lessons that center around…

In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students' blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses 'motivations' rather than 'aims' prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students' causal explanations tended to…

While standards and assessments demand that students be able to recall content information, planning guides direct teachers to prioritize the development of transferable skills and understandings, and scholars of education have spent the past century debating the purpose of history instruction without approaching consensus. The field is still…

In this article, the author describes three inquiry activities based on a children's book set in the Philippines during World War II. In many U.S. history and modern world history curricula and textbooks, events in the Philippines (and more generally in the Pacific theater) during World War II are not covered well. Because these events cannot be…

In Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most fundamental political and moral issue current and future citizens face. If we accept the maxim that schools should prepare citizens for participation in determining the future of their state, Israeli students must be introduced to the historical, political and moral questions at the heart of…