History Instruction in a Time of Disruption

Inquiry Question: How can we support personal connections and wellness?

Challenge: Teaching online highlights the need to build trusting relationships with students and families.

Principles:

• Prioritize time to check in with students about their lives and needs. 
• Plan assignments that invite participation from family and  community members.
• Build in time to collaborate with colleagues.

Practices:

• Create norms for your virtual learning environment.
• Plan assignments that allow students to share personal, family, and community history.
• Share responsibility of planning and support with your colleagues.

Examples & Resources:

• Worldview Activity
• UCLA-HGP Platicas - Family Conversation Activity
• Student Work Protocol

Inquiry Question: How do we decide which content and skills to emphasize in this evolving context of learning?

Challenge: Clearly articulated curricular priorities are required in order to respond effectively to teaching and learning disruptions. 

Principles:

• Identify content standards and curricular concepts that reinforce essential themes and promote deep engagement.
• Build student independence through discrete, bite-sized instructional units that foster inquiry.
• Plan for specific in person (synchronous) and out of school (asynchronous) learning opportunities.

Practices:

• Draw from the H-SS Framework Themes to center ongoing inquiry.
• Design and map a course based on a central question or theme that investigates alternative voices, narratives, and explanations of history.
• Build clear, self-contained, digital-friendly units that explore central themes and include primary and secondary sources.
• Create opportunites for learning beyond the computer.

Examples & Resources:

• Course map examples
• Inquiry-based unit and lesson planning worksheet
• Google forms and/or other digital formats to design blended learning courses

Inquiry Question: How do we manage instruction in order to best support critically engaged learning across multiple platforms?

Challenge: Creating opportunities for deep learning and inquiry is difficult, especially in an online context. 

Principles:

• Inquiry and historical thinking help students develop skills to understand their world, challenge dominant narratives, and create their own interpretations.
• Surface, deep and transfer learning have different qualities and require different strategies.
• Carefully scaffolded academic discourse and reading and writing strategies allow students to reflect on and consolidate their thinking.

Practices:

• Center all learning in inquiry by posing questions and promoting student investigations. 
• Surface-level learning is scaffolded to foster deeper conceptual thinking.
• Select a few key strategies for each level of learning for consistency and uniformity.

Examples & Resources:

• Surface Learning: Headings and Highlights
• Deeper Learning: Categorizing and analyzing online text with the Highlighter Tool
• Integrated Online Strategies: Civil Rights unit for distance learning

Inquiry Question: How can we reorient history instruction to empower students to engage with the world?

Challenge: Traditional history courses can feel irrelevant and meaningless to students.

Principles:

• Historical themes echo throughout time and can be seen in our contemporary world.
• Knowledge of the past and historical thinking skills help students understand their current reality and experiences.
• Historical skills and knowledge engage and empower students as agents of change.

Practices:

• Center units on themes that resonate with the current context to elevate relevance.
• Align curriculum to explore the emergence of and resistance to systems and structures of oppression in the past and today.
• Encourage and scaffold controversial conversations and civic engagement in response to  real-world issues.

Examples & Resources:

• Making History - Leverage local history and project-driven assignments.
• Integrated Action Civics - Empower students with change-making models and strategies.
• Lesson Plans - Connect learning to contemporary topics.