Please Tweet @ Your #History Teacher

Navigating Misinformation, Hashtags, and Trolls Helps Teach Our High School Students to Be Good Digital Citizens

For most teachers, social media has no place in a classroom. When they do use it, they often retreat to or remain within the safer confines of “walled garden” discussion and message boards where everything can be monitored and tracked and kept isolated from the outside world. But since 2015, we’ve been training our Advanced Placement U.S. History students at Barrington High School, in Illinois, to step into the “Wild West” of the real internet.

As social studies teachers, our job is to help build informed, concerned citizens who participate in …

Zoom Made Me a Better Teacher | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Zoom Made Me a Better Teacher

When Classrooms Went Digital, Relationship Building Became My Most Essential Tool to Keep Students Engaged

The start of the new year at the middle school where I teach in South Los Angeles has been stressful; the rapid spread of the Delta variant shook us from …

How to Teach an American Inauguration | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How to Teach an American Inauguration

Since 2008, My College Students Have Been Exploring—in Real Time—What the Transfer of Power Ceremony Reveals About the Nation

“Wouldn’t it be cool to go to D.C. for the inauguration?” I remember telling a fellow adjunct instructor in late 2008. Barack Obama had just been elected, and most of …

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One

A Scholar of Shakespeare Sees Perils and Possibilities in the Bard’s Plays, and His Own Experience

I once tried to commit suicide. Twenty years later, it’s still hard to talk about. I didn’t want to die. Self-esteem issues, depression, alcoholism. I was signaling, in an unhealthy …

Want to Take My Civics Class? Get Ready to Squirm

Learning How America Works Should Be Hard on You, Not Just Good for You

In many conversations, the topic of civics education comes with its own halo. The conventional wisdom is that it’s good, clean medicine, and if our children just get enough of …

Schools Aren’t Teaching Kids to Argue Truth to Power

State Education Standards Are Failing Students by Ignoring Why History Matters

Why can’t history classes show students why history matters?

That’s what I thought as I read through a new framework for teaching K-12 history in the U.S.—California’s History-Social Science Framework.

This is …