Changing the Classroom Curriculum in History: Recapturing How I Taught a Half-Century Ago (Part 2)
Within four years of beginning as a novice history teacher in 1956, I had slowly introduced new content and direct instruction in skills into my U.S. history classes. As I learned the methodology of the historian in my graduate courses, I designed more lessons on analyzing evidence, determining which sources of information were more or less reliable and assessing what makes one opinion more informed than another. A later generation of scholars and practitioners might have labeled my uncertain baby-steps in changing the content of lessons, “teaching historical thinking.”
I used “study guides” that I had prepared for each unit (e.g., the causes of the Civil War, Industrial Revolution) that included readings I had selected from historians, primary source documents, excerpts from American Heritagemagazine, and textbook pages students should read. Students had to answer