Changing the Classroom Curriculum: Recapturing How I Taught a Half-Century Ago (Part 1)
I was a 21 year-old novice eager and anxious to become an first-rate high school history teacher at Glenville High School (Cleveland OH) in 1956. Within six months, I discovered that teaching five classes a day with multiple lessons (I taught world history and U.S. history), grading homework from over 175 students, and learning the ropes of managing groups of students a few years younger than me not only wore me out–I was also taking evening graduate history courses at Western Reserve University– but drove me to rely on lectures and the textbook far more than I anticipated.
By mid-year, I had become dissatisfied about how I was teaching my students–who happened to be nearly all minority (Negro was the preferred word then). I routinely lectured, watched maybe half of the students take notes and the other half stare into the distance or try to look attentive. Some fell asleep. I asked students questions about the textbook pages I assigned and got one-word answers back. Occasionally, a student would ask a question and I would improvise an answer that would trigger a few more students to enter in what would become a full blown back-and-forth discussion. It was unplanned and brief but mysteriously disappeared in the snap of a finger. Periodic quizzes andcurrent events one day a week altered my routines but student disengagement persisted. I was wholly teacher-centered in my instruction concentrating my attention upon history content. I was, as I learned in later years, teaching history in the way that it had been taught for decades: the heritage approach. Yet after six months, I realized that I did not want to teach history mechanically drowning students in forgettable facts that left me drained and dissatisfied at the end of a long day. I wanted to break out of that pattern. But did not know how to do that yet.
These were the years before the civil rights movement had traveled northward. Martin Luther King, Jr. was in the midst of his Montgomery ministry; Rosa
