Teachers Designing Instructional Materials: A Unit on the Assassination of Kennedy (Part 1)
As a novice U.S. history teacher in Cleveland (OH) in the mid-1950s, I began designing lessons that contained sources absent from students’ textbooks. While I used the textbook for most lessons, I developed materials about race in the U.S. that would add to (and eventually replace) textbook lessons. Then called Negro history, these lessons and units largely used primary sources (e.g., letters written by black soldiers serving in the Civil War, accounts by former slaves about pre-Civil War life on plantations).
For most of my students (but clearly not all), these new materials and lessons seemed to work, that is, there was more student participation in class discussions, they asked questions, and many wanted to learn more about events and people in the sources I used. They connected events together and began using evidence to support their interpretations of what occurred in the past. I was pleased.
Designing lessons and units, however, while exhilarating, also exhausted me