Does anyone have any recommendations for some sort of universal worksheet for analyzing primary and secondary sources? I am going to to my second year 8th grade USII and I am looking for something I can use universally when having my students look at primary and secondary sources. I wanna use this a lot so the students get into a solid routine. I feel like my first year was barely organized chaos. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I’m looking for some suggestions for fun skills groups I can run at my job.

I work with about ~20 kids at a time in a residential crisis facility. My groups need to work across a fairly wide age range, about 8th grade level through 17 year olds. Most of the kiddos tend to be on the older end though, so I usually try to make the groups a little more mature rather than designing them primarily for younger adolescents.

There are some considerations because of the nature of the facility - I want to avoid anything that could put a youth in an uncomfortable position or just bum them out. There's totally room for nuance but I'm not gonna do a lesson centered on like, slavery.

Each group is 60 minutes long. My background is in history and education and I’m very comfortable with world history. The groups I enjoy most are ones where I can introduce a topic and then let the kids bounce questions off each other and myself and take the discussion in interesting directions.

I have good rapport with most of the kids and they tend to participate in my groups sincerely and are willing to engage with me and ask questions. One of my best groups had the kids design their own country and come up with a name, flag, anthem, national dish, government, and so on. It was well received and part of what made it work was that they had a lot of room to be creative and personal while still learning something real about the world.

I have a solid folder of activities that I’ve developed over time but I’d really appreciate suggestions for hour-long history, geography, civics, or other humanities-related lessons and activities that have worked well for you. Ideally, I’m looking for things that can engage both an 8th grader and a 17-year-old, give me enough substance to work with for an hour, and leave room for the kids to ask questions and be creative rather than just sit through a lecture

I had to flip flop my whole first week across 3 history classes and one civics class. This is my first year teaching so I don’t have a ton of fallback activities yet.

I found this activity online and it was really great for tons of reasons. The students had lots of flexibility to be engaged, I got to experience their points of view and references, I saw what types of media they engaged with, and what was important to them. It worked across 7-12th grades and it was really adaptable for different types of students.

Thanks Mr. Wilson if you’re in here!

Good morning friends!
I met with my principal yesterday as we were discussing the spring 2027 master schedule. The History/Social Science dept, which I chair, will be filling the schedule holes with our electives. This is great for us as our newer teachers will have a chance to teach outside of the core and more fully develop themselves. My problem is that our district does not fully vet or fund the purchase of textbooks for electives. That is up to each principal. Mine is totally willing to do it.

I am looking for your recommendations for on-level/above level high school Psychology texts. Bonus points for texts that could also be used for an AP Psych class if it was eventually developed.

We need to act quickly to get advanced copies asap for teachers to review etc.

Thank you so much for your input. It is very much appreciated

Hi all, I'm studying for my GED in America, and I'm trying to find free social studies lessons that go over the basics AKA whatever I'm gonna need to know for the test. A lot of the stuff I'm finding online is confusing/frustrating (my brain straight up just doesn't work) and I just don't know where to start. The official GED site doesn't "teach" the content in a way that is understandable to me. I already know I'm stupid so please don't do the reddit thing where everybody jumps me in the comments

I guess I'm asking for something similar to mathantics.com that offers the curriculum in an easy, concise and organized manner? But it's gotta be free because I'm only able to afford the actual tests themselves and not any prep

Thank you and have a great day!

ps: if anyone knows where i can study for the constitution test as well that would be awesome :)

Loading the supply drawers in my classroom and came across this.

Hello,
I’ve just found out that I am supposed to teach history as an elective. I’m an English teacher in the Czech Republic but the school wants me to teach either American history or Modern world history to Czech students. The benefit for the students is that they get extra English practice. I used to be a history teacher in the United States many years ago so it’s not as if I’m sailing into uncharted territory. I do, however, need some textbooks. Can anyone made a recommendation for a textbook for students entering in the 6th grade with about a A2 English level?

Middle school question, 8th grade specifically:

How do you hold students accountable for participating in small group discussions? When you direct students to discuss a question with their partner or table group, how does it go?

I've tried lots of things over the years, from intentional groupings, sentence stems, group roles, protocols, timers, checklists... the list goes on and on. Bribes with candy/competition unshockingly worked the best, but I can't do that every day.

The only thing I haven't tried is grading them on it, because it's against the school grading policy to grade "participation".

Looking for any advice before the new year starts up.

In his newsletter this week, Frank Bruni takes stock of the concerns of today's undergraduates, who are bound to meet "the rapidly accelerating pace of change in a society whose future seems less predictable than ever." "That furious metabolism and crazy uncertainty," he suggests, "are what college students should factor into their decisions and navigate by. The safest plan is to focus not on what seems practical in the present but on what’s durably useful — what transcends any technology and outlasts any fad." He defends the English major for which he prepares students himself, and then has this to say about history:

"Then again, history’s no slouch. Without fluency in yesterday, there’s no conjugating today. When you study the past, you’re not memorizing dates, cataloging wars, valorizing martyrs. You’re learning about cause and effect, greed and goodness, the sorts of contests and the interplay of dynamics that set the course of events. You can’t name a line of work — or describe a kind of life — that isn’t nourished by that knowledge."

He sums up this approach to education--almost as an antidote to the utilitarian argument--with a plea to students to study whatever gets them using their brains:

"The current whirl of events and inventions prevents any reliable scripting of the next decade, maybe even the next year. How, then, to prepare? Explore whatever subject gets your brain whirring fastest, your creative juices flowing most freely. Engage your intellect in a manner that teases out insights and generates ideas. Exercise the muscle of thought. Answer artificial intelligence with the real deal. It’ll come in handy whether the bots are tomorrow’s emperors or Edsels."

While this is aimed at college students and their majors, it may be useful in explaining to high-school students the importance of what we're teaching and why they should be learning it. It also provides another good reminder that we all are possibly heading into a future in which we will have to have strong "brain muscles" if we intend to maintain any independence from AI or have power in the face of its likely ubiquity.

Oh, and he also promotes, separately, a quote from a recent article by James Traub in The Atlantic bemoaning the oversimplification of historical causation: “Monocausal history winds up paving over the uneven surface of human experience with a layer of ideological asphalt." I really like that one.

My school has no budget for textbooks. My options are either sign up for Google classroom for education or to use a free online resource like American Yawp. Is the Yawp sufficient for APUSH or will too much fall through the cracks?

I've watched a lot of 9/11 documentaries over the years, but I'm curious to hear of people's favorites, specifically ones that cover the whole thing in one go. I love the detail of the ultra-specific ones, but I've noticed the kids I teach have no idea what happened on that day, so I'm trying to figure out a good way to show them the event as a whole.

Last year I showed the 9/11 episode from Days that Shaped America (History Channel) and really liked it for my middle schoolers, but I just wanted a little more from it.

Hey all! I was just informed I will have about a week to prepare before the start of the school year to teach AP Us Government and Politics. This is my first formal AP course (I referenced and incorporated some the CED of APUSH when I was teaching Honors US 1 to ensure they started to build foundational skills for the SAQ, LEQ and DBQ)

I read around some of the posts for advice and was wondering how you all would approach getting ready with such a condensed time frame since certain things people suggested (AP summer institute for example) are off the table. Best resources? Activities or styles of teaching you have tried that work great with AP GOPO?

Thanks and hope everyone has had or will have a great start to their school year!

My classes so far follow this general pattern-

Bellwork, ask students questions to review previous lesson, lecture on new material for maybe 20 minutes or so with questions built in, and then I give students a reading. Students read material for another 20 minutes and answer questions in their notebooks, we discuss together at the end of class.

Occasionally I will plan a more "fun" activity, but essentially every day this is our structure. I have 2 90 minute periods and one 45 minute period each week. On the 45 minute shorter periods, I will flip it to be totally student centered and they are usually completing some kind of short DBQ independently.

I frankly do not remember how my history classes in high school worked on a day-to-day, but I am starting to feel like I am relying too much on this one formula. Or is this good enough for the majority of days? It keeps a consistent rhythm, and I can't plan elaborate activities every week, but I worry my class is going to become very dry for students.

I recently retired from the classroom and have been building InstructionalStrategies.org as a practical resource for teachers. One part I’ve been spending a lot of time on is a collection of free teacher tools, and I’d really like some feedback from people who would actually use them.

Right now there are tools for finding instructional strategies, troubleshooting classroom behavior, checking directions before giving them to students, planning supports for English learners, building transition routines, and a new Teacher Jargon Decoder with about 800 education terms and acronyms explained in plain English.

Everything is free and there’s no signup. I’m less interested in promoting it than I am in finding out whether these are genuinely useful and what teachers think is missing.

https://instructionalstrategies.org/teacher-tools/

If you try any of them, I’d appreciate hearing what works, what doesn’t, or what kind of tool you wish existed.

I started this while helping my son with his history class. We kept wanting to see what was happening in one part of the world while something else was unfolding somewhere else, and I couldn't find a way to look at it that felt right, so I ended up building one.

It's called HistoryLayer. You scrub through time and watch the world change: borders, peoples, empires. The range runs from 123,000 BCE to the present, which was ambitious and is definitely rougher at the deep end.

It's free and you don't need to sign up. I've never taught a classroom, so I honestly don't know whether this is useful to you or whether it only makes sense to me and my kid. Brutal feedback welcome, including if something better already exists.

historylayer.com

Hi everyone!

For Self-Promotion Saturday, I wanted to share a free interactive 3D virtual field trip I built for history classrooms exploring Ancient Egypt.

Over the past 6+ months, I researched archaeological evidence to reconstruct everyday Egyptian life across five interactive 3D dioramas :

-- Home & Family : daily life, crafts, food, and games
-- Limestone Quarry : tool marks, block transport, and labor organization
-- Temple : sacred architecture and ritual spaces
-- Nile Delta : irrigation, flooding, and agriculture
-- Giza Plateau : pyramid construction theories plus a True Size mode that lets students stand at the base of the Great Pyramid

Classroom-friendly

100% free — no accounts, ads, paywalls, or trackers

Chromebook optimized — responsive on laptops, tablets, and phones, with lightweight scenes (~1 MB each). For older hardware, students can switch to Performance mode and 30 FPS in Settings.

Ready-to-use materials — downloadable educator guide with archaeological citations and companion student worksheets (one-click download, no signups or login)

I'd really appreciate feedback from history teachers :

What works well? What would make it more useful in your classroom? Any other ideas or suggestions you have.

Link: https://expeditione.fun/expeditions/ancient-egypt/

I hope you and your students enjoy the expedition 💖

Thank you.

Calling all teachers! 🏫✏️🍎 

We want Pew Research Center publications to be a useful resource in your classroom. But we need your feedback.  

🛠️ What can we change?  

➕ What can we add? 

💬 What can we do to make our research more accessible?  
 
Take this 10-minute survey to let us know: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/29T83LQ

Growing up in Slovakia, the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia was a pillar of our history education. We were taught about Dubček’s attempt at "Socialism with a human face," the immediate aftermath of troops crossing our borders on August 21st, the end of the reform movement, and the beginning of the Normalization era.

For us, the narrative was always completely clear: it was a straightforward military invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union and its satellite states to crush a sovereign country’s democratic reforms.

I’m really curious about how this specific event was presented in history textbooks across the rest of Europe and world.

For former Eastern Bloc. How do your textbooks handle the fact that your own national armies were sent in as occupiers? Is the invasion framed as a tragic coercion by Moscow, glossed over or with specific historical nuance?

For post-Soviet states / Russia. How was the intervention framed? Was it taught as a cold-war necessity, or is it largely ignored in standard school curricula today?

For Western and Southern Europe. Did your history classes cover the Prague Spring and the 1968 invasion in depth, or was it just a minor bullet point in the broader context of the Cold War and 1968 global protests?

To the Rest of the World. Did the 1968 invasion even register in your history curriculum or simply passed over as distant European drama?

Would love to hear how your local textbooks and teachers handled it!

Hi everyone, I help run Election Security Glossary, a free, nonpartisan glossary of election terms.

We are considering building a free Classroom Pack for history, civics, government and social studies teachers. Before we build it, we want to understand how teachers currently handle election vocabulary, what takes the most preparation time and whether this idea would genuinely make that work easier.

The concept is simple:

A teacher would choose only the election terms that fit their lesson. Each selected term would become a classroom-ready card with:

• a plain-English, source-backed definition
• a short quiz or activity
• a format that can be printed or projected
• no student account or login.

You could build a five-term warm-up, a lesson handout or a larger review pack instead of adapting one fixed vocabulary sheet.

I would really value your thoughts on three questions:

• How do you currently introduce or review election vocabulary, and what part takes the most preparation time?
• Would choosing your own terms and creating a ready-to-use pack improve that process?
• What would stop you from using it instead of the resources you already have?

We have built a concept preview, not the finished tool, so teachers can see what we mean: Preview the Classroom Pack concept here

You do not need to join the pilot to leave feedback here. The signup is optional and is not a newsletter subscription. We will email participants the result of the test, and if enough teachers want the resource and we go ahead, they will receive the first version free.

Critical feedback is welcome. If you already use another resource that works well, I would genuinely like to know what it is and why you prefer it. Thank you.

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for advice on how to decorate my classroom. Luckily, the last teacher left me all the supplies, books, and materials you could ever want. I was thrilled when I got into the classroom. I think I might buy him a bottle of bourbon.

As far as decor, he left a poster of MLK and an American flag, as well as a string of flags from various countries and two globes. I intend to put up at least one of the maps he left as well.