Social Studies/History

By collapsing the distance between historical eras and the present day, we motivate students to ask hard questions and dig deeper into the past.

High school students can learn about Black Americans’ fight against social and political oppression throughout the school year.

History is complicated, but teachers can approach it by leading with truth and advocating for empathy.

High school teachers can give students a chance to gain insights into their community by exploring the nuances of immigration patterns.

This eight-step framework can help teachers create units that integrate science and social studies with math and English language arts.

Station-based book study can help build students’ background knowledge for a unit as they survey content before direct instruction.

One way to help students master skills is to let them cultivate their own English language arts content to explore. Here’s how.

The Jewish experience is not limited to the Holocaust; here are some ways teachers can expand what they teach students about Judaism.

Assignments that are bigger than a lesson and smaller than a unit are a good way to experiment with inquiry-based learning.

Asking students to examine their own possessions from the perspective of a historian in the future helps them sharpens their analytical skills.

Debate has a place in middle and high school classrooms, but it can be divisive. Collaborative deliberation is non-adversarial and encourages sharing of diverse perspectives.

High school students can explore core ideas like self-reliance and civil disobedience as they read ‘Walden’ and engage in the game.

The open-ended work in project-based learning can help students explore issues that matter to them.

These resources can help middle and high school students learn about the first Thanksgiving and Native Americans today.

The Common Core Learning Standards describe the importance of teaching students how to comprehend informational text. Primary source documents are artifacts created by individuals during a particular period in history. This could be a letter, speech, photograph or journal entry. If you're looking to integrate social studies into your literacy block, try out one of these resources for primary source documents.