Making History Come Alive: Engaging Teaching Strategies for Educators
How to Teach History in a Way Where History Comes Alive
The study of history is all about recognizing, collecting, organizing, and interpreting evidence. It includes a broad range of topics, from humanities to science, but the discipline is most often associated with the past.
Historians often use theories of behavior developed by other social scientists, but they do not begin with a predetermined view of history. This way they can avoid making assumptions before looking at the evidence.
Flashcards
Flashcards are a great tool for helping students learn new concepts. They encourage a learning strategy called Successive Relearning, which helps to lock information into long-term memory.
Educators should keep in mind that it’s important to simplify the material on their flashcards, as the brain can easily become overwhelmed with too much information. Each card should be dedicated to testing one concept or posing one question, which will help reduce cognitive load.
Students can make their own paper flashcards or use study apps like Quizlet. It’s recommended to shuffle and mix up the cards regularly so that students don’t fall into patterns of guessing the answer from their card order. This will prevent students from becoming complacent and may even make their study sessions more fun.
Movies
Movies can help make history come alive by introducing students to different cultures, time periods and historical events. They also provide a visual record of past eras — the clothing, style and atmosphere.
Movies like Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes, bring the horrors of the Holocaust to life for students. They also provide a starting point for discussion of current issues like continued anti-semitism and white supremacy in the United States.
But movies aren’t always good teaching tools, as they often take artistic license with factual information to create drama and appeal. To be effective, a teacher needs to know the proper subject matter and learning goals before using a film in class.
Taking a Walk
Imagine history by looking at your world as an anthropologist or historian. Jump rope chants, jokes, the way your parents or grandparents warned you, and celebrations are examples of folklife, the everyday creativity around us that makes up history.
Research shows that students retain information better when their bodies are in motion. Take your class on a gallery walk where they review posters or objects that represent a particular historical topic.
Taking walks can help inspire new ideas, as well. Writers love to walk, and it’s no wonder: walking is a great workout that also helps the mind think. Just ask Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell or Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who solved a problem during his daily walks that led to the quaternions used in electric toothbrushes and mobile phones.
Creating a Timeline
Whether you are looking to highlight your business’s growth or simply show off a collection of milestones, timeline templates can make the job easier. Visme’s drag-and-drop diagramming tools allow you to quickly create an engaging timeline using icons, lines and pre-designed font pairs. It’s easy to emphasize certain dates – or even periods – by using bigger font sizes and contrasting colors.
Many teachers discover that a well-made timeline can help students understand the overlapping and confluence of historical events, cultures, and people. It also helps kids grasp that George Washington and Catherine the Great were contemporaries, or that the invention of fire and the printing press occurred at the same time.
It can be fun for students to create timelines of their own lives, marking important events such as family vacations or school milestones. This allows students to connect with history on a personal level and can be particularly effective for learners with visual, mathematic, or kinesthetic intelligences.
Making Connections
Using storytelling, experiential learning, visual aids, and relevance to student experiences helps make history come alive. These teaching strategies also encourage students to use reading comprehension strategies that will help them better understand the past.
One of the most common and effective reading strategies to teach is making connections. The research behind this strategy is that it activates students’ prior knowledge which increases their understanding of the text they are reading.
The types of connections students can make are text to self, text to text, and text to world. Provide students with recording sheets that allow them to mark the different connections they make while reading. This way you can easily see which types of connections each student makes and how well they are mastering the strategy.