History You Can Use

I could not have predicted the events that have punctuated the 2014-2015 school year when I opted to teach a course on the history of Jim Crow and race relations in America at a predominantly white liberal arts institution. The deaths of two black men at the hands of police were resounding punctuation marks. The…

Mid-Semester Evaluations

Somewhere I read that mid-semester evaluations were good opportunities to check how a course was going so that you can make any adjustments needed and potentially save a course that might have been going poorly. You can also use them to continue doing what works and to even foster habits of reflection and adjustment among…

#BlackLivesMatter and African American History

I began my African American history survey class with a discussion of the history of the study of African American history. I have taken this approach in past iterations of the course because I felt it was important for students to understand the context in which the study of African American history emerged. I wanted…

Questions to Ask for a Good Discussion

After fumbling and bumbling questions in my classes and failing to channel my inner Oprah and getting my students to just open up their intellectual inner landscapes to me, I started thinking about what makes good discussion questions. It occurred to me that the best questions are not the ones I ask students, but the…

Picturing Exodus and Emigration

I’m a visual learner, but I approach using images in my teaching with some trepidation. Even with useful guides to analyzing a picture, I worry about the contextual information that often does not accompany photos. Not every image comes with a complete photographers’ notes and an archive. But I recently found some great digital collections…

Begin with the End in Mind

I am very excited to be blogging with Teaching United States History and to become part of this vibrant and thoughtful community of teacher-researchers. I look forward to stimulating posts and conversations. I have decided to adapt one of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for my approach to classes this year: Begin…