The Supreme Court of the United States is often seen as the most distant and befuddling branch for my students. Whether it is misunderstanding their unelected status, difficulty in discerning legal language, or simply confusion about how the federal courts function, students are often left with a...
Teaching a young, eager, and naive student how to write a sophisticated DBQ is like teaching a similarly inexperienced athlete how to successfully clear the bar in a pole vault competition. You wouldn’t set them on the runway with a 12-foot long stick and tell them to go jump....would you?
In honor of Black History Month, I have created a lesson that can be used for students to learn (or review what they have learned) about African American experiences from the period after the Civil War through the Great Depression. Hopefully you will find the lesson useful and students will find it...
Whether you were relieved or intimidated to see nine foundational documents in the AP® U.S. Government and Politics course after the redesign, you most likely had to alter your approach to document analysis in your class. While the direction as to which documents to teach is helpful, it can be...
The following lesson plan uses the historical thinking skills of comparative and cause and effect to analyze two historians' perspectives on the Rwandan genocide. Helen Epstein and Philip Gourevitch relate their perspectives about that African genocide and students are asked to analyze those points...
For well over a millennium, Western Europe was unified by religious orthodoxy to the Roman Catholic Church. Although the church had been challenged on numerous occasions, religious uniformity only began to collapse during the 16th century during the period known as the “Protestant Reformation.”
I was pleasantly surprised with my students’ efforts and results on the Civic Engagement project in COVID spring 2021. The student-government connections were not what they might have been in a non-pandemic year, but with proper social distancing and a reliance on email and telephone calls, several...
Early in a school year it can be a real challenge to know how to begin teaching students critical skills they need to score on the AP® U.S. History Exam. I don’t think there is any one right way to begin approaching exam skills with our students, but, personally, I like to begin with something that...
If you read my previous blog post, The Most Foundational Document: The U.S. Constitution, you'll have noticed a classroom activity for the Constitution unit. If you were interested in finding out more on this activity, you're in luck
Do you struggle with teaching over 800 years of content and building college-level skill proficiency to AP® World History students? Does teaching AP® World seem like riding an escalator, where you are never being able to get off on a floor to explore? Are you always struggling with timing and...
