Re:Weaving History

You might have seen this special collector's edition of Canada's History - the Big Questions of Canada.  I know I've given them to lots of teachers, and I found the essays enlightening and engaging for myself. The question I'm addressing in this blog post is, how could you use this in your classroom? I think we need to back up a little and ask ourselves, as history teachers a fundamental question: How many history essays have your students actually read? I know I had never really asked my students to read a well-written history essay, I just asked them to write  a well-written history essay! I would venture to say that probably most teenagers are not seeking out history essays to read in their free time, so it's likely that the only place they would have encountered one is in history class. How could I expect my students to write a good history essay if they had never even read one?!! The light bulb went off for me a few years ago, when I learned abo...

With much of the professional development focus on numeracy in Ontario this year, I've been contemplating the connections between numeracy and historical thinking. There are the obvious statistics and graphs that we all use to unpack historical content, such as this graph from    Canadian Sources Investigated: The enlistments (green) and the casualties (purple) for the months of 1917 is a great example of how we often think of "numeracy." Students need to interpret and understand the "content" and implications of it. This is great! While these types of activities are a necessary and excellent part of understanding the events of the past, alone, they are not yet really historical thinking.  What I've really been wondering is how do numeracy skills and concepts overlap or converge with the historical thinking concepts ? Earlier this year, one of my more numerate colleagues shared some of her realizations from a lesson study observation, whe...