The crafty and alert among you will know that this is actually part seven of what I hope will be an eight-part series on the Election of 1824. This is the fourth (of hopefully five) lesson plans on the subject that I’m completing for the Massachusetts Historical Society. If a teacher is looking to do …
Category Archives: Pedagogy
The Election of 1824, Part 6 (will it ever end?)
Here’s the third lesson plan — of I think five? — that I’m doing for the Massachusetts Historical Society. This one draws on the Structured Academic Controversy model I learned through the Stanford Education Group. I’ve adapted it a little bit for my purposes here, adding a layer of courtroom jargon for fun. The formatting …
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New Jersey’s Learning Standards for Social Studies
Disclaimer: This is me at my most crotchety. I hate, hate, hate the use of these standards and find this blog entry a cathartic exercise. I fully recognize that any effort to make comprehensive standards for social studies is a nightmare, and doing it by committee where each member has particular biases and interests has …
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A Whole New World… gone without a trace!
I lost track of how many years I’ve been teaching U.S. History I Honors, but I know that I’ve always started the first day of school with the assignment I’m going to talk about today. I’m confident of that because it’s an assignment I started using back when I taught World History. So let’s say …
A Historical Corrective: The Battle of Greasy Grass
Every few years the state of New Jersey changes its core content curriculum standards, and those for social studies are a complete mess. There are well over a hundred standards on a broad variety of topics, some hyper-specific, some maddeningly vague. And tons of important subjects that get no attention. (I’m realizing as I write …
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Harvard Case Method Project Community Workshop 2019
Over the past three days I’ve attended a program held at Harvard Business School, the Harvard Case Method Project, led by Professor David Moss. Harvard has been doing some version of the case method for over a century, dating back to their law school’s casebook method sometime around the Civil War. The premise is deceptively …
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American Painting, Poetry, Prose, and “Progress” in the Nineteenth Century
This summer, as I started writing about a couple days ago, I am doing a fellowship program at the Massachusetts Historical Society. For four weeks I’m researching the Election of 1824 and events around it. Last summer I completed another four-week fellowship at Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. Both experiences afforded me the rare …
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Fenster on Education 