SS Practice #1

The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills. This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. 

Read.Inquire.Write. supports middle school students’ full participation in inquiry and argument writing in social studies across 6th through 8th grades, enabling them to develop disciplinary literacy along with disciplinary knowledge. It includes multiple supports for English learners—newcomers as well as more proficient bi/multilingual learners—and students who have experienced less success in school.

The Civic Online Reasoning curriculum provides lessons and assessments that help teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world. COR engages students in combating misinformation and provides a skill set to foster empowered citizenship in the digital age. Teachers can download a single lesson or the full curriculum. Either way, teachers get classroom-ready materials and can integrate lesson plans into existing curriculum or teach as a separate module. 

The CUNY Debating U.S. History Curriculum supports teaching the high school U.S. History survey course not as a story to be memorized, but as events to be interpreted using documentary evidence. DUSH engages students through genuine historical inquiry, focusing on historical thinking skills while examining injustice, social conflict, and change past and present. Debating US History also embeds explicit reading and writing strategies with content learning to prepare students for the demands of college-level study in the social sciences.

By actively investigating the past, rather than passively memorizing ready-made facts or accounts assembled by others, students strengthen their critical reading and writing skills and improve their ability to handle and retain vital content information.

This study drew on observations of 40 secondary English language arts, history, and science lessons to describe variation in opportunities for students to engage in argumentation and possible implications for student engagement and learning.

With video testimony, multimedia activities and digital resources, IWitness helps facilitate active learning.

This resource is a gateway to the very best in Project Based Learning. Here, teachers will find a growing set of resources to help them design and implement powerful learning in their classrooms, including planning tools, rubrics, student handouts, student materials, and more. Registration is free.

KQED Learn is a free platform for middle and high school students to tackle big issues and build their media literacy and critical thinking skills in a supportive environment.  KQED Learn presents a new topic every other week to encourage student inquiry and discourse.

This page provides resources for teaching about global issues and world history using New York Times content.

This web-based platform helps students build literacy and historical thinking skills through inquiry based “deep dives” into primary and secondary sources. Zoom In’s online learning environment features 18 content-rich U.S. history units that supplement teachers' regular instruction and help them use technology to support students’ mastery of both content and skills required by the new, higher standards. 

Learning history means learning how to engage in the process of historical inquiry. Engaging in historical inquiry, in order to develop an understanding of the broad picture of the past, is a cyclical process that begins with the asking of guiding historical questions. The SCIM-C strategy was developed to provide teachers with a tool to help students develop the knowledge and skills necessary to interpret historical primary sources and reconcile various historical accounts, in order to investigate meaningful historical questions.

The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) is a distinctive approach to creating curriculum and instructional materials that honors teachers’ knowledge and expertise, avoids overprescription, and focuses on the main elements of the instructional design process.

Teaching students to ask questions about primary sources helps unlock their magic — sparking curiosity, engagement, and critical thinking. Explore RQI’s free resources and online learning opportunities for using the Question Formulation Technique with primary sources, made possible by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Program.

From film kits and lesson plans to the building blocks of a customized Learning Plan—texts, student tasks and teaching strategies—these resources will bring relevance, rigor and social emotional learning into classrooms.

While the examples provided are applicable to secondary math and science classrooms, all educators can be inspired to begin a unit of study with short inquiry tasks to spark student curiosity.