Professional Learning To Make You An Excellent History Teacher
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The difference between a good history teacher and an excellent history teacher often has to do with the amount of support each gets. An excellent teacher, like with any profession, will search out resources so they can improve upon their craft. In this post I’ll write about top learning opportunities that can make you go from good to excellent. And I do this with the hope that you realize that there is nothing magical about excellent teaching, rather much of it lies in the strategy.
(1) Facing History And Ourselves
I was searching for the most tried and true strategies for teaching critical thinking in a history classroom, and I discovered the Resource Library for the organization Facing History And Ourselves. Do you want strategies for teaching with images? Help with teaching students how to paraphrase? Do you need to know how to conduct a discussion with a fishbowl? These strategies and dozens more are indexed in a search bank that allows you to favorite and add to your playlist your favorite strategies.
(2) National Geographic Educator Programs
The National Geographic Society offers in-person and online opportunities for professional learning and networking. All programs are interdisciplinary and offer a framework to solve real problems facing the world today. Online professional development opportunities guide you to teach students an inquiry process and how to connect with their local communities. If you are ready to share what you do in your classroom, and support other educators, there is an online network, and opportunities for teachers to meet in person.
(3) National Archives Professional Development
Go straight to the source of one of the largest sources of primary documents for U.S. history in order to know how to use these free resources in your classroom. There are regular webinars on how to teach using the National Archives documents. They have a special series on how to teach Native American history. The National Archives also indexes their past webinars on Youtube.
