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Who doesn't look forward to PD days? While some educators do, I have the feeling that many of you cringe at the thought. Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed the pitfalls of professional development (PD) after revisiting a blog post I wrote in 2021. Listen on Spotify or wherever you access your favorite podcasts. You can also read the original blog post HERE.
Listen to the interview with Susie Bell, Beth Blankenship, and Heather Messer ( transcript ): Sponsored by Zearn and EVERFI I was giving a presentation recently on differentiation , specifically about tiered assignments , a strategy that offers different tiers or levels of challenge, and students only work at the level that matches their current readiness.
All teachers would probably agree that adding some strategically placed videos to your lessons can really enhance the experience for your students. Short, to-the-point videos that are seamlessly integrated into a lecture or activity can have a huge impact. This is especially true in AP Government , where students face dense content, abstract theories, and a mountain of required cases and documents.
If you need help teaching social studies in 30 minutes or less daily, you’ve come to the right place. Of course, having such limited time to teach social studies is not ideal, but sometimes, this is a teacher’s reality. Social studies is a critical subject that should be given at least an entire class period daily. We all know that social studies instruction provides the essential background knowledge and nonfiction literacy skills that create excellent readers.
Roughly 41,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic field—our planet’s protective shield—flickered and faltered. The magnetic poles drifted from their usual places, the field weakened to a tenth of its modern strength, and aurorae flared over continents that rarely see them. This episode, known as the Laschamps excursion, did not just create celestial fireworks.
The public release of ChatGPT in November 2022 changed the world. A chatbot could instantly write paragraphs and papers, a task once thought to be uniquely human. Though it may take many years to understand the full consequences, a team of data scientists wanted to study how college writing might already be affected. The researchers were able to gain access to all the online discussion board comments submitted by college students at an unidentified large public university before and after ChatGP
This week was all about keeping the momentum goingconnecting reform movements, industrialization, and women’s rights in ways that actually made sense to students. Some lessons flowed just like I hoped. Others forced me to think on the fly (shoutout to the surprise Wi-Fi outage). But through it all, I leaned on purpose-driven protocols, reframing simple tasks to get kids thinking deeper, and using toolswhether AI or no-techintentionally.
The Puzzle of the Missing Fires In the bleak cold of the Last Glacial Maximum, it seems obvious that fire would have been essential for human survival. And yet, the archaeological record for that period—from roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago—tells a strangely quiet story. Hearths, once the heart of Paleolithic domestic life, seem to vanish from many known European sites.
What if colleges started applying to you instead of the other way around? The anxiety-inducing college admissions game is changing. With declining birth rates and growing skepticism about the value of a degree, higher education is facing an enrollment cliff, set to hit hard in 2026. Thats 18 years after the Great Recession, when many American families stopped having babies.
For todays blog, we are highlighting a document that helps students intersect two of the most historically important elements of the 1960s: the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. A part of our Cold War CDC volume, this statement by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) clearly and succinctly describes the Johnson administrations perceived hypocrisy in fighting injustice abroad while tolerating it at home, and demands that Americans reprioritize the expansion and enforcemen
A Puzzle in the Permafrost In the quiet hills near Medzhybizh, a small Ukrainian town nestled along the Southern Bug River, something unexpected has emerged from the deep past: splintered ivory fragments, unmistakably shaped by ancient hands. These are not the ornamental carvings of Ice Age artists. They are tools—fashioned from mammoth tusk, weathered by time, and dating back roughly 400,000 years.
Taking college courses through dual enrollment has been the most rewarding part of my high school experience so far. As a teenager at Lake Nona High School in Orlando, I get to explore my interests in public relations and communications by taking courses at a nearby community college, Valencia. Dual enrollment in college classrooms is helping me save money on college, and it also helped me get an after-school tutoring job at Kumon my mentors in Valencia College s tutoring program inspired me and
My History or Our History? Historical Revisionism and Entitlement to Lead By Nicholas Haas , Aarhus University ; Emmy Lindstam , IE University. Ongoing, spirited debates from around the globe over statues, street names, symbols, and textbooks call for a greater understanding of the political effects of different historical representations. In this paper, we theorize that inclusive (exclusive) historical representations can increase (decrease) marginalized group members perceived centrality to t
The Stanford Prison Experiment, arguably one of the most controversial experiments of the 20th century, has polarised opinions for over 50 years: To its supporters, the transformation of perfectly decent college students into brutal guards or compliant prisoners demonstrated the power of situations to determine behaviour.
When archaeologists sift through the remains of ancient settlements, they are not just uncovering lost homes—they are mapping the roots of inequality. Long before pharaohs ruled and scribes recorded human affairs, the seeds of economic disparity had already taken hold. In a sweeping new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1 , an international team analyzed the size of more than 47,000 houses across 1,100 archaeological sites.
I always find it so invigorating to talk with teachers about the craft of teaching. It is quite interesting to pick their brain about their perspective on education and teaching and learn a bit about how and why they do what they do in the classroom. No one celebrates the wins and understands the day to day grind of teaching better than a teacher. And sometimes is it just so nice to experience that mutual admiration society.
Moving toward the Median: Compulsory Voting and Political Polarization By Alexandra Oprea, University at Buffalo, Lucy Martin, University of North, Carolina at Chapel Hill, Geoffrey H. Brennan, Australian National University Should turning out to vote in mass elections be voluntary or compulsory? Previous normative arguments for compulsory voting often rely on contested normative claims about the moral duty to vote or about the democratic legitimacy conveyed by high turnout.
National Board Certification is one of the most prestigious milestones an educator can achieve. Its a rigorous, reflective process that pushes teachers to analyze their impact, refine their practice, and elevate their craft. Administrators understand the value of National Board Certification (NBCT)its a proven way to elevate teaching quality and improve student outcomes.
For much of history, the rise of inequality has been treated like gravity: inevitable, natural, and inescapable. From the sprawling villas of Roman elites to the thatched huts of the poor in medieval Europe, textbook history often presents wealth disparity as a consequence of human progress. Three excavated Classic period (ca. 550–750 CE) houses at El Palmillo (Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico).
Social Media, Social Control, and the Politics of Public Shaming By Jennifer Forestal , Loyola University Chicago. While there is disagreement over the value of public shaming, scholars largely agree that social media introduce pathologies. But while scholars rightly identify the effects of online public shaming (OPS), they misidentify the cause. Rather than solely a problem of scale, OPSs effects are also shaped by the network structure within which they take place.
This morning started in chaos. The WiFi was down. I scrambled. I needed something fast, something engaging, something that didnt rely on the internetbut still moved our learning forward. I couldve defaulted to a worksheet. Basic questions. Called it a day. But thats not really my style. I knew todays goal: students needed to be able to explain the importance of suffrage to the womens rights movement.
At first glance, Tel Shiqmona appears unassuming—a rocky outcrop overlooking the Mediterranean just south of modern-day Haifa. But beneath its surface, archaeologists have found what may be the most robust evidence yet of a long-standing, industrial-scale dye production facility operating between 1100 and 600 BCE. Not for clay, copper, or olive oil, but for something far more elusive: color.
Scaffolding: What is it and Why is it Important? Apr 10, 2025 By Studies Weekly NEWSLETTER What is Scaffolding? One of the greatest satisfactions in life is learning something new or improving ones skill in a subject. We can see this in the success of college extension programs for retired people. Few of these senior students are trying to build up knowledge for a new career, rather, they attend classes for the joy of learning.
Some of us are parents. Some of us are grandparents. All of us have people we love. And all those people are threatened by the ecocidal policies of the current president. This is the first administration in memory that does not even pay lip service to the environmental crisis and instead boasts about policies that make it worse. As Earth Day draws our attention to the existential threat we confront, teachers can resist the billionairesneglect of Mother Nature by teaching critical environmental
In 2006, when I first started teaching tennis, I ran a bunch of classes for 3 to 5 year olds. We had all the right equipmentmini nets, low-compression balls, small racquetsthe stuff that actually made sense for little kids. But I was still running drills like we were using regular tennis balls on a full court – stuff that was way too big and too much for where they were.
In the long arc of human history, what makes a settlement persist? Fresh water, fertile land, favorable climate—these are obvious candidates. But a recent study suggests another, less intuitive pattern: the most enduring settlements tended to be those with stark differences in wealth. Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1 , the study draws on data from over 47,000 houses spanning nearly 3,000 archaeological sites and 10,000 years of human history.
This blog post has been percolating for the past few weeks and is inspired by a post on a listserv where someone in faculty development was asking about common practices to cite resources from other teaching and learning centers (CTL) if that information was in turn used for another CTL as a resource or part of a presentation. The conversation that ensued was rather brief for such a great (and on the surface obvious, but not so obvious) question.
The American Political Science Association (APSA) and the Japanese Political Science Association (JPSA) are pleased to announce a Call for Applications for early-career scholars from the US and Japan who are interested in conducting civically engaged research related to the social and political impacts of demographic change. The second annual JPSA-APSA Working Group on Civically Engaged Research for Critical Issues in Society will be held alongside this years JPSA Annual Meeting , October 9-12 ,
Attend the Learning Lab! | Teacher Testimonial Apr 15 By Studies Weekly NEWSLETTER Video Transcript Speaker: Erika W., 4th Grade Teacher, TX What would you tell another educator considering attending the Learning Lab? Erika W.: I would tell another educator to definitely attend a Learning Lab, just because I think one of the big things for me was to go in to make sure that what I was doing was correct, what I was doing was right, but also to kind of gauge other people’s ideas kind of whe
“Language carves up the world in ways that reflect what matters most to its speakers.” That insight—often stated in anthropological circles—is easy to romanticize but hard to quantify. Now, a new study led by cognitive scientists and linguists has attempted to do exactly that. Using machine analysis of over 1,500 bilingual dictionaries spanning more than 600 languages, researchers report that vocabulary is not just a passive catalog of the world, but a cultural archive sh
A Standard post on the gentrification of neighbourhoods. It suggests that one metric by which an area can be classed as having a Gail's Bakery. Gail's is a bakery. The one I know best is Greggs. They have reached as far as Ely High Street. A new Gail's opened last month - I am yet to visit. There are a few in the NW as well but they are mostly in the SE of England and London, and across into the Midlands.
I didnt walk into my last school through the front door. I didnt get hired because I was the obvious choice. I wasnt recruited or celebrated. In fact, I was told no multiple times. I first interviewed there for a high school social studies position. Didnt get it. Later, I applied for a middle school social studies job. Didnt get that either. But they did ask me if I wanted to coach tennis.
Cosmos the Stellar Stalker, a novel of Fiction Science by Ronald R. Van Stockum, Jr. Buy it here, click my store link on the menu! Also available on Amazon, Audible and Kindle (Click on the Vimeo link if the video doesn’t immediately show below!) The Life and Landscapes Blog Site is at: www.vanstockum.blog/lookin Also find me at: www.facebook.com/reggievanstockum www.instagram.com/reggievanstockum www.vimeo.com/reggievanstockum www.youtube.com @reggievanstockum1097 www.tiktok.com/@reggiesr
For at least 10,000 years, humans have worked the land to feed families, build communities, and form civilizations. But the way those lands were used—how they were divided, worked, and governed—did more than sustain life. It shaped who got rich, who stayed poor, and how power was passed on across generations. A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers 1 one of the most detailed archaeological analyses to date of the roots of economic inequality.
Reawakening a Revolutionary Party: The Ancient and Modern Princes in Wang Huis Political Theory By Simon Sihang Luo , Stanford University. Recent political theory has seen a revived interest in theorizing the political party, and, in particular, exploring what the political party can do to address its decline and revitalize itself. This renewed interest, however, draws largely on the political praxis of party politics of established liberal democracies in the United States and Europe.
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