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" The future doesn't need us to memorize its answers; it needs us to master the art of asking better questions." The future won't wait for us to catch up; it will demand that we've already anticipated its needs, making future-proofing learning not a luxury but the very oxygen of survival. Recently, on my podcast Unpacking the Backpack , I discussed this topic in detail after revisiting a blog post I wrote in 2021.
Here are some great StoryMaps from Esri's GIS Systems Their software includes story maps for over a dozen titles in World and US history, including the Age of Exploration, the First Crusade, Ancient Greece, the Black Death, the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, Egyptian Funerary Practices, and many more. The story maps are engaging and include images, maps, graphs, and primary sources presented in an engaging manner like the excerpt below from the First Crusade story map.
Listen to my interview with Jen Serravallo ( transcript ): Sponsored by Wix Tomorrow and Brisk Teaching This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. If you click these and make a purchase from Amazon, Cult of Pedagogy will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. As I considered how to introduce this post, I started by looking for statistics that could paint a picture of where modern-day students are with their reading skills.
Hello teachers. Im reaching out today as a fellow educator and historian, and as Executive Director of the National Council for History Education, to affirm your professionalism and the importance of your role as history educators. As you know, history is not the past its the study of the past. We, and our students, make sense of individuals, groups, and events by studying primary sources and the work of scholars.
A trio of researchers argues that it’s unclear where students with disabilities learn the most and recommends that teachers and parents focus first on interventions students need. Credit: Getty images A prominent professor of special education is about to ignite a fierce debate over a tenet of his field, that students with disabilities should be educated as much as possible alongside their peers in general education classrooms, a strategy known as inclusion.
Reading fluency the ability to read accurately, automatically and with appropriate expression remains a critical yet often overlooked component of literacy development. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 68 percent of U.S. students are not reading at proficient levels. By fourth grade, students transition from learning to read to reading to learn.
An anthropologist plunges into the world of Patagonian heavy metal music in Argentina to explore how the genre relates to language and cultural revitalization. I FIRST HEARD Patagonian heavy metal on a cold winter night in Esquel, Argentina. The song roared to life with guitar riffs and drumming resembling a U.S. or European thrash metal record. But around the 35-second mark, unfamiliar wind instruments grabbed my attention.
In November 2024, Digital Promise and Verizon Innovative Learning hosted the third annual Elevating Innovation Virtual Conference. The event attracted educators from across the country and around the world. Attendees had the opportunity to learn about the latest educational trends, emerging technologies, and innovative strategies shaping education directly from education and edtech experts like 2022 Hawaii State Teacher of the Year Whitney Aragaki; Hey, Mrs.
In November 2024, Digital Promise and Verizon Innovative Learning hosted the third annual Elevating Innovation Virtual Conference. The event attracted educators from across the country and around the world. Attendees had the opportunity to learn about the latest educational trends, emerging technologies, and innovative strategies shaping education directly from education and edtech experts like 2022 Hawaii State Teacher of the Year Whitney Aragaki; Hey, Mrs.
It’s a fact of life, when you assign work or projects in social studies class, you’ll have early finishers. What should you do with them? Let them hang out and talk? Ummm, no, that’s just asking for classroom management nightmares. When you fail to set procedures for students, they’ll create their own procedures 100% of the time, so make sure students know what assignments they must complete and what they are able to do once finished with their required work.
Chloe Beckett, M.A., Nightingale College, South Dakota, US As I grade my Cultural Anthropoloy classs Emic and Etic Perspectives of Halloween essay, two things strike me: 1. How often I write the comment Capitalize proper nouns, and 2. How the Turnitin AI scores keep creeping higher and higher. For anyone who has been teaching anthropology over the last two years, the latter will be of no surprise to you.
The climate crisis is not in some distant future. It is being felt around the world with heatwaves, floods, and most dramatically with the wildfires in Southern California. Our hearts go out to the residents who face the tragic loss of lives, homes, and entire communities. #TeachClimateJustice : Invite students to listen to news about the fires and come up with their own terms for the disaster, such as fossil-fueled disaster or climate change disaster.
The laws of our country are the foundation of our democracy, safety, and prosperity. Without laws, there would be no protection for citizens rights and freedoms. There would also be no framework of laws to maintain order in the country. As such, citizens and their rights would be in grave danger and the nation could fall into a state of chaos. Thats why teaching the Legislative Branch and its importance to students is so crucial.
The Guardian has a terrific interactive site about the global nature of World War I. It has interactive maps, original news reports, and videos exploring the war and its effects from many perspectives. Ten historians give a brief history of the war through global lenses in a video that takes the viewer through the war. My colleague and I put together a hyperdoc that takes students through the site and helps them understand the global nature of the war.
Listen to my interview with Blake Harvard ( transcript ): Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Brisk Teaching This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?
This week in 8th-grade social studies, we brought history to life with engaging EduProtocols that helped students dive deep into the Early Republic and key moments like the Whiskey Rebellion. From Sketch and Tell-O activities that broke down complex ideas to Progressive Sketch and Tell timelines that visualized historical events, we kept creativity at the forefront.
By now, you may have seen the recent spate of articles bemoaning the plight of the novel, that outdated 18th-century technology that adults have long forsaken and that some schools are beginning to shrug off. The best case against novels goes something like this: Theyre long, students dont read them outside of class, and they should make way for other aspects of instruction.
Several years ago, Oklahoma City Public Schools shuttered more than a dozen of its school buildings. It was part of a realignment process in the district to right-size student populations within schools some were overcrowded, others were underenrolled and to make the school experience better and more consistent for students across the city. But what to do with all of those empty buildings?
The Roti Collective, a community-based research project, explores the layered histories that brought a flatbread from the Indian subcontinent around the world. THE PERFECT BITE Roti, an unleavened flatbread, originated with ancient peoples of the Indus River Valley on the Indian subcontinent. Known by many names, including chapati and parotta, roti and the practice of roti-making has traveled the globe to become a culinary mainstay across many foodways in the Global South.
When someone disappears without a trace, what remains are their possessions objects that become anchors for memory and vessels for unresolved grief. The human urge to collect and preserve objects, what Jacques Derrida calls archive fever , takeson special significance when there is no body to bury, no grave to visit. This ethnography explores one such case of preservation: my grandmother’s decades-long stewardship of my grandfather’s wardrobe after his disappearance in the 1974 con
For decades, the story of modern human origins seemed relatively straightforward: Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, evolving as a single, continuous lineage before expanding across the globe. But new research suggests that this narrative is missing an entire chapter. Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe.
On Monday, March 24, 2025 , historian Jeanne Theoharis and Rethinking Schools editorJesse Hagopian will discuss Theohariss book, King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.s Life of Struggle Outside the South. Jeanne Theoharis is a distinguished professor at Brooklyn College. She is the author or co-author of numerous books and articles on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and the politics of race and education.
First Call for Papers Womens History Network 33rd Annual Conference Online via Zoom Thursday 4 & Friday 5 September 2025 Hidden in Plain Sight: Women in Archives, Libraries, Museums and Personal Collections.
Atlantic Magazine published 45 black and white stunning black-and-white photographs of the interwar period around the world. Among the 45 images are Hitler and Mussolini shaking hands in Germany, Japanese aircraft carrying out air raids over China, Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek sitting with the chairman of the Yunan provincial government, and four Italian soldiers taking aim in Ethiopia in 1935.
Listen to the interview with Amanda Morin and Emily Kircher-Morris ( transcript ): Sponsored by Boclips Classroom and Brisk Teaching This page contains Amazon Affiliate and Bookshop.org links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. What’s the difference between Amazon and Bookshop.org?
This week was all about using EduProtocols to drive deeper thinking, engagement, and writing practice as we explored westward expansion and Manifest Destiny. Instead of just reading from the textbook and answering questions, students worked through activities that encouraged them to generate their own questions, analyze sources, and compare perspectives.
Nearly a half century ago, a landmark study showed that teachers werent explicitly teaching reading comprehension. Once children learned how to read words, no one taught them how to make sense of the sentences and paragraphs. Some kids naturally got it. Some didnt. Since then, reading researchers have come up with many ideas to foster comprehension.
Education in the 21st century is obsessed with assessing children, attempting to measure every aspect of their intelligence, learning and growth. Yet we are not, according to Isabelle Hau, measuring what matters: relationships. Theres a disconnect between what we know is really critical and then what were paying attention to, says Hau, executive director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning and author of a new book about the essential role of relationships in healthy human development.
A paleontologist journeys through Indonesias Riau Archipelago in search of Homo erectus remains, but uncovers how environmental devastation has erased much of the regions history. FROM THE AIR, endless rows of palm trees swallowed the topography as we flew over Bintan Island in the South China Sea. On the ground, an occasional fallen palm tree and piles of red palm fruit scattered along the roadsides.
Heres hoping as many as possible read the book and action the ideas getting these learning ideas on the front foot is a tough ask (weirdly) and moving teachers from their obsession about teaching to add an obsession about learning is the aim of the game. This line was written in an email to me from Dr. John Hattie recently where we were talking about my book on memory processing, attention, and learning.
Few traits define humanity as clearly as language. Yet, despite its central role in human evolution, determining when and how language first emerged remains a challenge. Fossils do not speak, and ancient DNA does not carry recordings of conversations. Traditionally, scholars have debated linguistic origins based on indirect clues—symbolic artifacts, brain size, or the complexity of tool-making.
When Shanthy left her coastal home in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in 1970 for Chicago, she carried ways of caring that would reshape her familys bonds through war and displacement. Over the next fifteen years, as violence against Tamils escalated, her eight siblingsShakuntala, Chandran, Babu, Nala, Saddan, Kala, Amutha, and Thushyand their parents would scatter across temporary homes in Europe, Africa, and the United States, each finding their own way to maintain connection through food.
The Vietnam War was a pivotal event in world history. It shaped global politics, the nature of warfare, and international relations. So, it is essential that students understand its causes and impacts on the United States. Thankfully, the Vietnam War Lesson and Recent US History Unit are ready to make learning meaningful and planning a breeze! The Importance of Teaching about the Vietnam War There are many reasons why students must develop a strong understanding of the Vietnam War.
Here is a Cold War Stations activity that I use with my AP World students when we cover the Cold War. One of my colleagues developed it years ago. It includes seven stations, each with cartoons, documents, or photographs for students to process. I printed it out for seven different stations, but students could also work on it online. Here's a google link to the handout that students complete.
Listen to this post as a podcast: Sponsored by Alpaca and Brisk Teaching Every January for the last ten years, we have chosen a small collection of tech tools we think are worth checking out. That will be the same this year. But something else will be different: Traditionally, when we put out this list, we do it to coincide with the release of our annual Teacher’s Guide to Tech.
This past week, EduProtocols made Andrew Jacksons presidency more interactive and engaging , helping students analyze his impact through Fast & Curious, Annotate & Tell, MiniReports, Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then, Thin Slides, and Number Mania. We started each day with Gimkit vocabulary practice , reinforcing key terms before diving into content.
This story about eighth grade algebra was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. BRAHAM, Minn. It was fourth-period Basic Algebra 8 class on a gray October morning at Braham Area High School. Teacher Rick Riccio had assigned an exercise on converting large integers to scientific notation, but fifteen minutes in, some students had lost focus.
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