History Detected

[unrepentant progress]

This sounds like a fantastic program that helps teachers to train kids to think critically and more actively engage with materials.

"Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

<snip>

As Wineburg notes in the website's book counterpart, "the practices historians have developed can be used to make sense of the conflicting voices that confront us every time we turn on Fox News or MSNBC. Put simply, the skills cultivated by Reading Like a Historian provide essential tools for citizenship."

<snip>

Wineburg realized that the art of historical thinking is not something that comes naturally to most people; it has to be cultivated. Students have to be taught to look at the source of a document before reading it, figure out the context in which it was written, and cross-check it with other sources before coming to a conclusion. The professor codified his thinking in an award-winning 2002 book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Then he returned to Stanford, determined to spread his educational theories to an even wider audience.

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=61541

[ms liberty]

1. K&R...n/t