Teaching World History Thematically: Essential Questions and Document-Based Lessons to Connect Past and Present

This book offers the tools teachers need to get started with a more thoughtful and compelling approach to teaching history, one that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives today, and meets social studies 3C standards and most state standards (grades 6-12). The author provides over 90 primary sources organized into seven thematic units, each structured around an essential question from world history. As students analyze carefully excerpted documents--including speeches by queens and rebels, ancient artifacts, and social media posts--they build an understanding of how diverse historical figures have approached key issues. At the same time, students learn to participate in civic debates and develop their own views on what it means to be a 21st-century citizen of the world. Each unit connects to current events with dynamic classroom activities that make history come alive. In addition to the documents themselves, this teaching manual provides strategies to assess student learning; mini-lectures designed to introduce documents; activities and reproducibles to help students process, display, and integrate their learning; guidance to help teachers create their own units; guidelines for respectful student debate and discussion; and more. This book features: (1) A timely aid for secondary school teachers tasked with meeting standards and other state-level quality requirements; (2) An approach that promotes student engagement and critical thinking to replace or augment a traditional textbook; (3) Challenges to the "master narrative" of world history from figures like Queen Nzinga and Huda Sha'arawi, as well as traditionally recognized historical figures such as Pericles and Napoleon; (4) Essential questions to help students explore seven of the most important recurring themes in world history; (5) Role-plays and debates to promote interaction among students; and (6) Printable copies of the documents included in the book can be downloaded at tcpress.com.