Stanford University trains local educators on new instructional methods
In a role-reversing exercise at the Placer Union High School District office, local history teachers became the students at a seminar from Stanford University Thursday to learn a new approach to teaching history in the classroom.
Substitute teachers stood in for close to 30 social science teachers at Placer High, Colfax High, Del Oro, Foresthill, Newcastle and E.V. Cain while the regular faculty attended the all-day event, called “Thinking Like a Historian.” It was the first of two professional development days, the second of which is in March, intended to give history teachers a clearer picture of what the new Common Core educational standards expect of them, and how to meet those expectations.
Brad Fogo, director of digital curriculum at Stanford History Education Group, said this boils down to a new emphasis on investigation over memorization -- skills over content.
“One of the leading researchers on teaching history had done research on the differences between how historians read and how high school students read,” he said. “High school kids tend to read just to summarize and to not question any of the sources they’re working with, whereas historians go through a much more elaborate process of skills we’ve tried to teach – sourcing, contextualization, corroboration.”
Fogo said he and his colleagues have been touring the country with “Thinking Like a Historian” since 2009, before they knew about Common Core standards. Since then the program has been gaining popularity as teachers realized it offered precisely what their future lesson plans will need.
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© Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305.
