No one wants to get in a teaching rut. That leads to a bored teacher and bored students which turns into not-so-engaged students which decreases their chances for learning and retaining information. So one thing I try to do is use different strategies/techniques/activities each time we get to a new topic or unit. Below are 3 of my favorite ways of introducing a new topic. You can read about some of my other go-to “get students engaged” strategies/ideas HERE and HERE (both prior posts).
1. Preview and predict with images the students will encounter later during the unit. Using the French Revolution as an example, the following happens after I tell the students we are going to start the French Revolution but before they are given any information about it. I put an image of the king on the projector and ask the students to tell me what they see. I would have them discuss what they think his life is like. I then show them an image of a peasant and the students would talk about what they see and what they think that person’s life is like. Next, we have a discussion about how the differences in lives between peasants/laborers and a king could potentially cause discontentment. I then put a political cartoon representing the 3 Estates up on the projector screen and we would have a discussion about what they think this represents about French society. I then show an image of the meeting of the Estates General, the storming of the Bastille, and the king’s execution via guillotine. For each image, the students take educated guesses as to what is happening and what it means for French politics and society. The kids always seem to enjoy competing with each other to try and predict the most accurate information for each image, but then they always have fun with it (like coming up with the reasons why the king would have been executed…some are always a little less historically plausible than others but it’s always a lively discussion).
2. I love having students put themselves in other time periods, or getting them out of their perceived comfort zone. One way I do this is to provide the following sort of writing prompts before starting a new unit.
For the Revolutionary War, (which most students have a basic understanding of before we get into the material), they respond to this: If you woke up and it was 1775, do you think you would be a Loyalist, a Patriot, or undecided and why? (I clarify for them that they do NOT have 20/20 hindsight because they have become someone in Revolutionary War America, they do not have any memories from 2015).
For our Manifest Destiny/Westward Expansion unit I ask the students to free write on: “What couldn’t you live without if ended up in 1845 America? How would you adapt to life in the frontier, what would you miss the most about life in 2015, and what would you be most excited about regarding your new life in the American West? (for this prompt they DO know they have time traveled).
For a unit on the Roaring 20s, I ask students to think about the main issues of the time, social changes, inventions, newsworthy people, and I have them free write (or discuss in small groups then as a whole class) which item from each category would they have been most interested in/invested in/involved in had they lived in the 1920s, and why. For writing prompts appropriate for both before and after covering a unit, click HERE.
3. Getting students familiar with seeing and saying vocabulary, themes, and topics before starting the meat of a new unit has always been crucial to the success of my students. There are a plethora of ways to do this, but below are two of the ways my students have enjoyed it the most:
a. I divide the white board into four large squares (at the very top of the board is the title/topic of the new unit). In the center of each square I write a person/event/vocabulary term that will be pertinent throughout the whole unit. The students then brainstorm how the terms relate to each other and how they relate to the overarching topic. The students also have the chance to throw out some educated guesses as to detailed identifications of the terms on the board (for example, in a World War 2 unit, one of the words might be kamikaze, and one student might know that it was a Japanese pilot, then another student might guess that kamikaze pilots were involved in Pearl Harbor, then another might say that Pearl Harbor was the explosive reason for America’s full involvement in WW2).
b. Another option is to write a single word on the board and have the students free think it (depending on the students I let them go up to the board and write their contribution, otherwise I just call on them and write their contributions myself). In Medieval History, we cover the Vikings. So I would write Vikings in the middle of the board and circle it. I then have each student say one thing they know about, think they know about, or want to know about Vikings and those items get written down. We go around the room until the students have exhausted their preconceptions of Vikings, prior knowledge, or what they want to know.
Do you have a go-to way of introducing a new topic? I’d love to read about it in the comments! If you want more ideas, here are 3 of my favorite ways to REVIEW a unit!