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History classroom activities, ready to run

History gets interesting when students start reasoning: why did this happen, what came next, what looks like today? These structures put those questions in the middle of the class, so students build an explanation together instead of memorizing dates.

They are prepared on cause and effect, then and now, ancient Rome, the Middle Ages and the American Revolution, for grades 6 to 8.

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27 ready-made structures

Engagement strategies for history class

History is more than dates. The subject asks for historical thinking: seeing cause and effect, recognizing change and continuity, and looking at an event through the eyes of the people who lived it. Students learn that kind of thinking by doing it out loud, and that is what active learning structures are for.

Cooperative learning structures let students build an explanation together. A student who has to explain their reasoning to a classmate quickly notices where it falls apart.

Which structure for which part of the lesson?

Stand Up & Sit Down and Four Corners are strong openers with statements about the past: was this progress? What was the most important cause? Students choose and explain, and the lesson starts with a question instead of an answer.

For the work phase, Numbered Minds and 1 goes, 3 stay work well: groups build an explanation and compare it with other groups. Interview in Three Rounds fits topics like then and now, where students ask each other about their own family history.

Check factual knowledge about a period with the Knowledge Quiz, so you know the foundation is there before the class reasons further.

What to watch for

Choose questions without a single right answer: which cause weighed most, what would have happened if? And keep asking students for a source or an example to back their position, so the conversation stays historical instead of turning into opinion without evidence.

Learning to learn in this subject

Three ways of learning studied in this very subject, each with the structure that makes it happen in class. The board tells the class what it is training.

  • Turn a text into questions

    Read and Ask

    From every heading in the chapter a question with who, what, where, when, why or how; the other answers without reading along.

  • Write down all you remember

    Think, Write & Share

    Book closed: everyone writes what they remember about the French Revolution, the round adds.

  • Ask why it is so

    Five Whys: root cause analysis

    «Why did the war break out?» five times, each on the previous answer, down to the cause behind the trigger.

Summarising helps only when the class is taught it explicitly, and then as part of a scheme, not as the goal.

Sources: Rosenshine, Meister & Chapman (1996), question generation · Smith, Blunt, Whiffen & Karpicke (2016), free recall · Pressley et al. (1987), elaborative interrogation

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