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

by Rosalie Metro

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. Book

Genres: Education

304 pages, Paperback

Published October 16, 2020

About the author

Rosalie Metro is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has taught social studies at the secondary level, and she holds a Ph.D. in Learning, Teaching, and Social Policy from Cornell University. She has been traveling to Southeast Asia since 2000, and she conducted her doctoral research in Thailand and Burma/Myanmar. She is interested, both academically and creatively, in conflicts around history, identity, and language.

Metro's textbook, "Teaching US History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom," will be published by Teachers College Press in 2017. Her first novel, "Have Fun in Burma," will be published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2018.

She lives in Columbia, MO, with her husband and two children.

Reviews

[Seif Tekaya · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book does a very poor job describing the wars between Carthage and Rome. It actually promotes misconceptions and lies written by Polybus. I think the author did very poor research, not even trying to explore modern findings in the matter, at some point doing better job than Polybus himself, at being a pro-roman.
There is an abundance of literature that the author could have consulted, to at least present what a pro-Carthaginian perspective would look like. (qualifying Sanguntum as being a Roman territory, blaming Carthage for starting the war are all Roman versions of the story. Actual scientific research on the matter says otherwise).
Carthage was not an empire, never ruled by an emperor. It was rather a republic, with two chambers elected directly by the people. Aristotle himself praised the Carthaginian democratic system as being a logical improvement of the Greek one. The author just randomly qualifies Carthage as an empire..
The title of the book says Teaching world history..At least on this part, the teaching proved fallacious.

[Kerry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting concept, but the book is very biased.