Teaching History with Big Ideas

S. G. Grant is the founding dean of the School of Education at Binghamton University. His research interests include the intersection of curriculum and assessment policy. Jill M. Gradwell is an assistant professor and coordinator of social studies education in the Department of History and Social Studies at Buffalo State College, State University of New York. Her research centers on teaching, learning, and assessing history.

In Teaching History with Big Ideas, coeditors S.G. Grant and Jill Gradwell have compiled a series of powerful cases of ambitious teaching that highlight the challenging, complex, and messy world of working in a high-stakes testing environment. The cases cover a range of topics and experiences, different students, different contexts. Yet all of these teachers provide fascinating insight into their journeys as teachers, how they've thought about using big ideas in social studies instruction, and how they make sense of working in diverse contexts that all seem to value test scores, albeit in different ways. . . . This book clearly highlights how scary it is to move away from teaching to the test, but how rewarding and powerful that decision can be.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 The Evolution of a Big Idea: Why Don't We Know Anything About Africa?Chapter 3 Defining Success with Big Ideas: A New Teacher's Growth and ChallengesChapter 4 From the Holocaust to Darfur: A Recipe for GenocideChapter 5 How I Learned To Stop Worrying about the Test and to Love Teaching Students to Write WellChapter 6 Big Expectations: Big Ideas in Honors and InclusionChapter 7 Big Ideas: A Methodology to Engage StudentsChapter 8 Reconstructing Reconstruction and HistoryChapter 9 Big Ideas and Ambitious Teaching: A Cross-Case AnalysisChapter 10 Implications