Creating and Teaching the Cold War History Blueprint

This paper will discuss the process of writing, revision, and implementation of one of the Common Core Standards Blueprint Lessons on the Cold War.  I will discuss the process of searching through primary and secondary resources to develop academic lessons in ways that meet the common core standards, and I will address some of the difficulties I anticipate many teachers will have with this new style of lesson planning.  In particular, I will address how the revisions I had to make in order to provide improved literacy access may provide insight into the challenges of transitioning from a fact-based to a critical thinking-based curriculum, both to meet the needs of English learners and the needs of students whose experience with challenging primary and secondary source text has been low for the past ten years.  Finally, I will provide an overview of the process of implementing the unit in a standard US History course and in overview of the feedback I received from a classroom observer of student responses to the new curriculum.