American Historical Association

131st Annual Meeting (January 5-8, 2017)

January 05 - 08, 2017

Each person at this conference has learned how to write like a historian. Most of us, however, don’t particularly remember how we were taught to do so, which poses a problem when we are asked to teach these skills to our students.

Historians have to become fluent in a specific set of skills and with different types of analyses. Three veteran AP History teachers will present and discuss a wide variety of techniques to use to help students in AP History courses and introductory college History courses write with clarity, precision, and analysis. They will discuss how to help students identify and practice skills such as evidence-based thinking and argumentation, synthesizing and contextualizing multiple and complicated accounts, and organizing a coherent essay with precision and purpose.

High school teachers are familiar with the pedagogical work and rubrics such as those of the Common Core Standards and the AP Historical Thinking Skills. However, one feels about the politics of the Common Core or the AP courses, the skills and rubrics they (and others) contain are eminently useful for making the historical thinking and writing skills transparent for students at the upper-secondary and lower-collegiate levels. The panelists will present these and other ways that enable students to learn the writing and analytical skills they need to succeed in their introductory classes and moving forward. The roundtable format will allow for discussion, questions and answers from the audience.