In the News
Republican congressman suggests Columbus discovered the US
A People’s Website
Lies Your Textbooks Tell You About Irish-American History
Portland teacher Bill Bigelow breaks it down.
You're probably wearing green and pining for a Guinness right about now. That's cool. Happy St. Paddy's Day! But Bill Bigelow, a master educator in Portland who taught at Franklin and Jefferson high schools for years, wants you to honor Irish Americans in a different way. Bigelow, curriculum editor for Rethinking Schools magazine, this week penned an eye-opening article for the Zinn Education Project on the Irish potato famine—and the misinformation U.S. textbooks tell students about the largest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. (The project honors the late Howard Zinn, the historian who wrote A People's History of the United States.)Women’s History and the Zinn Education Project
Radio Broadcast
How did the 8-hour work day come about? Do local students know about Lucy Parsons and the first May Day (in 1886)? Do you? Women played important roles in labor history, but their perspectives are sometimes overlooked. In honor of women’s history month, the Zinn Education Project (ZEP) has just released new resources on this topic. Veteran teacher and ZEP staff member, Julian Hipkins, III, joined the Education Town Hall to talk about the new materials and ZEP’s dedication to promoting a more accurate and complex understanding of United States history, inspired by Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Here also is the “Teaching about Selma” materials mentioned in our conversation. Interview with Julian Hipkins III starts at 30:00.Equity in School Funding and Zinn Education Project on The Education Town Hall March 12 2015 by Education_Town_Hall on Mixcloud
Our corporate classrooms: Bill Bigelow on the dangers of standardized curriculums and fresh ideas
Lesson from ‘Howie’: 12 Thoughts on the Zinn Legacy
Many of the scholars who gathered at Vanderbilt Hall for a recent daylong symposium on Howard Zinn shared a common quirk of speech: They tended to refer to the icon in question as “Howie.”
That’s because more than a few of the assembled admirers of Zinn’s work—including NYU history professor Marilyn Young and writer Alice Walker—were also students, colleagues, or personal friends of the popular historian and lifelong activist who died in 2010.
Upgrade Your Lesson Plans with These 5 Online Resources
Lesson planning is an art. A good lesson requires a fine balance of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), creativity, student buy in — and, of course, content.
While public perception can reduce the role of teachers to mere conveyers of information — as if knowledge is spread through osmosis — the actual process of creating an engaging, innovative, and informative lesson is far more complex.
Working in isolation to create the "perfect" lesson is time consuming, and relying too heavily on textbook curricula can feel uninspired.
Luckily, there is a happy medium... The below sites are awesome resources to get the juices flowing and inspire teachers to push innovative lessons into their classrooms, without reinventing the wheel.