Teaching high school history with picture books can enliven social studies content, advance students’ higher-order thinking skills, and help facilitate differentiated instruction.

Creating photoblogs in the social studies classroom builds on students’ interest in using images to convey messages while teaching important media literacy skills.

Enabling students to pose and answer their own questions helps them evolve from passive learners to students who are actively engaged in their coursework.

Implementing 25-minute instructional blocks when teaching online can help learners develop stronger inquiry skills and prevent the zombie-like effects of staring nonstop at a screen.

Project-based learning not only engages and fosters development in young learners, it enables them to see themselves as change agents in their communities.

Incorporating poetry into the social studies curriculum can help students develop reading and writing skills while building their content knowledge.

Even without in-person field trips, photographs stored online can stimulate enriching investigations of historic places.

Educators can get an inside look at how some classrooms have shifted to inquiry-based social studies with four documentary films featured in the The Making Inquiry Possible project. 

Recent research shows that growing students’ knowledge of the world through social studies has a greater impact on literacy than increasing English language arts instruction time. 

The featured lesson plan explores the history of scapegoating during epidemics and examines how politicians and media can exacerbate xenophobia.