Throughout my journey in PDS this semester we were asked to create a wondering that had to do

with our future careers as teachers. After sitting down and brainstorming with my cooperating
teacher my wondering came to be.
Many times when I am asked what my career plans are, I am often asked why I would ever want
to teach history. People describe history as:
-Boring
-Lame
-Dry
-Repetitive
-ETC.
With that being said my wondering was born!
How can I teach history in a way that is engaging for all students?

Step 1.
Finding literature that has relevance to my wondering.
For my literature I focused on teaching strategies that are most effective and engaging for
students to learn history.
My first piece of literature comes from the NC Civic Education Consortium titled: “Tips and
Tricks for Engaging Students in Social Studies Instruction”
My Second piece of literature comes from Queen’s University and is titled: “Engaging Students
in Learning History”

Most effective strategies:

-Role-playing
-Re-enactments
-Simulations
-Philosophical Chairs
-Debates
After reading up on current literature I conducted my own research.
Step 2.
I interviewed my co-operating teacher Mr. Smith on what strategies he found most effective
when it came to teaching history. You will find the results below.
Step 3
I conducted a survey among the students at Wahlert High School. Listed below are the results
from my survey. [Note: These are only a few questions that I asked.]
Student Surveys at Wahlert High School
After looking through the results of these surveys I discovered that 71% of the 63 students who
took this survey believe they learn history best through Notes. While only 27% found that they
learned history best through Role-playing activities.
To me this was very surprising as it goes against what the literature was saying. Many students
find the way history is taught as boring and dry, but they also think they learn this subject best
through a less engaging way.
One question that I asked that got contradicting results was the following: How can history be
taught in a more engaging way for you? For this question many students stated that they would
like to learn history through more activities and hands-on engagement. This contradicts those
students who said they learned best through notes and a lecture based classroom.

From Mr. Smith’s interview I discovered the following:

These are the Strategies he uses. He was also asked to rank them in which he finds most effective
in engaging students in the lesson (1 being the best and 10 being the worst):
-Lecture (10)
-Notes (9)
-PowerPoint (8)
-Trivia Pursuit/Kahoot (6)
-Films (7)
-Debates (4)
-Student centered discussion (1)
-Role-playing/simulation activities (2)
-Free Writes (3)
-Kinesthetic activities (5)
-Research/internet usage (5)
Conclusion:
Mr. Smith understands the strategies that are more student centered are the best approaches to
teaching history in an engaging way. He feels trapped in a way to teach through PowerPoints and
lecture notes as it is a time effective way to deliver the content and move on to a student centered
activity. He realizes that this is not the best method. His results line up with those of the literature
findings.
My findings from this inquiry project has spurned my motivation to keep this project going. My
next steps would be to implement more of the teaching strategies from the literature into the
student’s lessons. I would also like to conduct another survey after students had a period of time
with the implementation of the new strategies. I would be interested to see if their answers
changed in regards to how they learn and if they find history a more engaging subject to learn
about.