How to Teach History - You Can be an Exceptional History Teacher!

Ever wonder, “Am I really qualified to teach my kids this subject or that subject?” Or say, “What if I teach them something wrong?”

Relax. Every teacher, at every level, has done this.

No one knows everything, and there were things even Solomon didn’t know!

The first thing to understand is that teaching is a learning process for both the student and the teacher. That’s what makes it fun. It also makes you as a teacher more trustworthy and believable when you say, “You know, yesterday I said this but upon further research it looks like I was wrong and this is the real story.”

You can find resources everywhere on how to be a good teacher, but let me encourage you with my experiences. I have taught as a:

substitute teacher at every grade level in public schools—except perhaps first grade—and in almost every subject including art and music;
7th grade reading teacher in Eloy, Arizona, a migrant farm community where the average reading level in 7th grade was 2nd grade;
high school teacher in the elite Arizona high school (where I could assign more reading than I could to my college kids);
professor at a small public “junior college” variation in the University of Wisconsin system; and finally
tenured professor at a sizeable midwestern private university. So there aren’t too many teaching situations I haven’t seen.

I’ve taught reading, economics, world civilization, Wisconsin state history, and a variety of U.S. history courses, including, one year, “UFOs in Historical Perspective”!

Did I know all this stuff going in? NO! My first four or five academic books, all well reviewed, were on banking and financial history—but never in my life had I ever taken a course at any level in economics, banking, or finance! Yet somehow I became “the” expert in American banking history.

The message is that you learn as you teach. There is an old college professor joke, “Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird?” and the answer is, “Read it? I haven’t even taught it!”

So let’s get you ready to be an exceptional history teacher with four basic principles. I go into each of these in great detail in the free How to Teach History eBook...so download it now!