One thing that isn't always taught very well is how to think historically, by which I mean reading sources carefully, thinking about what questions you can usefully ask of your sources(and how those sources fit with other sources, with archaeological or art-historical data if the circumstances warrant, and with the current historical understanding of their time and place), and thinking carefully about how you decide what questions are interesting and significant to pursue. Having a clear sense of the questions one is asking is to my mind the difference between aimless accumulation of facts and genuine historical inquiry. I think there's also more room for discussing how disagreement among historians is very often not disagreement about the facts but about what kind of intellectual framework we set the facts in; building on that there's I think a lot of room for discussing how "theory" works in the academy and the different intellectual frameworks that historians use. I don't see any reason why teens/young adults couldn't read, say, a good E.P. Thompson essay or the introduction to The Making of The English Working Class to get a sense of what social history at its best can be, Foucault to understand what people are doing when they look at biopower and knowledge as a category of history, or some part of The Corrupting Sea to understand the current fascination with environmental history.

EDIT: I'd also be interested in introducing some elementary historiography; assigning say a review or presentation of a secondary work that puts it in its intellectual context or assigning several well-regarded but divergent secondary sources on the same topic of varying ages and ask students to compare and contrast them.

My wife teaches history at the high school level, at a high-end private high school in the USA. As an aside, she has a Ph.D. in history from a top program, and before going into the independent school world she taught at several high-end universities.

Her observations are that even at the high-end, private high school level, the focus is often still on "content acquisition" — e.g. drilling of facts and dates and names. It's about an approach to history that can be tested with multiple-choice questions. Many of the students are more or less encouraged to think there is "right" answer and their goal in history is to learn it.

She finds this very distressing. She teaches the students more or less the same way we teach undergraduates at college. History for her is more about skill acquisition. Yes, there is content, of course. But it's not fussy memorization. It's about learning that the proper understanding of a historical context means you will learn lots of information about the time period, but that it all sorts of fits together rather naturally when learned this way, so you don't have to focus on trying to memorize it. (As I might put it, if you grok it, you grok it.) As an example, if you really understand World War I in your bones, if you really get the narrative, then you don't have to have a flash card that says, "Russia was on the side of the Allies" on the back of it, because you'll know that. And she doesn't test them on things you can easily look up (because why bother?). Memorization is not a useful skill (and we all know that whatever you've memorized seeps out of your head immediately after the test anyway if it doesn't actually matter to you).

She teaches them how to read — primary sources, secondary sources, even modern newspaper articles (read through the lens of history). Because most high school students have no clue how to really read general non-fiction, and it is for whatever reason not a skill that is taught in many other courses. (In English class they get many years of experience reading fiction, but it is a different skill.) She teaches them how to take a document from the past that might be difficult and unusual and figure out how it fits into the broader historical context, and shows them that they have the means of reading between the lines, figuring out what isn't being said, what is really on the (long dead) writer's mind, and so forth.

She teaches them how to write. Writing papers in history is about writing good non-fiction analysis. It is about marshaling many sources to make a coherent synthetic argument. Again, another skill that for whatever reason is often neglected in high school (and as an aside I have spent a lot of time, at even very high-end universities, trying to basically teach students basic non-fiction writing skills they should have learned but didn't). Not to complain about the dominance of English departments again, but students get a lot of training in emoting and writing short single-source essays, but not at multiple-source, non-fiction, nobody-cares-how-it-makes-you-feel sorts of essays.

She teaches them how to research. She makes them write a long research paper over three weeks' time. They get very into it usually. The papers can range in quality (some of the best ones are basically what we would consider great undergraduate work at a place like Harvard, most are more average of course, and some she gives Ds and Fs because she's hardcore), but for the students who don't just check out, even if they don't get a great grade (e.g. a C) they often leave with a huge sense of achievement, of mastery, of knowledge of one small part of the world.

She eschews textbooks when possible and, if they are necessary (and sometimes they are, for giving a broad overview), she shops around to find the ones that do the least damage to the past (there are a couple OK ones out there, most of them are terrible). She gives them excerpts of contemporary popular history (e.g. Charles Mann) as that usually works a lot better than textbooks (and sometimes sparks a real interest).

Lastly, she makes them talk about it. She always asks them "Why?" She teaches them that the answer is never the final answer, there is always more to be talked about, asked about. She cold-calls them — everybody talks. At first they all are quite scared but they realize over the course of the year (one of the benefits of high school over college is that as a teacher you get to see them every day for an entire year), they start to understand the basic method and motivations and start to ask the right questions without prompting. She also makes them discuss on current events once a week, part of which is just to get them used to giving presentations and facilitating discussions (skills they will need in college and life), but also because it gives them opportunities to draw connections between the past and the present, which is another key historical skill (and helps them see the relevancy).

Anyway. I sort of think this is how it should be taught, but I'm biased. Not all of her students always appreciate her. Some of them want multiple-choice tests and memorization because that is, for them, easier. The students start off each year completely terrified because she has a reputation of being the hardest teacher in the school. But each year ends with them saying she's the best teacher they ever had, that she made them really think, that they feel confident to do anything in the future, that she grades hard but they know that if they get an A then they've really earned it, that history is their favorite subject and favorite class, etc. So she finds this very rewarding and vindicating to her approach.

It's not an easy way to teach history. Her max class sizes are not very large, as you can imagine — these schools have very good faculty/student ratios and they cost a ridiculous amount of money in tuition. (We both went to public schools ourselves.) Even with that she works very hard preparing materials for class, grading student work, working with them on their writing, etc. It is much harder work than teaching at the college level (in my experience), where you see the students only once or twice a week, are probably lecturing for most of that, and rarely look at more than one draft of an assignment (and can refer them to a writing center if they really need help).

A lot of her method and success depends on the fact that she herself takes history very seriously — it is not just "another subject" to her, she's a historian by training and outlook. I have doubts that you can teach history this well without being deeply trained in it yourself. Her colleagues that only have history undergrad degrees and MAs in education don't teach it this way and have at times implied that they really can't — because they don't have enough confidence to look up things they don't know and they don't have a big enough worldview to fit new things into it. I don't know if you could scale this approach to large numbers (I doubt it) and it requires a basic minimum amount of classroom control (at these schools discipline is not an issue). But if you want to ask, "how should history be taught to high schools, in an ideal world?" there's no better answer that I've seen, either in theory or in practice.

One of the most influential talks that altered how I teach history was Chimamanda Adichie's TED Talk, Danger of the Single Story.

I show it in the first week. It helps drive home the point that we can't cover every angle or aspect of a part of history and that there are certain biases in their materials and even my teaching.

I tell students to "get hungry" to search for other POVs on their own and come back with questions of that nature. And yes, one suggestion I give them is to come to this subreddit and browse. But don't ask a question until you understand the culture first, as to not anger the mods . . .

For me, 'history' means 'enquiry' (deriving from its Greek etymological roots), and the skills gained from rigorously appraising evidence and questioning other peoples' interpretations are probably the most important set of skills anyone one person can have, in my opinion. 'Teaching history' shouldn't be about choreographing children into being able to 'recite the Kings of England', it should be about training in being able to investigate questions like 'why did 'England' have 'kings' in the first place?', with healthy employment of reverse commas to signify that terms like 'England' and 'king' haven't existed for all of time - they are constructs.

Read the book, "Lies my Teacher Told Me."

Or at least roughly the first half. It gets a bit long winded.

Short answer is that rather than teaching people, places, dates, events, it makes far more sense to build a narrative. What's going on in the world around the person, who were they, what shaped their lives. What were their flaws, what drove them?

Furthermore introduce the concept of primary and secondary sources. Introduce the concept of writing bias. Teach the students how to think, not what to think. They should be able to read Mein Kampf and rather than say, "wow, this guy was crazy" they should be saying, "Wow, this guy was crazy, where did he get these ideas?" Or the problem with formulating a coherent history of an entire culture when they themselves didn't really write about themselves. Understanding a civilization only by what it's enemies thought of it isn't always going to result in a balanced understanding of them.

A final point? Shandify your teaching. I don't particularly blame you for not knowing of the 9-volume work, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" written in the 18th century as it is an unwieldy mess of a novel series. But it must be given credit as one of the first attempts to properly convey human life at the macro-level. History doesn't function in a vacuum. Events do not exist unto themselves. Or people. Or places.

Watch this, skip to two minutes in if you want. Ignore the fact that he's applying it to a video game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwlt4FqmS0