The answer to this question is, I think: get good teachers and let them teach the way they want to.

I studied history as an undergrad and grad student, and then taught it briefly at the high school level (I still teach, but a different subject now). I had a lot of different teachers. Some of them focused on nuts-and-bolts lecturing, some were very discussion-based teachers, others were constantly bringing in new activities for the class. I would not say any one approach was how we "should be doing it." I feel incredibly lucky that I have had so many excellent history teachers from high school forward. They instilled a life-long love of learning in me. It was not one style they were using, but rather their collective passion (expressed in myriad styles) that was so effective.

Personally, I like a mixed approach. Start off with a lecture, move on to an activity of some sort, and finish things off with a discussion. But we should always be cautious of thinking there is one perfect method all teachers should follow. In this day and age, we are finally acknowledging that every student is unique and every group of students (class) has unique needs. In addition to that, however, we must also accept that every teacher is unique. They must be allowed to teach to their own skills and passions.

When your teacher is passionate about something, it is extremely infectious. I took a class in university called "Dictators of the 20th Century." Exciting, right? Nope, it sucked big time. The professor considered undergrad classes beneath his dignity, had no passion for the class, and the class was nearly unbearable. On the other had, I also took a class on the day-to-day bureaucratic functions of the state of Florida. The professor was passionate about the importance of governance and made the class fascinating and genuinely useful. I am grateful to have had a professor like him to make me appreciate that everything has the potential to be amazing.

My all time favorite professor was a straight up lecturer. One of my other favorites had us constantly doing little activities. Each one was strongest when they were doing what came naturally to them. The way we "should be teaching history" is with passion! Passion will trump methodology more often than not.

I think the main problem with the way history is taught at a secondary level (at least in my experience, which is supported by a cursory look at the Ontario curriculum) is that it appears very static. In high school, we are taught history as a series of set pieces, with little critical analysis of how historians arrive at the conclusions which produced those pieces.

More attention to methodology is a must. We learn about primary sources and secondary sources, but what about the methods of analyzing these sources. I have students in first (and even second) year university that believe simply using a primary source is enough to guarantee factual correctness.

What about theory? Students must also be made aware of their own perspective as imperfect observers of history. How does culture affect analysis? What are some potential barriers to analysis?

As far as I recall my high school history courses, there was a lot of rote memorization of dates. And I actually had a fairly good teacher, who did attempt to impart some sense of methodology and historiography, as much as he could.

Free up the curriculum. I hated history until third year when my new history teacher gave use a class vote on what we wanted to do. We ended up doing the Afghan Wars and seeing if we could draw parralelles between the conflicts. It went from being the lesson I dreaded every day to the one I looked forward to.

Honestly, this is more of a local tax policy and labor relations question. Anyone who would be passionate or skilled enough to do such things would most like get a better job doing something else and get paid more. To attract those individuals, you'd have to offer much better pay and benefits on the public dime. Then you have questions like, should we do this for all subject fields, are we going to raise taxes, how will we manage teacher performance, does the community care about better history teachers enough to have higher property taxes or less money in the road budget, etc.

Hi, I feel this question may be more suited to r/history as here it leads to many opinions and not very much solid evidence.

But to answer your question, I personally think that teaching history by giving both sides and letting students discuss and debate is a good method to teach. My teacher for APUSH back on the day have us either a contradictory version to what we knew or gave us multiple standpoints. But he would always remind us to keep in mind that they were different periods and to not judge them by our standards in order to keep things oriented on our subject matter.

My favorite professor of all time was a history teacher. In fact, I was in his class just last semester, which was a class called American Military History. His style of teaching was unique in that he used every "tool" for teaching. Most days he lectured, but while lecturing we weren't only taught who won the battle, and what happened. We were also taught background stories, and what led to the significant events which occurred. This professor also had book discussions, on three books which were required readings in the class. "A Respectable Army", "Why the North Won the Civil War", and "On Strategy", all three discussions led to a better understanding of history and how we should think about it. Our assignments were also great for learning. We had two major assignments, an oral history assignment where we interviewed a veteran, and transcribed the interview. As well as writing a battle report. This battle report was on an activity in class where we had a battle with water balloons, and writing the paper we had to pinpoint where every participant was, as well as throwing away bad sources. We also visited the Battle of Cowpens for class, as well as a simulation of trench warfare in WWI. The class overall was an amazing experience.

One unsolvable problem is that history is big and time is limited.

High school students (and junior high and elementary) have a lot of subjects to learn, all of which are important. There is limited time for any one subject - including history - because they all have to make room for each other. Most students have one or two courses I. Their own national history (at least in the US), which leaves one or two courses for the entire history of the rest of the world.

Therefore, you can have depth or breadth, but not both. If you choose breadth, kids will learn a little bit about most of the important stuff, but you can get much past the superficial "bad caricature" level. If you choose depth, kids can get a little into the weeds and learn the complexity of one or two events/countries/time periods, but will know nothing about a lot of other important events.

I think one important thing to finding history interesting is seeing the narrative in it. People like stories. Teaching the important historical events through the lens of storytelling instead of boring lectures with names and dates would go a long way to making history interesting.

Another thing that is pretty fascinating with history is seeing how the various events connect. So often history is broken up into global sections (American history, European history, etc), that you lose any sense of how what's going on in one part of the world relates to what's going on elsewhere. It can be interesting to learn that while Thing X was happening in Rome, Thing Y was happening in China, and Thing Z was happening in India.

I'm a teacher and one of my subjects I'm trained in is History. The good professors I've had were able to approach the subject from an unbiased perspective. They told factual stories instead of listing facts and students were more willing to pay attention, form their own opinions, and get excited about the subject matter.

The biggest flaw in history education is the tendency for teachers to talk at students. They list dates and events as if those are important. Then they force students to memorize dates for an exam before allowing them to forget forever.

Students need to be given the opportunity to think critically about and debate topics of history. It's also important for them to understand the significance of events, more so than the dates. Why are we talking about this event 200 years later? Why is it important? How does it affect us today?

It's easy to forget how vital some events are to the plot of humanity when they happened so long ago. The teacher has to find a way to make history relevant to the student. It's not always going to be easy and not all students are going to respond, but teachers need to try. And schools need to make sure they hire people who love history rather than simply placing someone who couldn't care less into the role.

As others have mentioned, passion is key. That goes for any subject, not just history.

Get teachers from involved countries to give their point of views. Ie rather than just an American teacher teach middle eastern history about the Iraq Iran war, get teachers from those regions to chime in. I'm sure you'd get a more interesting view point that way, rather than just Iran was the devil and only instigator, and that chemical weapons weren't turned a blind eye to

The way it's being taught in America, at least when my nephew was in school (he just turned 21 last year) was (is?) terrible. I tutored him for the History AP and Regents exam and there was so much he didn't know because it was peripheral to the test material. He hated history, so he said and didn't understand how I could willfully and happily study the subject, let alone love it. The US has to move away from the "Wham bam, just the dates and facts madam!" model.

My tutoring sessions didn't make him fall in love with history, but he did say that he got a lot more out of it than what he was getting in the classroom. That bit was probably for my benefit, I think.

I found that I cared much more about History when it was told as a story. Not just a timeline with facts. As soon as your class can be boiled down into nothing but note cards everything loses its meaning.

Ditch the book and quit having the football coach "teach" history. I always hated history because i had the stereotypical history teacher who either droned on or just said read a chapter in the book, it wasnt until my Junior year in high school we got a new teacher who said on the 1st day wed never crack open the book instead wed read newspapers and watch films and other sources. I instantly fell in love with history and had the highest average id ever had in any subject

I am a teacher. Not history, though I do integrate it often. One of my favorite one-liners about teaching is:

"What students do in class becomes their definition of what that subject is."

So instead of thinking about how you want to teach history or what specific things you want kids to learn, think about what do you want them to think history is and then make then do that.

A second point, historians don't necessarily know much about how to teach history, you may want to ask teachers.

A lot of what I'm noticing in this discussion focuses not on content, but on skills that a teacher can promote and develop in his or her students (historiography, assessing reliability of sources, contextualization, corroboration, etc). There are some simple, straightforward, and dynamic resources to do this, one of my favorite for middle and secondary school being the lessons and curriculum out of Stanford History Education Group. The lessons are dynamic and can fit into curriculum at many different places (these resources require a free account to access).

I've noticed in some of your comments that assessment is a concern. As in, not only how do teachers foster critical thinking skills, but assess those skills as well? Using a rubric is one of many ways to assess critical thinking skills, but it's all about modeling good practices with students, presenting models of sound historical work, and having them practice these skills often. Unfortunately the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) doesn't have rubrics, but there are a number of organizations that have created rubrics based off of SHEG curriculum, such as those found at the Center for History Education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Also, if you're interested in engaging with a community of social studies educators (mainly middle and secondary) that are concerned with the questions you pose, then I would suggest looking at the group sschat, which hosts a weekly Twitter chat on a variety of topics relating to skill development, curriculum, assessment, projects, resources, etc.

edit: a word

Are caricatures the end of the world? My impression is that learning naturally involves making a series of gradually more correct caricatures inside one's head, one after the other.

To me I always found the way I was taught history was very sanitized, and very boring. WWI was taught as a series of troop movements on a Divisional scale, with pins moving across a map, and all the political influences and alliances that led to the war, which, while important, is incredibly boring for a kid. However, when I walked through a reproduction trench, and got to see pictures of life in the trenches, censorship of letters, real life hardships suffered by the soldiers and so on, it made it real. A kid can't identify with a Divisional move across half a country, but they can identify with being far from home in a really shitty situation, and the pain and suffering of the day to day soldiery in WWI.

Same thing with learning music history. Yes, Mozart was a child genius, toured Europe, made beautiful music, but he was also an immature man-child who made fart jokes in his letters and screwed around with singers and patrons. I never learned that until way later and knowing that would make him seem human and relate able, rather than some venerated musical demi-god genius.

The best history teacher I had actually taught cause and effect instead of just names, dates, and places.

Tell a compelling story, with lessons that are widely applicable, and detail the intricacies of the events and why those intricacies were significant.

That's how my History of Technology professor taught us, and I walked into that class dreading it, and walked out with my passion for history re-ignited.

I've been teaching US History for just under two decades. For me the keys to fostering some of the things you mentioned are:

Focusing on the story. That means motives both hidden and obvious. That means morally complex and conflicted people. It means many shades of gray. It also means foreshadowing, shocking turns, recurring themes, patterns and parallels. It means context and setting. The story means everything.

Seeking out the odd, curious, horrific, coincidental and mysterious things in history. These can be amazing hooks for kids that are not only memorable but tie stories together.

Fostering debate, discussion and argumentation. Whose motives were most pure? Who would be more effective in today's world? What would've happened if X didn't happen? Which of these is most important? Why? If you could witness one event, what wood it be? Whose impact was greater?

Promote collaboration and discovery using technology. Learning is so much more powerful--hell, life is so much more powerful--when you are working with others toward a common goal and discovering together. We have the wealth of human knowledge at our fingertips--the skill that must be taught now is how to evaluate the credibility of information and how to be an effective curator. My favorite things to hear in class are, "Oh my gosh. Did you know that..." followed by "Cool. What's your source?"

Just my two cents, but to me history has to be a living, breathing, evolving, collaborative effort.

Expose children early on to large swaths of world history in a fun way. I wish I had the kid's show Horrible Histories when I grew up. It makes history silly and interesting and in shows them that history is fascinating not drudgery. And when kids have general knowledge of history at a young age, every time they learn something new they have a context for it and it they build a well rounded information base.

It is also primarily a comedy and teaches the weird and gross parts of history. It reminds students that historical figures are still people with foibles and mistakes (and lots of bodily functions). It makes history silly and approachable instead of some mythical information on a pedestal that they cannot ever question.

One of the problems I see in history (at the middle/high school level) is that it's too sterile. Kids are taught about "great men" and their "great accomplishments" without acknowledging how messy history often is and how "great men" often did things that weren't so great. When kids are taught history like this, the people become larger than life and unrelatable. If we humanize them, they become much more interesting.

There's a point that a lot of people are making on general teaching that I'd like to delve into. Engagement with the students.

Students in normal, mid-income areas go to school and come out with grades proportional to the effort they put in. However, student's income level affects their education massively.

There was a study about 10 years ago that showed the stereotyping of minorities (who are disproportionately from these lower class backgrounds in greater amounts) might be a large cause of this.

The idea goes that, for instance, an English teacher would tell off a kid for using AAV rather than proper English, and this would make the kid feel stupid. AAV, as we should know in the historical community, is simply a dialect of English like Southern/Hill-billy American English, but yet the teachers at the Southern schools didn't tend to correct kids for their dialect as they usually came from the same communities.

More recently, there was a study showing that minority kids tend to turn up more, and hence learn more, if a class on minority cultures existed.

So, I'd conclude this simply for all teachers looking to work in inner-cities or places where education level was especially low: Ensure that you don't mock (if even accidentally) a kid for the way they are, the way they talk, look, write (handwriting), read, etc. And open the class to more discussion on history that shows a representation of the people in the class in the history itself.

Say, for instance, you have a class of mixed races. You could talk about the 6th-9th Crusades in Egypt, with admirable figures from Asia (the Mongols), Europe (the Franks), Africa/Middle-East (the Mamluks), you're sure to engage the kids on a personal level.

Obviously this effect diminishes past High-School, but I'd definitely say give it a go, I've got University to get through before I can try it myself.

I'm not sure if this is only in my country but I think a big problem is only teaching the history of your country. Yes it's important for discussing and understanding culture and past politics and attitudes of the stock you come from but we get so much more perspective from learning about other areas of the world in history.

I was only taught history until the end of secondary school (I guess high school for the US?) All we learnt in depth about the lead up to WW1 from a British perspective, inter-war years, WW2 from the British perspective, 1950s Britain and the rise of communism/Vietnam war in the last 2 years of education (the ones we're nationally tested on). In the younger years we skimmed Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt but there was also a lot of Tudors and Victorians and other British stuff.

I basically got bored with history after that until 2 years after university when I discovered the history of the HRE, the early years of the USA, the Ottomans, the birth of Islam and the empires and trading states of East Africa. Yes I'm still just an armchair historian at best (a toilet historian at worst) but learning about these times, these different cultures and these events have really given me perspective on the world as it is, as it was and as it could become.

This comment is obviously much less academic and more personal experience and opinion, most academic historians can pass it by because they either know this already, don't agree or don't think this is a useful answer to a meta-academic question. However, I thought it would be useful to comment from the perspective of someone who took history willingly and then gave up on it 2 years in before returning to it casually.

I'll just sum up with my opening gambit, the problem with teaching history at a secondary level (highschool level), at least in the UK, is that it is very much about our history, and can border on propaganda and extolling the greatness of our nation's history. It's tired, boring for a teenager and potentially a short-sighted exercise for our rapidly globalised and connected world.

Make it interesting. Throw in some Jerry Springer type history into the lectures to grab the attention of the students. People have some awesome skeletons in the closet, talk about them. Some people might grumble that you are disparaging historical figures, but you aren't, you are making these people more relatable.

In my experience there isn't enough focus on the context in which the story occurs. Context is very broad, it's a totality of the ideas and experiences of the actors involved.

How often in history class do you read newspaper accounts of events as they occur? What made the PBS Ken Burns, Civil War so approachable was viewing events from the historical actor perspective with a understanding of the context that they saw the event.

Educational science student here. Ill keep this Short since im on my phone. In my opinion there are two ways to Tackle the matter: In a group with high interest and Motivation let students "explore" the subject and Focus on discussing Events and implications for later Events and our world today. In the ordinary history class you should Focus on the narrative rather than facts. Facts are like random numbers you have learn. It's mind numbingly dull, theres no Emotion whatsoever. Knowledge for knowledges sake is useless, even though Most educational Systems are based on "filling" students with Knowledge. If you take the expostory approach you need to tell the hi-story in a way students can see why they should care about it. During internships i've found that Ken follets century-trilogy is a great way to get people interested in history, since it does exactly what I think good history classes should do: telling history in a relateble way. Please excuse typos.

I was lucky enough in my elementary school to have an amazing teacher who taught the American civil war through re-enactment over the course of a few weeks. Every student was given a character to play with a little biography. Turning in homework and getting questions right in a jeopardy type contest gained points for our side. Simultaneously, we are learning the course of the real war, ie. the generals, battles, challenges for both sides, etc. We even spent a couple of mornings learning to march in formation. It was a great way to teach 10-11 year old children by getting them really engaged. I already liked history by then, but I think it redoubled my passion for it.