OER Project Teaching Guide
OER PROJECT TEACHING GUIDEAbout OER Project OER Project is a coalition of educators and historians committed to boosting student engagement and achievement through high-quality, rigorous education programs. We aim to empower classroom teachers like you with better curricula, content, and a vibrant professional learning community through the delivery of compelling, impactful, and usable resources. Currently, OER Project offers four courses covering the topics of Big History (BH), world history (WH and WH AP®), and climate change (Climate Project)—all of which are completely free, online, and adaptable to your local standards and classroom needs. We also offer professional learning via workshops, lectures, supporting materials, and our teacher community.Our Philosophy...And How Our Courses Embody ItWe rely on research in teaching and learning; expert knowledge and scholarship; and years of experience creating, improving, and managing curriculum projects. Our courses provide a unique, comprehensive, flexible curriculum that includes a rich set of materials for you and your students. Experienced teachers, educators, and historians have created articles, lessons, activities, and assessments with your classroom in mind. This approach gives our course materials a clarity and cohesiveness that translates into student engagement.
2OER Project Teaching GuideOER Project courses put student thinking and questioning front and center. They emphasize concepts and thinking skills rather than facts. We ground our student- and teacher-facing curricula, assessments, professional development, and the OER Project platform in five principles of action:1. Merge core content and disciplinary inquiry practices.2. Manage students’ challenges through thinking tools and practice progressions that gradually increase in complexity.3. Use research to improve the courses and professional learning experiences for you and your students.4. Attend to your classroom challenges through educative curricula and multifaceted professional learning opportunities that will help you develop your teaching practice.5. Encourage and support ongoing, active conversations about each of these principles.We think of inquiry as the backbone of all that we do—it’s how students learn content and connect their thinking to the real world. OER Project’s inquiry model aligns with the four dimensions of C3 Framework’s Inquiry Arc:1. Developing questions and planning inquiries.2. Evaluating sources and using evidence.3. Communicating conclusions and taking informed action.4. Applying disciplinary concepts and tools.What You’ll Find Studying the social sciences and conducting inquiry isn’t easy. It incorporates many different practices all at once. We want OER Project students to engage in this work, so we ask them to read, source, contextualize, and corroborate evidence; evaluate interpretations; engage in causal and consequential reasoning; compare developments across and within time; assess continuity and change; contextualize events; and make and test claims.To help students develop the skills they need to do that work, OER Project courses include practice progressions—a series of activities that are each based on one of the thinking or reasoning skills. These activities build upon one another, increasing in sophistication along the way. Each progression includes what we call thinking tools, as well as feedback forms. Thinking tools are sometimes called smart tools or cognitive tools, and they include posters, rubrics, graphic organizers, mnemonic devices, or a mixture of these. Feedback forms break down the progression of skills that students need to master to get better and better with each thinking practice. These help both you and your students evaluate their progress and come up with practical next steps for learning.
3OER Project Teaching GuideA selection of thinking toolsOER Project courses include a wide range of materials and provide a flexible structure for you to choose from. We want students of different ages, backgrounds, and skill levels to be able to use our materials and stay engaged, so our courses include a mix of activities, articles, and videos. Our articles are offered at multiple reading levels, and the majority have accompanying audio versions. We provide different types of videos because not all learners respond to the same media. Activities are widely varied, from more traditional skills work to fun projects, explorations, and problem-based learning opportunities.We also mix in a variety of infographics, image galleries, and other arts-based visuals, such as comic-book style representations and other types of graphic accounts. By combining graphical storytelling with text, we give you an attention-grabbing way of introducing your students to historical figures in context. And when we have students’ attention, there’s greater opportunity for learning—far greater than with the average textbook narrative.A selection of infographics and graphic biographies