World History Project Guide
WORLD HISTORY COURSE GUIDEContentsWhy teach OER Project: World History? .............................................................................................................2Overview of OER Project: World History Courses .............................................................................................2Course Problem and Learning Objectives ...........................................................................................................3Course Frames .....................................................................................................................................................3Course Structure and Materials...........................................................................................................................4Standards Alignment ............................................................................................................................................5Skills .....................................................................................................................................................................5Assessment ..........................................................................................................................................................7Support and contact information .........................................................................................................................8OER Project: World History (WH) is a high-school history curriculum like no other. Easily aligned to your state’s social studies standards, WH provides you with the tools to turn every student into a young historian.
2World History Course GuideWhy teach OER Project: World History?Each school, district, and state is distinct in its approach to world history. That’s why we’ve designed world history courses that give you the flexibility to meet your specific requirements. Choose from our three offerings—Origins, 1200, or 1750—or pick and choose lessons or materials from each. We also offer an AP®version, designed to align with the Modern World History: Course and Exam Description. Click here to learn more. Whatever course you choose, you and your students will have access to the content, tools, and essential skills woven throughout the curriculum.Our approachEncourage inquiry-based learning: Lesson plans and activities allow students to explore historical causes, impacts, and potential solutions.Focus on skills: WH courses emphasize eight core skills:• Reading• Writing• Claim testing• Sourcing• Causation• Comparison• Contextualization• Continuity and change over timeInspire interest: Articles, videos, graphic biographies, activities, and more, all designed to engage students at many levels.Overview of OER Project: World History CoursesThe “Flavors” of World HistoryWorld-history standards vary widely among states. With that in mind, we offer three WH periodizations: Origins to the Present, 1200 to the Present, and 1750 to the Present. Each version of the course includes carefully scaffolded units and lessons that you can use throughout your school year. Our world-history course materials (activities, readings, videos, writing assessments, and more) will support your students in drawing a line from the past to the present, with an eye to the future.Which Periodization Is Right for You?If your state standards start with early humans, the WH Origins course is the best choice. If your state standards begin a bit later in history, the WH 1200 course provides more context for the massive worldwide changes that manifested around 1450 CE. The WH 1750 course is best for teachers in states like California and New York, where state world-history standards begin around the year 1750 CE. Do you need more flexibility than the full WH courses provide? Feel free to use materials from all three versions to create your own scope and sequence for the year. Check out the individual course overviews to learn more about each course: Origins, 1200, 1750.Course Goals1. Develop an understanding of the role history plays in shaping our present and future.2. Build critical-thinking skills needed to consider important questions, gather and analyze evidence, and build informed arguments in a way that is applicable across disciplines.3. Engage in meaningful historical inquiry through analysis of a wide range of materials from different perspectives.
3World History Course GuideCourse Problem and Learning ObjectivesCourse Problem:How have human communities connected and diverged over our long history?Course Learning Objectives:1. Understand that history is a narrative, or a combination of narratives, shaped by the sources and perspectives you use to tell that story.2. Apply the evidence from sources using multiple perspectives and scales to evaluate (support, extend, or challenge) different narratives.3. Engage in meaningful historical inquiry by analyzing primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and other hierarchies to gain a deeper understanding of human history.4. Analyze the narrative of history using the course’s three frames: communities, networks, and production and distribution.5. Use historical thinking skills and reasoning practices such as contextualization, claim testing, sourcing, comparison, causation, and continuity and change over time to understand and evaluate the historical narrative.6. Create and support arguments using historical evidence to communicate conclusions through individual or shared writing.Course FramesRegardless of which course you teach, OER Project: World History asks you and your students to examine world history through different lenses, or frames. The course frames are communities, networks, and production and distribution. The frames help students organize the information they’ll encounter in world history, and provide a way for them to make sense of all the ways in which someone could tell the history of the world. This approach highlights the idea that historical accounts are based on perspective. More important, these frames provide students with big picture, historical “stories,” thus providing a backdrop they can use to develop their own understanding of history. As students move through the course, they’ll examine how each frame has changed over our long history. Learn more in the Frames Guide.
4World History Course GuideCourse Structure and MaterialsEvery OER Project: World History course is divided into units and lessons. Each unit is divided into a set of suggested lesson plans, which typically include a mix of articles, videos, and activities. You can use the structure we suggest or incorporate the material into your own lesson plans. All lessons are designed to be flexible and easily integrated into your classroom setting. Each course can be taught as a full-year program or through standalone lessons. This flexibility allows you to tailor the curriculum to meet specific learning goals, schedules, and student needs. Whether you choose to teach an entire course or select individual lessons or materials to focus on topics of interest, course materials follow a clear, cohesive structure that keeps students engaged and learning.We want students of different ages, backgrounds, and skills to be able to use our course content and stay engaged with their work. To achieve that, we include a mix of activities, articles, and videos throughout our courses and we provide you with a flexible structure for how you present that content to your students. The 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, and variety will help you target what works for different students. Activities are widely varied, from more-traditional skills work to fun projects, explorations, and simulations. Opener and closer activities are provided at the beginning and end of every single lesson—these are great opportunities to activate students’ prior knowledge, check for student understanding, and provide time for informal writing. Learn more about these foundational material types in their respective guides:• Activities Guide• Video Guide• Reading Guide• Openers & Closers GuideA selection of WH course materials.Graphic BiographiesOne unique feature of WH courses is our series of graphic biographies, which are illustrated one-page histories of individuals. Whether they’re “important” or “everyday” figures, each of these individuals has their own story, their own history, and those stories weave in and out of the global themes of their era. Their experiences highlight—and sometimes bring into question—developments on a global scale that