Teaching Guides: Course Guides & Instructional Strategies

From course objectives, structure, assessments, and teacher-generated course plans, get to know OER Project: World History.

Grab our College Board-approved syllabus and see a teacher’s course plan.

Look beneath the hood to see how this science-meets-history course works for middle- and high-school social studies.

Whether you need an activity, a lesson, or a semester-long elective, Climate has a place in your classroom. Find a pathway that fits.

Dig into the periodization, driving questions, and big ideas of OER Project: World History Origins.

Assessment is baked in: low-stakes checkpoints, skills-building routines, and feedback forms.

Get the lay of the land with OER Project: World History 1200 with periodization, driving questions, and big ideas.

Find the exact primary source collection you need for tomorrow’s DBQ—or explore them all.

Navigate OER Project: World History 1750 with the course periodization, driving questions, and big ideas.

Quickly locate every writing task across OER Project: World History courses.

See how OER Project: World History AP lessons are a one-to-one match with the AP® World History: Modern CED.

It’s like a map to our maps, so you can find the political, thematic, or regional map you need.

Open your roadmap to teaching the history of the Universe: objectives, structure, and skills inside.

Easily locate activities to grow middle-school writers—from claims, to paragraphs, to DBQs.

Check out guidance to take students from “what is climate change?” to “what can I do about it?”

Explore pathways to bring climate learning to your class, whether you’ve got a week or a semester.

It wouldn’t be social studies without source analysis. Go deeper than “Is this a primary, secondary, or tertiary source?” with our activities, tool, and feedback form.

To believe or not to believe...a claim. Give students a mental checklist to use intuition, logic, authority, and evidence to fact-check any argument.

History isn’t a straight line from the past to the future. Help students untangle the web of causes and consequences with historical reasoning tools.

Build the practice of comparison, and then take it one step further, pushing students to identify the significance of similarities and differences.

Move beyond “What’s happening here?” with contextualization. Analysis goes deeper when students situate events in the context of time, space, and setting.

Guide students to track continuity and change over time with nuanced thinking, noting historical significance through degree, pace of change, and direction of impact.

Check out OER Project’s variety of texts, three-step reading routine, and built-in supports.

Explore a wide variety of strategies that help you meet students’ reading, writing, and activities needs.

Get to know OER Project’s writing opportunities: informal routines, rubric-based activities, and DBQs.

Build student confidence with writing by weaving it into your daily routines.

Meet OER Project graphic biographies, and learn how to help students read these unique history comics.

A quick look at all the graphic biographies in OER Project: World History and Big History.

Find strategies to strengthen students’ vocabulary skills while learning content.

Data in social studies? Grow student confidence to find the narrative in the numbers.

Set the stage for lively discussions with engaging questions, clear norms, and shared goals.

Strategies to approach complexity in today’s classrooms: plan ahead, model, and reflect.

Tips to guide your students’ use of AI—and ideas for your own planning with OER Project.

Check out teaching tips to get students actively viewing and making meaning of videos.

Fire up student cognition with AI as a sparring partner, or design assessments that require deeper thinking.

Guide students to read the data, read between the data, and read beyond the data in social studies.

Comics deserve three-step reading too. Help students observe, understand, and connect to the text.

An acronym they won’t forget (HAPPY) scaffolds students’ source analysis.

Break down all of the elements of sourcing to focus your feedback for students.

Download these anchor charts to cue students to check authority, evidence, logic, and intuition.

Check the credibility of students’ claims, counter-claims, and their historical accuracy.

Scaffold student thinking about long-, intermediate-, and short-term causes and effects.

Focus your feedback on causation and its historical significance.

A graphic organizer to describe similarities, differences, and their significance.

Make your feedback count with comparison criteria and quick notes for students.

A tactile tool to place events in the broad or narrow context of an event.

Give students clear feedback on their contextualization of an event.

Graph continuity and change over time, plot the positive and negative effects, and then form a thesis.

Show students what they did well and where they can improve in their CCOT analysis.