Middle School Is Hard. Big History Helps.
As a middle school teacher how do you guide students in a way that encourages their confidence and curiosity? Here’s one way: Teach Big History.
Middle school is the ideal level to teach students a “framework for all knowledge,” something that will help them be successful in high school and beyond. It encourages creativity and cognitive risk-taking in an environment that is supportive and collaborative without the pressure of credit accumulation. OER Project knows that finding a curriculum that pushes students to create mental connections and to wrestle with big questions about complex topics is difficult. Often, middle-school curricula either far exceed the cognitive load of students or fail to challenge them. Some of these curricula encourage middle schoolers to learn discrete skills, such as causal thinking and making claims, in isolation, which may leave them wondering how these skills fit together. The result can be student misconceptions that go unnoticed in their middle-school classrooms, but that sneak up later as they try to learn subjects in high school and college. We believe that the ideal middle-school curriculum needs to be challenging, but also provide students scaffolded supports, or supports that provide the right amount of structure to help them put the pieces of the academic puzzle together in a way that makes sense to them and allows them to make sense of the world around them.
The real question, therefore, is this: How, as social studies educators, can we overcome these challenges? What can we do to regulate our middle-school students’ emotional state, ensure they feel intellectually secure in our classrooms, and spark their curiosity—all in the 50-plus minutes we have with them? At OER Project, our answer is simple: Create an interdisciplinary curriculum that helps students connect the dots between everything that they’re learning in their middle-school years and beyond. In Big History students learn that everything is connected, anchoring their understanding in the deep past and helping them practice skills development in context—while having fun along the way.
How does Big History engage younger learners?
Studies have shown that middle-school students thrive when they’re engaged and challenged with “authentic intellectual work” that is relevant to their lives.1 In other words, engagement is the key to motivating learners who are invested in the material they’re studying. Additionally, middle-school students have questions—lots of questions—about the world and their place in it. Engaging materials that focus on big questions help tap into middle schoolers’ learning potential. When students are invested in the material being taught and when they’re encouraged to think about big questions that are relevant to their lives, they develop intellectual habits and lay the foundation of prior knowledge that will aid them throughout secondary school. This focus on relevance and inquiry is what makes Big History the ideal social studies course for middle school. Students are engaged through rich, relevant content that is applicable to them because it situates and connects their lives to both the past and the future. They’re encouraged to ask questions about the Universe, Earth, humanity, and the future, all as they learn historical thinking skills that help them make sense of the content.
Through the use of comics and graphic biographies; short, visually rich videos; podcast clips that highlight current mysteries of the Universe; and hands-on activities, Big History challenges students to make connections across the vastness of time—13.8 billion years—by switching scales to examine the history of the Universe at the smallest scale—that of an atom—to the largest—that of the entire Universe. As they learn about the Universe, they’ll begin to understand how their lives are shaped by the increasing complexity that is the connective tissue of this history, and how they can use the past to look ahead to what the future may hold.
Why teach Big History in middle school?
When taught as a middle-school course, Big History enables younger students to become adept at making connections across time and space as well as across disciplines, which can give them a big advantage in high school and beyond. The middle-school curriculum often marks the beginning of separating disciplines into silos, with students learning English, math, science, and social studies in different, isolated blocks. But research has shown that integrating disciplines helps students think more deeply about topics and ask questions that make connections across subjects.2 If this type of thinking is established in the middle-school classroom, students can use these skills later in their education as they make connections across historical and scientific content.
In recent years—as a result of focus on standardized test scores—the time students spend learning social studies in both high school and middle school has decreased in favor of focusing on English and math. Ironically, however, limiting students’ exposure to social studies decreases their background knowledge, which is essential to understanding texts such as those used to test students’ reading comprehension on standardized tests.3 Learning about the history of the Universe and connecting content across disciplines helps establish the background knowledge that is needed for students to become more-skilled readers and critical thinkers.
1 Hilary G. Conklin, “Teaching Intellectually Challenging Social Studies in the Middle School: Problems and Possibilities,” Social Education 75, no. 4 (2011): 220–25. See also, Fred Newann, Bruce King, and Dana Carmichael, Authentic Instruction and Assessment: Common Standards for Rigor and Relevance in Teaching Academic Subjects, Iowa Department of Education, 2007; Christopher M. Longo, “Changing the Instructional Model: Utilizing Blended Learning as a Tool of Inquiry Instruction in Middle School Science,” Middle School Journal 47, no. 3 (2016): 33–40; Judith L. Meece, “Applying Learner-Centered Principles to Middle School Education,” Theory into Practice 42, no. 2 (2003): 109–16.
2 Lee Hendricks, “How Interlinking Learning Promotes Critical Thinking in Middle School, Edutopia, September 28, 2023. See also, Rachel Mark, “What Makes Integrated Curriculum Work?,” The University of Vermont Tarrant Institute for Innovative Education, October 23, 2020; AMLE Board of Trustees, “Curriculum Integration,” AMLE, October 2019; and R.D. Merritt, “Integrated Curriculum,” EBSCO Knowledge Advantage.
3 “What Is Background Knowledge, and How Does It Fit Into the Science of Reading?,” Education Week, January 30, 2023, and Sarah Schwartz, “Middle Schools Often Prioritize English and Math over Other Subjects. Should They?,” Education Week, June 11, 2025.