Stanford researchers bring life to high school history classes
with a curriculum built around historical documents Students who
used the "Reading Like a Historian" curriculum outperformed
their peers in traditional history classrooms, study finds. The
11th-graders at Lincoln High School use a curriculum developed
at Stanford that uses letters, speeches and government documents
from the period to teach students how to analyze history in
context. There are no orderly rows of desks in Valerie Ziegler's
high school history class – students sit in groups of three or
four at small tables around the room. There also is no lectern
because there are no lectures. And perhaps most striking, there
are no textbooks. The 11th-grade class at Abraham Lincoln High
School in San Francisco learns about the Vietnam War, women's
suffrage, civil rights, the Great Depression and other major
events in U.S. history by analyzing journal writings, memoirs,
speeches, songs, photographs, illustrations and other documents
of the era. "I a