One of the biggest takeaways from this reading is that it is important to break the tradition of teaching history chronologically. Teaching history asks for one to take on a pretty hefty task of teaching children the social sciences related to human history. This is why many history teachers fall prey into teaching out of the textbook, or just giving lectures. This is because the chronological teaching method makes the teacher feel as if they need to cover all the information in the timeline. This leads to teachers missing important details, stressing, and like I mentioned earlier, taking an easier route to teaching the content. Another method of teaching history that one can choose to approach to approach with is teaching through themes. This means that one would have an overall theme such as “war,” or “revolution.” This allows for the teacher to choose specific events from history that relate to an overall theme that persists throughout it. I believe that this approach can be quite helpful in the future as it is asking one to take a step back, and look more into the reasoning behind their theme and topic choices. It allows for easier backwards design as the teacher now knows the overall objective, that isn’t content related, yet theme related. It also will help “sell” the students on the curriculum, and keep them engaged as it mentioned in the article.
The second most important takeaway from these readings is that there are a variety of ways to effectively use exit tickets. In my career as a student, my understanding of exit tickets were always just one quick question that was used to take attendance. While the question was usually content related, it was usually just a memorization question that provided no useful feedback. From what I’ve learned through this course, and the EDU 3000 course is that exit tickets can be a great tool, but only if feedback is provided, and the data used accordingly. The revelation I had was the amount of variety that one can explore when using exit tickets. The reading provided some good resources like Kahoot!, and Seesaw, and these are just two of many. These resources allowed me to se how creative one can get with just one form of assessment, giving me ways to diversify my teaching methods in the future classroom.
I think you could still include a chronological element in a class mainly structured around themes. You would probably want to do the different events in the theme in chronological order to see how that type of event changed over time. It would be necessary to give some context to the event as well. It would be jarring to just drop students into the Haitian Revolution without making sure they understand the buildup.
I like how you included the fact that teaching chronologically tends to lead teachers to teaching out of the textbook or resulting to more of a lecture based class. I think people don’t tend to think that this teaching method correlates to textbook learning and lectures, but it so evidently does. I have also had the same experience for exit tickets where they were quick and usually had no feedback. It is clear there are so many other ways to do an exit ticket but like you said the most important part of it is providing that feedback.