Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction

Thinking Like a Historian: Rethinking History Instruction by Nikki Mandell and Bobbie Malone is a teaching and learning framework that explains the essential elements of history and provides "how to" examples for building historical literacy in classrooms at all grade levels. With practical examples, engaging and effective lessons, and classroom activities that tie to essential questions, Thinking Like a Historian provides a framework to enhance and improve teaching and learning history. We invite you to use Thinking Like a Historian to bring history into your classroom or to re-energize your teaching of this crucial discipline in new ways.


The contributors to Thinking Like a Historian are experienced historians and educators from elementary through university levels. This philosophical and pedagogical guide to history as a discipline uses published standards of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the National Council for History Education, the National History Standards and state standards for Wisconsin and California.

 

Bobbie Malone, Ph.D., is the co-author of the Student Textbook, Teacher's Edition and Student Activity Guide for Wisconsin: Our State, Our Story. She worked as the Director of the Office of School Services at the Wisconsin Historical Society until 2011. With a master's degree in elementary education, she taught school for 10 years before taking a doctorate in American History. Bobbie has authored and edited many student books and teachers guides on Wisconsin history for the state's classrooms.

Nikki Mandell, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in history at the University of California-Davis. She is a member of the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where she teaches American and global women's history, U.S. business history, U.S. social history and courses in historical methods and research. She is the author of The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930. Dr. Mandell is co-chair of her university's Social Studies Council.  She served as project director and participating historian in the Teaching American History program that developed and field-tested the Thinking Like a Historian framework.