TEACHER MATERIALS BIG HISTORY TEACHING GUIDE Table of Contents Welcome to the Big History Project! 4 Who Should Teach Big History? 5 Course Themes 6 Essential Skills 6 Core Concepts 6 Course Structure 8 Part 1: Formations and Early Life 8 Part 2: Humans 10 Course Content 12 Lesson resources 13 Activities 13 Investigations 13 Project-based Learning Activities 13 Guiding Documents 14 Additional Resources 14 BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 1 TEACHER MATERIALS Extended Big History Offerings 15 Big History Public Course 15 Big History on Khan Academy 15 Big History on YouTube 15 Crash Course Big History 15 Planning your course 16 Teaching Big History 17 Teacher as Lead Learner 17 Big History Reading Guide 19 Reading Resources for Teachers 19 Approach to Reading 19 Big History Writing Guide 23 Part I: Prewriting 23 Part II: Outlining and Drafting 23 Part III: Revising and Finalizing 24 Openings Guide 25 Assessment in Big History 26 Rubrics 26 Closings 26 Writing Assessments 26 Lesson Quizzes 27 Driving Question Notebook Guide 28 Who sees the DQ Book? 28 Vocab Activities Guide 29 Menu of Activities 29 Interpreting Infographics Guide 34 BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 2 TEACHER MATERIALS Homework Guide 35 Video 35 Readings 35 Little Big History 36 LBH Preparation Units 1-5 36 Project-based learning 39 Join the Community 40 Big History Project Evaluation efforts 41 Project Based Learning 42 BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 3 TEACHER MATERIALS Welcome to the Big History Project! Where did we come from? What causes change? Where are we heading? Big History takes on these questions that originate with the dawn of time, and gives students a framework to tell the story of humanity’s place in the Universe. It’s more than a history course. Big History helps students see the overall picture and make sense of the pieces: it looks at the past from the Big Bang to modernity, seeking out common themes and patterns that can help us better understand people, civilizations, and the world we live in. Big History arose from a desire to transcend traditional self-contained fields of study and grasp history as a whole, looking for linked ideas and connections across history’s entire spectrum. By teaching students to explore these connections, and to effectively question, analyze and postulate, it provides a foundation for thinking not only about the past, but also the future and the changes that are reshaping our world. The Big History Project represents a strong collaboration between teachers, university faculty and technical professionals. Built from the ground up to support the Common Core and best practices from classrooms around the world, the course includes a rich and comprehensive set of videos, readings, infographics, and classroom activities for students and teachers. Throughout, students encounter challenging ideas and questions and learn to connect ideas across 13.8 billion years of time and an array of disciplines. The course asks students to thoughtfully and rigorously engage with the claims they encounter along the way. Big History is a free online set of course materials. These materials will always be free. All we ask of teachers is to share what they have learned so we can continually make the course better. The best ideas within the course have always come from the teachers that teach it. Here’s what teachers have said about teaching Big History for the first time—we look forward to hearing about your experience! Big History requires students to examine big questions: • How has the Universe and life within it grown more complex over the past 13.8 billion years? • How do we know what we know about the past? • How can we judge claims about the past? • Why does what we “know” change over time? • How does what happened during the early days of the Universe, the Solar System, and the Earth shape what we are experiencing today? Students get to participate in the important and exciting work of exploring, developing, and testing big answers. BHPTimeline.pdf 1 2014-08-10 4:22 PM C M Y CM MY CY CMY K BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 4 TEACHER MATERIALS Who Should Teach Big History? The Big History Project is an interdisciplinary study of change over time from the Big Bang to the future, but at its core, it is a history course. To that end, Big History is designed as a ninth- to tenth-grade history course (for 14-15 year old students). Students will still achieve many of the same outcomes of a high school world history course. Many schools teach Big History in place of world history, world geography or as an elective course in the history department. Some middle schools have offered Big History, simplifying some of the most complex readings. Big History is also used as a capstone course for high school seniors, as there are infinite opportunities for students to delve deeply into complex topics across a range of subjects. Although Big History is designed as a full-year course, some schools will teach it in a single semester, skipping some of the Investigations or the project-based learning (PBL) activities. The Big History Project (BHP) is a technology-based course, but it is not a self-taught course. BHP assumes a teacher is available to discuss content with students, and to evaluate student work. The course relies heavily on a series of videos, including talks from Big History founder David Christian and other noted scholars. While the various articles and graphic content may be printed and shared in hard copy, it would be very difficult to teach BHP without showing the videos. At the same time, the Big History Project does not require every student to have a computer in the classroom. Many schools teach Big History by showing the videos in class and distributing hard copies of readings for use at home. BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 5 TEACHER MATERIALS Course Themes The Big History course focuses on three essential skills and three key concepts that we want students to master. The essential skills are: thinking across scales, integrating multiple disciplines, and making and testing claims. The core concepts are: thresholds, collective learning, and origin stories. Essential Skills Thinking across scales • Big History encourages students to think across scales, from the massive expanse of the Universe to the smallest of atoms. • Students need to think across scale in terms of both time and distance. This helps us to frame our experience at the level of the personal, family, community, national human and geologic experience. Integrating multiple disciplines • Big History encourages the use of interdisciplinary thinking and methodologies. Students should integrate the insights of multiple disciplines when analyzing and drawing conclusions about historical information, including social, physical, and natural sciences. • Students should become aware of a range of scholarly disciplines and understand the types of questions they ask, the types of conclusions that they draw, and the types of evidence they use to support their findings. Making and testing claims • Big History encourages students to develop a thoughtful, consistent, and rigorous approach to testing new ideas and information. • Students should apply these techniques in their writing and other academic discourse. Core Concepts Thresholds • Big History looks at the Universe as a series of moments called thresholds. These moments are characterized by a set of ingredients and just-right ‘Goldilocks Conditions’ that result in new forms of complexity. Big History tells the story of the Universe by using these moments to describe Universal change. • The use of thresholds is unique to Big History, but it provides a helpful means of analysis that can be applied to more traditional historical contexts and other disciplines. Collective learning • Collective learning is the human ability to share, preserve, and build knowledge over time. In Big History, this is the defining characteristic that separates humans from other species. Origin stories • There are numerous explanations of the origins of our planet as well as the Universe as a whole. Since the time of the earliest humans, we have struggled to make sense of our world. Big History represents one point of view, and is considered a modern, scientific origin story. • The Big History origin story is incomplete and will continue to evolve as science and scholarly inquiry continue to advance. BIG HISTORY PROJECT / TEACHING GUIDE 6 TEACHER MATERIALS Course Learning Outcomes 1. Explain how thresholds of increasing complexity, differing scales of time and space, claim testing, and collective learning help us understand historical, current, and future events as part of a larger narrative. 2. Integrate perspectives from multiple disciplines to create, defend, and evaluate the history of the Universe and Universal change. 3. Deepen an understanding of key historical and scientific concepts and facts; use these in constructing explanations. 4. Engage in meaningful scientific inquiry and historical investigations by being able to hypothesize, form researchable questions, conduct research, revise one’s thinking, and present findings that are well- supported by scientific and historical evidence. 5. Critically evaluate, analyze, and synthesize primary and secondary historical, scientific, and technical texts to form well crafted and carefully supported written and oral arguments. 6. Communicate arguments to a variety of audiences to support claims through analysis of substantive texts and topics; use valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence through individual or shared writing, speaking, and other formats. 7. Locate and understand how our own place, our community’s place, and humanity as a whole fit into and impact Big History’s narrative,. 8. Engage in historical analysis using the theories and practices from multiple disciplines, toward an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of the history of the Universe.