Stanford-developed history lessons for grades 6-12 adopted worldwide

For social studies teacher Loi Laing, the first day of school in 2011-12 was a like a bad dream. Just three weeks earlier, the principal of her Miami, Fla., high school had informed her that she would be teaching 11th grade United States history for the first time. Laing, a business lawyer-turned-teacher, had been comfortable leading classes in government and economics. But in this new role, she felt like one of those New World explorers in her heavy, state-issued textbook: alone at sea, without a landmark in sight.

Laing wasn’t just inexperienced at teaching the subject; she never had taken a U.S. history course in her life. In Jamaica, the British Commonwealth country where she grew up, history was an endless parade of European kings, queens and armies, seen from a decidedly English perspective. And what a boring subject it was! “Just memorizing names and dates” she recalled, shuddering. “I hated that.”

With hours of study, Laing managed to stumble through that first year. But she knew she needed to step up her game, particularly after Florida announced plans to implement a high-stakes high school history examination. Searching the internet for help, she came across Reading Like a Historian, an increasingly popular online tool developed by faculty and students at Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Launched in 2009, Reading Like a Historian offers 101 flexible lesson plans that teachers can download and adapt for their own students, free of charge. In each unit, middle- and high schoolers learn how to examine challenging primary and secondary source documents critically — just as historians would — in order to answer intriguing questions about the ancient and modern world: Did slaves build the Great Pyramid at Giza? Why did so many Americans, including many women, oppose women’s suffrage? Was President Truman right to fire General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War?...