Instructional Overview Due to the nature of history, much of the content is knowledge based and needs to be given to the students. I have found that direct instruction is best suited to do this. Most of the lessons that I have developed are taught in a lecture format. I have incorporated other learning styles into some of my lessons, and each lesson will attempt to be more of a class discussion than a straight lecture. The students will be asked questions to keep them involved in the discussion and they should be actively taking notes.
Indirect instruction is incorporated into a couple of lessons, which are discovery lessons.
Because history is based on knowledge level facts, there does not seem to be much room, or time, for the students to discover how or why events happened. I do believe that there are lessons, and even entire units, in a history class that can be written more indirectly, but I did not chose such a topic. I have written a few indirect lessons, which will teach my students to use the knowledge based specifics that they have learned and make generalizations and predictions. One activity has the students using previously learned geography skills to determine where the most heavily traveled trails west ran. They will work in groups to draw several trails onto a topographical map.