When and When Not to use the Theme Approach

Keeping in mind that the theme approach is utilized best during planning and presenting of content, their is much wisdom needed to use it appropriately. As you try it and see if it fits into a certain unit of study better or worse than another approach, that experience will undoubtedly give you wisdom in making future decisions on its employment.

Each individual teacher has a command and knowledge base of their course's content and management. This will be very useful in determining whether to theme or not. You can also test the possibilities by doing a generative topic exercise and weigh the results against that of your other approaches; thus making an intelligent decision. The theme approach is very useful other than in straight instruction.

For example, you may want to teach the transition from the Great Depression to WWII in time order fashion, with two separate units. However, another idea would to be either revisit or collectively teach WWI before or after the time order of GD to WWII. This way you can still experiment with theming the World Wars together while still paying much needed attention to the important transitions and cause-effects from WWI to the Roaring 20s to the Great Depression to WWII.

Other Uses

Themed History is a great way to review for final assessments at the closing of the course. This takes the entire myriad of topics and areas of specific study and organizes them so that students are not redoing the entire course. They can review all the important governmental systems studied in the year by using the theme approach.
On the larger, more administrative scale, theming history can aide in creating new curriculums, elective courses and their curriculums, sequences of course study and much more organizational approach benefits.

Closing

This idea to organize historical instruction into themes came from a collection of thoughts and experiences that I have had both as a student and teacher of the social studies. In high school, history was at least divided by physical areas of study with U.S. vs. Global history. Although, once I entered college and began to take more in depth courses in special and detailed areas of the history, I began to really understand the connections and trends throughout all of history and felt the great importance this had on understanding the deeper levels of history rather than just the factual information. I believe that most of the specifics and factoids can always be researched when needed. There is less use for this information than in the skills and abstract understandings embedded deep within history. One of these skills being that of research, so that when specifics are needed they can be accessed. We study history to understand the past, not memorize it. We strive to use these understandings to make better decisions for the future. It only makes sense that we should then be teaching our students to do the same.

As students, go practice and learn the value of using themes to teach history. As teachers, become wise with its use and guide students to the deeper, higher level thinking skills and understandings they need to really USE history. GIVE IT A TRY!! ITS WORTH A SHOT.

To go to Part I of this course follow this link:

Part I - Choosing Themes via Generative Topics

To go to Part II of this course follow this link:

Part II - Implementing the Theme Approach

Back to Start Page:

Mini-course: Teaching Themed History