Structured Academic Controversy Analysis

The complexity of world history spans from the multiple tiers of information collected over many years. The subject of world history has caused much controversy and has kept educators and scholars deciphering content. The controversy has kept educators wandering what to teach and how to teach. This broad subject holds educators to an extremely high standard which they must not fall beneath; teaching philosophies and lesson plans must meet each standard. An educator is responsible for their students’ understanding. A quotation provided by the American Historical Association helps to reflect students’ potential understanding. “They lack an understanding of the field 's complexity, often believing that all the answers have been determined”
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Subtitled, The Structured Academic Controversy is a segment under Debate and Discussion chapter. “Using academic conflicts for instructional purposes is a powerful approach to discussing controversial issues in the classroom.” With a subject as broad as world history, this approach would definitely be useful in a high school classroom. The following are steps for this approach provided by the classroom text. “Choosing the discussion topic, preparing instruction materials, guiding the controversy-which offers five additional steps for the instructor to follow. learning the positions, presenting the positions, discussing the issue, reversing perspectives, reaching a decision, and debriefing. These steps will be used within the presented lesson plan and will help evaluate students’ …show more content…
One of the challenges of teaching a global world history course is developing final assessments that are on the right scale. Since world history units typically include several regions and centuries, end unit, semester, or year projects should allow students to show what they have learned about connections between particular events and larger global patterns.
It seems the argument McAuthur proposes in her segment is a challenge all educators face. McAuthur also taught as a ninth grade world history teacher; therefore, her research and study correlates with the challenges of learning and teaching world history. McAuthur also suggest examples of assignments that should be taught in the secondary history classroom. McAuthur lists: timeline projects, mapping projects, and projects based on illustrative cases of global patterns as staple assignments to be taught within a secondary