BHP Course Themes

BHP Team

BHP’s course themes are what make Big History, Big History. Use the core concepts to frame the course when getting started. Incorporate the essential skills into every single lesson. Doing so will help prepare our students to become the next generation of expert problem solvers and critical thinkers.

Here are some tips on how you can incorporate BHP’s essential skills on a daily basis:

Use BHP’s claim testing framework to help students get in the habit of making evidence-based arguments. Start by using claim testing to drive classroom discussion. Teach students to (appropriately) call each other out when they don’t use their claim testers, and set the expectation that any argument needs to be supported by authority, logic, intuition, and/or evidence. Starting this practice early will build students’ mental muscle. By the time they get to writing argumentative essays for BHP investigations and/or high stakes exams, use of evidence and claim testers will be second nature.

Incorporate multiple disciplines whenever you examine information and historical evidence.This will get students in the habit of wearing different disciplinary hats to analyze information. The What do you know, what do you ask? activities are a great place to start building these skills.

Thinking across scale is another great skill to help students glean new insights and questions from existing information. When students are making an argument, ask them to scale in and out. Track how the emergent questions and information change with varying scales of time and space.