Thank you for providing us with excellent teaching ideas in your PSA for this cohort and in our past TAH cohorts! It has been a great encouragement to see you in action in the classroom, providing engaging and fun lessons for your students that draw everyone in to the content and skills. Like you, I will never think about American Indian history in the same way after the institute week and reading Dee Brown’s awesome book. Best wishes for continued success at BRMS!

Kevin

Thank you for your leadership in spreading the word about TAH and encouraging other teachers to participate! It has been a privilege to learn from you and to experience how organized, purposeful, and positive a classroom environment can be. Best wishes for continued success in your teaching and for plenty of joy (if not sleep) as you become a new mom!

Kevin

Thank you for offering us an opportunity to see how TAH can be applied so successfully in an ELL classroom. Your use of a wide variety of sources (visual, written, audio) in multiple PSAs over the past several years has been a powerful example of how effective the TAH approach can be with students. You’ve been able to take complex topics such as the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement and make them both accessible and fascinating to your students, no matter what their background or language ability.

Algonkian ES is fortunate to be getting you full time next year and I hope that you will have those opportunities to introduce primary sources and historical thinking skills to your students in the way that has worked so well in your classroom at Farmwell Station. Thank you for being such a great advocate for TAH and an inspiration for all of us!

Kevin

Thank you for the creative and thoughtful work you have done with TAH over the past two years! Your PSAs make such great use of objects, art work, music, and a range of sources that are a great reminder of their power to excite and engage students in the study of history. Thank you also for sharing your methods with us in TAH and with your colleagues at Hillside – we need positive, experienced teachers like you to continue to spread the word and encourage others to try out the TAH approach. Visiting your classroom has been one of the highlights of my TAH experience and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be inspired by you and your constant support and encouragement for your students!

Kevin

Thank you for putting what TAH has meant to you in such clear and powerful words! Most importantly, thank you for setting the pace in applying this approach in your AP classes and showing me how what we have learned can be done well to help students learn and appreciate history in a new way. Your work with primary sources and the flipped classroom is an inspiration (and a much-needed kick in the pants) for teachers like me who are tentative about radically overhauling the traditional classroom. Thanks also for being such a great colleague in our workshops – your questions and comments have always helped to advance the discussion and our understanding of the content and how the TAH approach can be used successfully.

Best wishes for continued success and I hope that you have a chance to get a little bit of a break next year but, with SCA and track on top of five APs, I’m not sure when that’s going to happen.:) I hope your students appreciate what you do for them!

Kevin

Better late than never and we have been blessed by your dedication and active participation in TAH over the past year! It’s been especially enjoyable and instructive to see how you have applied the TAH approach to your World History classes and, like you, I’m more excited than ever to be able to try new things thatI’ve learned from TAH in my World History classes next year. Your PSA with Rick was awesome and it’s pretty much clear now that HHS is the epicenter of TAH at the high school level – I blame Liz for that! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and passion for good teaching with us in our last two TAH programs. Best wishes for continued success!

Kevin

Thank you for your comments and for being a part of our last TAH program in Loudoun County. It’s exciting to hear from you about the new dual-enrollment U.S. History course you will be teaching next year and to know that you will be able to use the TAH approach with your students. You captured the heart of what TAH means in just a few sentences – if we can get our students to think critically using history as both a source and a guide, then they will be that much better prepared to handle the challenges of an increasinlgy complex society. Thank you for sharing the excellent PSA on the Cold War that you designed with Michele and best wishes for continued success in the classroom!

Kevin

Thank you for being a TAH stalwart and for sharing such great examples of primary source lessons over the past several years! I know that your 6th grade team will miss you but that your 7th graders will be very blessed to have you as a teacher to build on the skills and content they have learned coming out of 6th grade at BRMS. The PSA you designed with Emily is excellent and adds to the ever growing bank of PSAs that you have already created. In addition to Bury My Heart…, I hope you will also enjoy The War Lovers, especially given your interest in TR and imperialism. It’s a fascinating time period and, as you well know, has some interesting and relevant lessons for understanding our global role and situation today.

Thank you again for you dedication and professionalism. Best wishes for a relaxing summer and continued success in the classroom!

Kevin

Thank you for your thought-provoking comments and for being such an enthusiastic practitioner of the TAH approach! Along with you, my hope is that we can continue to bring this approach to as many teachers as possible to get beyond the textbook version of history and SOLs and into a much more c0mplex understanding of history. It’s exciting and personally motivating to see you develop your tool kit of PSA activities over the past year to use with 11th graders. Your creative approaches to using primary sources and your evident love of history are wonderful to see in the classroom and in our TAH workshops. Plus, I appreciate your comment about being sure to show both the positive and the negative sides of history – we as teachers know the importance of addressing both but I think that high school students can sometimes get the impression that U.S. history is mostly about the negatives if we’re not careful. Balancing is critical so that students get all sides of the story (or at least more than one).

It would be great to do a field trip to the LOC building and have students “close read” it as a primary source. As you noted, the statues of the four “races” really capture the attitudes of the time period and make for an interesting reflection on issues of imperialism and racism. The exhibtis theyhave there are also very interesting and I only wish we had another day just to visit the reading rooms and see the exhibits – I would have loved to have seen the Bob Hope exhibit that you had a chance to explore.

Best wishes for continued success in the classroom and in spreading the good word on TAH with your colleagues!

Kevin

Thank you for sharing your enthusiasm and expertise with us this past week! It was great to see how you applied the TAH approach to your excellent lesson on Social Darwinism, which included amazing sources and a very thoughtful lesson plan that focuses on developing students’ critical thinking skills. That’s a huge encouragement to World History teachers like me who are trying to use more primary sources and model historical thinking skills with 9th and 10th graders – a perfect time to get them hooked on the method if they aren’t already.

Best wishes for continued success in your AP World History and World History II classes!

Kevin