Discover a New Teaching Approach

Since I was a child, I have loved the study of history, but as a young teacher, I quickly discovered that not all of my students shared my passion. So I began experimenting with different methods to make the learning of history more inviting. One of the most successful methods has proven to be inviting guest speakers into the classroom. During the past twelve semesters, I have been using this instructional approach that I call the Community-in-the-Classroom to teach a popular high school elective called the Lessons of Vietnam (LOV). I invite as many as twenty well-informed visitors into our classroom to help students investigate and better understand what was happening, both at home and abroad, during the Vietnam Era.

Not surprisingly, students are less interested in instructional strategies that rely on lecture and teacher-directed thinking, which often emphasize coverage at the expense of understanding. Instead of making an unbroken march through the textbook version of what happened in Vietnam, my students and I delve into the important ideas and lessons of this historical period with a team of volunteer “guest teachers” who work to support the LOV class both inside and outside the classroom. There is really so much we can learn from the legacy of this war, and students will learn it better if we expose them directly to Vietnam veterans, their spouses, South Vietnamese, war correspondents, and people who were active in the U.S peace movement in the 1960s and 1970s, authors, clergy, refugees and others who have an important personal history and association with this controversial era.