Flashback

Summation of Flashback: Comparing Two Approaches to Teaching World History b y Joseph Khazzaka   
 * The Flashback Approach ** - essentially teaching the past by starting with and emphasizing the present. It begins by describing and analyzing existing conditions, and centers on issues and questions of concern to students before tracing their historical evolution through the ages.
 * In the Flashback approach, the past is used as a background to current events in order to clarify present day problems, institutions, or situations.
 * Beginning with current questions and dealing with them at a personal level makes history, and especially world history, more relevant and interesting to learners.
 * By allowing students to reconstruct past events to address present concerns that they feel are connected to them in time, space, need, or interest, we exploit the psychological potential of the curriculum, while at the same time enhancing its motivational possibilities and, consequently, learning.
 * The Sequential Approach **- standard sequential history lessons emphasizing chronological developments through history from the ancient to the modern.
 * Comparing The Two Approaches - **A matched-pairs designed study of ten classes, each teaching the same materials and with access to identical resources, followed by testing and student interviews, reached the following conclusions:
 * The statistical results suggested that the Flashback approach had stronger effects than the Chronological approach in enhancing students' cognitive outcomes and testing.
 * Regarding changes in student attitudes toward world history as a subject, the results were mixed. Comparisons of class averages showed a gain in positive attitudes in both groups, though the gain was higher in the Flashback group.
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">The interviewees in the Flashback group expressed the same ideas, but also praised the Flashback approach itself as the major reason for their change of attitude. Sixteen out of twenty students interviewed who were exposed to the Flashback approach felt that the approach itself contributed to their attitude change.

//<span style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'">Joseph Khazzaka is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania. He is a former social studies teacher at the middle and high school level. // <span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">Chuck Martin is currently involved in designing plans for flashback curriculum for the Metro Schools. Chuck emphasizes all of the extra resources that Flashback teaching gives students to help make their projects more relevant. <span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">This was a fairly dry article, but I think that this approach makes a lot of sense for many parts of an overall history curriculum.
 * <span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">Conclusion **<span style="FONT-FAMILY: 'Arial','sans-serif'; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt">The Flashback approach may be considered a viable and valuable alternative to traditional chronological lectures for specific units or sections of courses in world history and in social studies. One of its advantages is that it does not require special material and equipment or other extra expenditures to be implemented. The simplest use of the Flashback approach consists of reversing the chronological order of lectures. Another engaging use of this approach would be to center the world history curriculum around current issues that are relevant to student needs and interests, and to use the past as a background that can help students to understand contemporary problems.

To read the original article, please follow this link: [|Flashback.pdf]