Curriculum and Standards

Working with our pilot school partners, experts, and pedagogical advisors, we built the course to be easily adapted to a wide range of needs. All schools in the pilot program are required to use a core set of content and materials that make up approximately 50% of a standard year's class time. These core materials focus on the key themes and align to the specific learning outcomes foundational to big history.

The BHP curriculum centers on a defined set of learning outcomes and concepts, or themes. The course structure and delivery are designed to promote literacy and instill critical thinking skills - prioritizing alignment with Common Core Literacy standards throughout.

Common Core Standards

Through the deep exploration and interpretation of extensive texts, and a holistic assessment strategy, the program fundamentally values literacy skills, with a particular focus on Common Core standards. We will continue to engineer our content and assessment strategy to support the following specific standards:

  • Reading standards for literacy in history/social studies
  • Reading standards for literacy in science and technical subjects
  • Writing standards for literacy in history/social studies, science and technical subjects
  • Speaking and listening standards for grades 9-10

Australian Standards

As the big history curriculum is refined, we plan to develop a formal mapping to jurisdictional curriculum requirements, including the New South Wales Board of Studies Learning Outcomes and the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS). Big history is being developed in the line with the Australian Curriculums goal to equip students with the skills, behaviors and attitudes to succeed in life and work, including:

  • Literacy: listening, reading, viewing, writing, speaking and creating visual and digital materials across disciplines and formats to facilitate students' ability to communicate confidently
  • Information and Communication Technology competence: Use ICT effectively and appropriately when investigating, creating and communicating ideas and information at school, at home, and at work and in their communities
  • Critical and Creative Thinking: Learn to generate and evaluate knowledge, ideas and possibilities, and use them when seeking new pathways or solutions. Learn to use reason and imagination to direct their thinking for different purposes embodied in activities requiring reason, logic, imagination and innovation.

At its core, big history addresses the issue of sustainability (an Australian Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priority) by exploring the ongoing capacity of the Earth to maintain life and encouraging students to develop ideas for how to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

Skills Development

The curriculum is about the intersection and transfer of knowledge. It encourages students to read widely, write frequently, and work to connect ideas and information across a wide range of media types. It also asks students to do this across several fields of study: physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, earth science/geology, human history and more. Laying a foundation of knowledge across many domains provides context for the students to carry forward into any independent field of study.

Here are some examples of where big history demands integrative knowledge and critical thinking:

  • Determining the central ideas or conclusions of a text; summarizing complex concepts, processes, or information into simpler but still accurate terms.
  • Writing arguments focused on discipline-specific content and informative texts, including narration of historical events and scientific changes.
  • Using technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to collaborative exchange and new ideas.
  • Conducting and presenting short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem.
  • Reading, analyzing and drawing evidence from informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Social Studies Standards

Big history focuses on key historical concepts and themes aligned with most states' core social studies requirements. Working with partner schools and agencies, we co-create content and curriculum to help meet foundational state standards, and then both view and extend that content in a big history context. Schools should be able to incorporate big history into the history/social science sequence as a substitute for a required class or as a featured inter-disciplinary elective.

We are also prioritizing accreditation by certain states (e.g. California) in an effort to facilitate broader adoption.

For more information on how big history can work in your state or district, email info@bighistoryproject.com.

© 2011 Big History, LLC.