Daniel Hood is a high school history teacher at a private school in Southwest Virginia where he teaches AP^® World History, AP^® European History, and AP^® Comparative Government.

I love maps. Maybe it’s because of all the high fantasy novels I read as a young adult, which would have been incomplete without the map inside the first few pages that brought the whole fantasy world into sharper relief. Or it might have been because when I was a kid my parents would hand me the public transit map of any city we were visiting and have me try to navigate us to our destination. It may also just be because I am a history nerd who knows that geography is critical to understanding how the past unfolded. No matter the reason, now that I am a high school history teacher, one of the first things I check out in a potential history textbook is how the maps look. When I started planning lessons out of Norton’s Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, AP ^® Edition, the maps were the very first thing that drew me in.  

In an era when we rely on GPS, strong map interpretation skills are becoming rarer among my high school students. They struggle to conceptualize where they are in space and even more how to situate historical events in both time and space. This is why I got so excited when I got access to the Worlds Together instructor resources. The book has a whole interactive map resource—aptly called “Map and Primary Source Exercises”—dedicated to teaching map skills while students simultaneously use the same maps to trace change over time. When I create my AP ^® World History lessons, I love to start with a map and, with Worlds Together, I check to see if there is a map activity that will orient my students.  

For a recent lesson on African and Asian resistance to European imperialism, I started with the Worlds Together map activity on 19th-century imperialism. This showed students just how much of the world Europeans claimed in the 19th century. Having the students understand the extent of European colonialism, and that it was not just Europe having an imperial moment in the 19th century, is critical for them to see the pervasiveness of colonialism. However, just seeing countries colored in the rainbow of imperializing nations belied the reality on the ground and the lived experience of those colonized peoples. So, I immediately followed this activity with the Worlds Together map showing all of the colonial resistance movements in Africa. Contrasting the two maps forced my students to hold two realities in their minds at the same time: that Europeans successfully claimed control over most of Africa in the 19th century, and that the indigenous peoples of Africa did not merely accept this as their new reality.  

Unlike other world history textbooks, which tend to reinforce the European narrative of progress and expansion, Worlds Together emphasizes the role of African and Asian resistance to Western imperialism. To reinforce this further for my students, I opted to follow the maps with a short mini lecture built with the chapter slides provided in the instructor resources of Worlds Together. Some slides I was able to use as-is, but others provided a jumping-off point for putting together extra slides. As a busy teacher, having the foundational presentation from which to build is a major time-saver and encourages me to add my own knowledge. I used the map of resistance movements, which listed more movements than the book could cover in depth, and had my students research some of those extra movements for expanded presentations.  

After the students’ research and sharing expanded our joint knowledge, it was time to turn to a different kind of source analysis. While Worlds Together has a similar interactive tool for primary source analysis as it does for map analysis, sometimes I prefer to go old school and print things out. I found a sample DBQ (Document-Based Question) from the Worlds Together instructor resources on the topic of resistance to European imperialism. I use these kinds of sample DBQs as practice for the AP ^® exam, but I will often also use them as a starting point for class discussions. This particular DBQ asks about the different responses to European imperial encroachment into Africa through the categories of accommodation or resistance. I used that as a way in for my students, tasking them with identifying how each of the seven sources fell into either category. The ability to summarize and understand sources quickly as they read them is a critical skill for mastering the DBQ and for historical thinking more generally. 

One of the most time-consuming aspects of being a high school AP ^® history teacher is finding enough variety of primary sources for my students to read. In order to be prepared to answer all of the questions on the AP ^® Exam, they need to be exposed to a wide variety of sources—diary entries, speeches, paintings, propaganda images, poems, charts, maps, graphs, academic historian’s work, etc. For class discussion, having a broad set of sources is also critical to student engagement. The best discussions we have in the classroom are when the students read sources with opposing viewpoints or alternative perspectives on the same event. For example, the DBQ mentioned previously includes forms from the Royal Niger Company, letters from African leaders, an image representing African resistance, and a report from a German colonial official. Taken together, these sources all brought a more well-rounded and nuanced vision of African resistance on the ground for my students. In addition to the available DBQs, I find the Companion Reader for Worlds Together to be a great place to start looking for sources along with the primary sources available in the textbook’s instructor resources. The more time I am able to spend discussing sources with the students, rather than finding sources, is time very well spent.  

I also like to start my classes with a short “bell-ringer”or multiple-choice question quiz and sometimes end lessons with some kind of “exit ticket.” The excellent questions in the Worlds Together test bank can easily be slotted in to work for either end of the class period, as assessment or practice. Like finding good primary sources, writing solid AP-style questions requires time and effort that is difficult to find in a high school teacher’s day. I have used questions from the test bank to add variety for my students and to help them practice being confronted with unfamiliar sources. Additionally, the online homework tool InQuizitive allows me to assign questions to my students for them to complete digitally—whether in class or for homework. These activities are another great opportunity for my students to practice their testing and reading skills. Not only that, it saves me from my least favorite part of being a teacher: grading. By having InQuizitive grade for me, I am able to take those scores and slot them directly into my “quiz” grade category in my school’s LMS, and I can find out quickly where my students are still struggling to comprehend the content. Grading 30–60 quizzes by hand makes finding those correlations much more difficult, so InQuizitive can be a real boon.  

For all of these reasons—maps, primary sources, the test bank, and more—I really appreciate using Worlds Together, Worlds Apart when I am planning my lessons for my AP ^® World History classes. To use a marketing cliché: come for the maps, and stay for the deep bench of resources. I have found that these resources, when employed intentionally, not only deepen my students’ understanding, but encourage them to further develop the very skills they need to be successful historians and AP ^® Exam takers. I do not want my students to just memorize facts or dates; I want them to see the stories we weave in order to make sense of the past. Worlds Together brings those stories to the forefront and walks my students through how historians reconstruct the past. Most important, though, it gives me literal maps to show my students where they are in relation to the past and to understand where they are going. Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that “the past is another country” and I hold that when you go to another country the very first thing you need is a good map.  

Interested in considering Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, AP ^® Edition, for your course? Learn more here.  

AP^® is a trademark registered and/or owned by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this product. 
 

MEET THE AUTHOR