NHD: A Challenge that
pays off for students,
even those with learning
challenges
T
Gita Morris and Julie Noble
The New Community School, Richmond, Virginia
he National History Day project is a valuable process for students interested in learning more about the past and how it
can empower the future. It’s also a tool teachers can use to energize students—but it’s not just for gifted students, top
history students, or after-school clubs. National History Day can be a valuable means of teaching all kinds of students
how to improve their research skills and tap into their interests and strengths.
As teachers at a school for students with language-processing challenges, we both employ NHD projects to complement and
build on the curriculum during the regular school day. Julie Noble is an eighth-grade history teacher who introduces NHD to her
T
students in her Ancient World curriculum. Gita Morris, the History department head, also works with eleventh-grade students
in U.S. History/Modern World on NHD. Fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders work on shorter history projects, in which they learn
basic research skills. In other years of high school, students focus on writing term papers.
Our School and Students
he school where we teach has an enrollment of 120
in fifth- through twelfth-grades. The difficulties our
students face when creating an NHD project are the
same ones they face in the classroom. Processing language
is difficult for them in various ways, including problems
with reading accuracy, vocabulary, reading comprehension,
reading rate, written expression, spelling, memorization,
remembering names and dates, organization, and ability to
use technology. Many also have challenges when it comes to
attention span, organization, and executive functioning. For
these reasons they often come to us lacking the background
knowledge you might expect to find in students of their age
and obvious intelligence. Not every student has difficulty in all
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of these areas, however, or to the same extent.
NATIONAL HISTORY DAY 2015