There's rare bipartisan agreement on the need to improve civic and history instruction. But as any teacher knows, it can be quite the challenge to engage middle school and high school students — let alone get them to care.

A mark of great teaching is making topics so interesting that the students quite simply can’t ignore them. Telling a story effectively is what makes students enjoy learning history. Telling a good story starts with being a content expert and, more importantly, a lover of the content. History class will be transformed for students when those teaching it are clearly in love with their topics. When teachers keep diving deeper and learning more in preparation for class.

For students to be invested in something that happened centuries before they were born, they need to have as much stake in the game as possible. This means appealing to students' senses and imaginations. What did dawn look, feel, and smell like on the Lexington green on April 19, 1775? What was it like to hear the distant cadence of the Redcoats approaching? If teachers make history feel present to their students, it won’t matter how long ago an event took place.

Another great way to help make the past present is by using curated, primary sources. Primary source material reaches through time and space with the voices of our greatest speakers. It’s a direct communication between the historical figure and the student and an enormous gift to teachers and students alike.

Visuals are sometimes even more important than texts. Maps, pictures, and artwork are often best used as either a jumping-off point or to help contextualize content. Teachers can start class with a map and trace events as they’re taught during the class period. Or teachers can conclude a class with a picture from the historical narrative at hand, allowing students to adjust their vision subtly of what they had imagined someone or some event to have looked like. It’s almost impossible to care about what you learn without a vibrant and well-furnished imagination.

One of the most important ways to fight classroom lethargy is by asking the children prompting questions. These can range from simple answers to alternative history hypotheticals all the way to grandiose but surprisingly pertinent philosophical questions that may even be concerned with the fate of mankind. Inquiry-based instruction hones serious critical-thinking skills and promotes active engagement.

An additional common roadblock to the effectiveness of any modern lecture is PowerPoint. Instead of relying on prewritten, oversaturated slides to make it through their classes, teachers should ditch the PowerPoints and handwrite the most important parts of the story on the board along with the students. This approach should be kept lucid and dynamic, with the key parts of the story written out as it unfolds.

A final word of caution: While group projects can be used effectively, they typically don’t work as well in real life as in theory. Group projects typically take more time than is available for a robust study of history, distribute work unfairly, and often throw students into the deep end of a topic of which they don’t even possess basic knowledge.

Top line: Lessons should be exciting because history is exciting. History is filled with fascinating, complicated people who thought and acted in circumstances in which the stakes were massive, both for themselves and future students. If teachers can rediscover the power of effectively illustrating the mesmerizing, stranger-than-fiction elements of our shared past, history class can be the highlight of each child’s school day.

Jordan Adams is the interim director of curriculum for Hillsdale College K-12 Education. He advises on civic education reform and provides teachers with history and civics instruction across the nation.