Planning for Historical Thinking

Blog of Month February- Planning for Historical Thinking

Since the summer, I have spent many hours thinking about and discussing what I want to do more of in my history class. After thousands of tweets and many blog posts, now is the time for me to focus on specifics, to focus on what exactly I want to do in my classroom that is different from what I have done in the past. The History Blog Circle is an attempt to collaborate with others who are at various stages of a similar process, a process that at its core focuses on teaching students how to think like historians.

Starting last month and continuing indefinitely, I will continue to dig deeper as I explore what it means to think like an historian and how to set up a classroom that emphasizes this approach to teaching students about the past, present, and, I suppose, even the future.   

When I try to imagine change, I have found that sometimes it is helpful for me to start by defining what I don’t want to see. From there, I am often in a better position to conceptualize and articulate my vision, where I want to go and how I am going to get there. For the time being, that is going to be my approach with historical thinking. What are classrooms like where historical thinking is not occurring or only rarely occurs? And what can I do to avoid creating a classroom like this?

Students are quiet. Lots of teacher talk. 

I start with a basic assumption: When students are not writing or talking, I am severely limiting my opportunities to get them thinking about the past, to teach them specific historical thinking skills, and, in time, to assess their thinking, providing the feedback that is essential to help students become historical thinkers.

That is not to say that when I lecture students are not thinking. What, though, are they thinking about? I suspect that more often than not when we are talking, or ‘lecturing’, the chances that students are actually thinking about the topics we are discussing are often quite small.  If we cannot get students thinking aloud or on paper, then we cannot do much teaching. The best we can say that we are doing is talking; we are not teaching.

Assignments need to emphasize more than regurgitating content

Even a student with exceptional memory is not really learning much of value if all she can do is repeat what her teacher or her textbook says. As Grant Wiggins repeatedly reminds us, remembering is not understanding. Expecting and accepting recall of information as the main evidence of learning signals to students that the learning we value is primarily the learning associated with remembering, as opposed to understanding.

If superficial learning is the goal, then, indeed, little understanding is needed for students to demonstrate that they can remember content well enough to spit it back on a test. Knowing this, it is essential for me to consciously get students thinking on paper or out loud in class. Only then, can I push students to evaluate their thinking, the thinking of their classmates, their teacher, and all of the texts, written and unwritten, that we encounter in class.

Units and Lessons Need to Revolve around Questions

The Stanford Historical Education Group (SHEG) does this well. @William ABerry11 also discussed this in his post. I am still learning the best way to incorporate the SHEG model of lesson planning into my routine since the vast majority of the existing SHEG lessons do not connect to my Western Civ course.  When examining the SHEG lessons, you will notice that every lesson has a central question at the top the lesson plan. This approach, I think, is superior to structuring a lesson around a series of learning objectives, as many of us were taught in college when we first learned how to lesson plan.

I have noticed that the SHEG questions are usually fairly limited. They do not carry over into multiple lessons, the way that one of Grant Wiggins’ Essential Questions (EQs) does. I am also pretty sure that many of SHEGs questions revolve around why and how questions, as opposed to should or would questions.

As long as you are not attempting to build a lesson around a closed ended question, then this approach should work for you.  The bottom line here is that we set students up to construct a response to the lesson’s central question, requiring them to defend their position and support it with evidence derived from their analysis of primary and secondary sources.

How I have typically planned

Throughout my career, I have never planned my units and lessons in ways that are aligned with the best practices spelled out by Grant Wiggins and SHEG.

I like that Wiggins focuses on student understanding and transfer. He is eloquent in his articulation about why teaching discrete facts and isolated details is not meaningful. When I think about my history class, I have generally been content with teaching students information. When planning, I have typically started by making decisions about what I want to tell, or ‘teach’, students in class.

 In recent years, with the advent of department tests, my planning has revolved almost completely around the department tests. I have decided what to tell students by looking at the test. This is not what a good history teacher does. In fact, this is not what a good teacher does. What, then, do good history teachers do?

I have to decide what big ideas and essential understandings I am going to focus on in class.

I have been reading Grant Wiggins’ text Understanding by Design, where he discusses how teachers can teach students in a meaningful way, as opposed to providing them with superficial instruction that for all intents and purposes is a waste of time.

Wiggins emphasizes teaching for transfer, teaching students to use the concepts and skills they learn in your class in new and varied situations. Wiggins asserts, and I agree, that this type of deeper, lasting learning is not common.

Why? Wiggins premise is that it is not common because of how teachers teach. And, to tie these comments back to this month’s topic, how teachers teach is connected with how they plan their units and lessons.

If I am honest, I do not plan to teach for understanding, in the manner discussed by Wiggins. What do teachers who plan and teach using UbD principles do? What do they do that I do not do?

More to come…

From Units to Investigations: Constraints?

     In my last post I discussed my desire to stop using the term ‘Units’ in my history class, replacing it with the word investigation. This choice, I think, captures the essence of the epistemological transformation that I am seeking to cultivate, both in myself and in my students. The burden now rests on me to explain and explore what a historical investigation is and how it will be different from a unit. History teaches, after all, that it is quite common to attach new labels to old products. How will my so called historical investigations, in practice, differ from what I have always done in my classes?

     What will my historical investigations look like? How will they be different than traditional units? And, most importantly, what constraints do I need to acknowledge?

     An investigation, at least as they will occur in my class, will have to be structured so that I can serve two masters, both the curriculum and the demands of teaching historical thinking skills. I have to expose students to the content that they are responsible for on their department tests, and I have to genuinely involve them in meaningful historical inquiry.

     For the past few years, I have allowed common tests, which generally demand that students are able to recall enough facts to write definitions, answer multiple choice questions, and explain causes and consequences of events, to turn me into a stereotypical history teacher, the kind who uses lots of powerpoints, handouts, and activities that demand little more than student regurgitation of facts.

      If there is one factor that has me pushed me to where I am now in my thinking, it is how far I have strayed from my core beliefs about what students ought to be doing in a history class. While I do not think I have ever consistently put into practice my beliefs about what students ought to be doing in a history class, I have always tried to embrace the ambiguity of knowing the past. Increasingly, I have allowed myself to move further and further from that perspective. From time to time, two books I read over a decade ago kept popping up in my thoughts: Ted Sizer’s Horace’s Compromise and William Glasser’s Quality School.    

     The department tests that I referred to above are not all multiple choice, but they do not include source work, nor do they require students to construct historical interpretations. My students also need to be prepared for a mid-term and a final exam that together consist of close to 140 multiple choice questions.    

     The biggest constraint that I see, then, is that it is essential for me to start planning my historical investigations with an eye on the department tests. The department tests are a work in progress. When I return to school in September, especially after the reflection and research I have been doing this summer, I plan on preaching the importance of placing more Beyond the Bubble style prompts on our tests.

     So my historical investigations will NOT be so open ended that students have free reign to go anywhere they want with a topic. After all, I am charged with teaching a curriculum and giving students various common tests, which weigh heavily on their course grades....more soon!

Lesh, Wineburg, and SHEG

     Since finishing Bruce Lesh's book, I have also read Sam Wineburg's Historical thinking and other unnatural acts. As I said in my first post, authors invite us to change. Change, though, usually requires effort, persistence, realism, and support (I need to explore 'realism' since I have a tendency to try to change too much too fast!).

     Reading Wineburg exposed me to his work with the Stanford Historical Education Group (SHEG), whose Reading Like an Historian approach and curriculum capture well what I would like to do in my history classroom. In fact, if I hadn't stumbled on the SHEG website and their free American History curriculum, I am not sure I would have the know how to restructure my Western Civ course. I am relying heavily on this curriculum, as well as the thinking behind it, as articulated by Avishag Reisman in her Stanford dissertation (pdf).


     SHEG has over 70 American history lessons on their website. I have been looking at SHEG's American History lessons to learn what a course genuinely focused on historical thinking would look like. I can say with certainty that historical thinking has not been the main focus of my lesson planning or of my instructional design and decision making (why? what has? More on this in future posts). My goal is to evolve as a history educator. Reading, writing, reflecting, especially through this blog and Twitter, and lesson planning are at the heart of my transformation.