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…

Getting Started: Two Essential Questions

     The word investigation triggers in my mind thoughts of searching, exploring, and inquiring. I think of detectives in the field and scientists in the lab. I do not, if I am honest, think of the students in my history classes. I now need to align my classroom practices with the vision that is inspiring me.  

     Bruse Lesh writes about History Labs, where students conduct source work, inquiry, and ultimately construct and share historical interpretations. I am modeling my historical investigations around this recursive, challenging, and meaningful intellectual process.

Two Essential Questions will Frame the Course

     I love the idea of using one or two open ended questions to frame all of our inquiry in my Western Civ course. Students will revisit these questions repeatedly and, over time, develop increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about them. Journals, blogs, and/or portfolios can be used to monitor students’ search for meaning, as they construct, share, and refine their responses.  

     For Western Civ I have decided that I will use a process AND a content question.

Year Long Process Question: Constructing the Past: How do historians do history?

Year Long Content Question: The idea of progress: How civilized are we?

     Contrast a traditional unit approach to teaching history with an investigatory model and it is easy to see the appeal. I am excited to begin planning how I will help my students explore the complexities of the past and of the human condition in an honest and meaningful way.  

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!

Step 1: I am no longer using the term 'Unit'.

     The term itself, 'unit', appears innocuous. After all, it simply means a chunk of material that is grouped or unified. It is a term that most of us have been hearing since our first day of kindergarten. Why, then, am I choosing to focus on the concept of a unit, as I begin transforming my classroom approach to history?  

     I am not sure when the term unit was first used in an educational setting, but the word instantly makes me think of textbooks. Textbooks, in many ways, immediately reduce the chances that a history teacher will create a classroom environment where inquiry is valued over regurgitation history (RH).  

     What do textbooks do? A text breaks information down into discrete packages. A text often consists of two dozen units. And each unit is broken down further into a dozen or so sections.

     As soon as we allow ourselves to embrace a textbook approach to history, we begin a process that inevitably moves us far away from creating meaningful history classes that embrace the thinking skills and epistemological attitudes that are associated with the discipline of history. 

    Throughout my career, I have thought of the courses I teach in terms of units. In my Western Civ class, for example, I teach 6 or 7 units, including units on the Industrial Revolution, French Revoltuon, and World War I. 

    By embracing a textbook, unit-centric approach to history teaching, I have allowed myself to fall into the trap of viewing content as something that is delivered to students in a variety of ways, such as through lectures, powerpoints, worksheets, and video clips.

     Teaching for regurgitation creates a learning environment where students are passive, intellectually detached receivers of content. In this setting, content often appears to students as inert and without meaning.

     Thinking of content as units that I deliver to students is a mistake, likely a fatal one if my overarching goal is to cultivate historical thinking skills among my students.

     Units, in regurgitation history classes, often end with a test that attempts to measure student acquisition of factual knowledge. A looming end of unit test creates pressure on a teacher to teach all of 'the facts' to students so that they can have success on the end of unit test.

     Well intentioned teachers, often obsessively, consider the following question: "How can I ensure that all of my students learn the facts that they are going to be tested on ?" 

     We need to reconsider this approach to teaching and testing.  And, beginning in Sept, I am going to stop using the term unit, replacing it with the term investigation. 

     Obviously, replacing the word unit with investigation means nothing if this change is not accompanied by numerous other changes. Nevertheless, I think this change captures something important about the change in philosophy that I am embracing. In the coming days and weeks, I will connect other, more substantive, changes to the concept of an investigation. 

UNIT= Usually Not Inquiry Teaching