Thematic Planning and Teaching

Last night's #inquirychat focused on the concept of thematic teaching. One of the points that is on my mind has to do with the extent to which a thematic approach is at odds with a chronological approach. I am not sure this is the case, though in the chat it appeared to be expressed as such.

I should probably start with some definitions.

During last night's chat, I defined a theme as a recurring, organizing idea. I then proceeded to define themes as big questions, particularly questions focused on disciplinary concepts. In the course of the chat, words such as justice, equality, and nationalism were all mentioned as possible themes.

For me, it is always helpful to think about the non example. What does a teacher who is NOT teaching thematically doing, or not doing?

Let's picture them opening up the textbook and talking about the French Revolution, section by section. And then students are tested. Traditional history teaching personified. I do not consider this thematic teaching because there is no attempt to tie the material to larger ideas or themes. If we think about how a textbook is organized, it is often around events. For example, the Western Civ textbook my school uses has the following sections for the French Revolution:

The first section is organized in the following way:

Section 1- Revolution threatens the French King

Sub topics

Old Regime

The Forces of Change

Revolution Dawns

A Great Fear Sweeps France

The textbook is presenting the French Revolution the way most textbooks do, as a series of events. The book is telling a story. It is not simply a list of facts. So, to that extent, there are unstated themes ( I will talk about this more).

What about the theme of revolution? Would that work here?

It seemed from the chat that some conceptions of thematic teaching would look like this:

Unit Theme= Revolution

Examine the use of the word revolution, as it has appeared recently in the news.

Study French Revolution

Study Russia Revolution

Notice that in this formulation the teacher appears to jump from the French Rev to the Russian Rev. I do not think this approach works, at least for me. And I do not think that thematic teaching has to look this way.


More tomorrow...

The Textbook in Our Heads

Of late, I have found myself on reddit, reading various posts to the askhistorians group. This week, these two posts have stood out, exploring reasons to study the past.

This one focuses particularly on the study of history against the backdrop of postmodernism. And this one is more general, a student who is questioning whether his choice to major in history makes sense.

The quality of comments and the depth of the answers, at least on this subreddit, is appealing.

It is quite jarring, I think, for a person who has become accustomed to thinking about the past in binary terms- true or false- to entertain the idea that much of what historians do is subjective, despite the methods of the discipline.

Much of what I have come to think of as good or quality history teaching boils down to helping students explore the nuances of the discipline, its interpretive layers.

At the very least, as a teacher, once you grasp that history is never as simple as ‘just the facts’, you ought to stop trying to spoon feed students facts for recall and start teaching disciplinary concepts that revolve around argument construction and using sources as evidence.

Going back and reading these last few sentences, I can see that I take it for granted that once you grasp that a just the facts notion of studying history is inadequate and not even tenable intellectually, a teacher will move away from it and embrace the interpretive, seemingly more subjective, realm. In fact, I don’t think this is the case. Why?

It’s a major paradigm shift, and, as far as I can tell, students need to be led carefully down the winding corridors of epistemology. It is much easier for a teacher to look at the curriculum guide, count the textbook pages and days, cue up the well worn powerpoint slides, and start teaching. Most parties involved are quite comfortable with this approach to teaching about the past. 

Those in the classroom, as well as those outside of it- colleagues, parents, administrators, the media- often derive great comfort from the traditional narrative arcs embedded in textbooks and History channel docudramas.   

   

A first model

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am thinking about how modeling might be used in a social studies class. I am using the visual above as a potential starting point for some of the modeling that might be done during the first few days of a social studies class.

Most of our students walk in on day one assuming that in a  social studies class they will study the past. And studying the past means learning facts about the past. And doing well in a social studies class is about little more than remembering the facts that the teacher, textbook, and videos say are important. This is what many social studies classes have and continue to look like.

This first model, then, has to get students to unpack and examine these assumptions. If these assumptions are left unchallenged, or, worse, perpetuated, then we are missing an opportunity to teach our students how to think critically about the past and present.

Notice that the arrow flows from the classroom to the past. We need to get students thinking about the idea of the past. What is the past? An easy place to begin a reflection about the nature of the past is to think about our own memories. Human beings do not and cannot remember everything about the past. The memories we store and the artifacts we keep help us to hold on to aspects of the past. Other people who experienced the events we recall also connect us to the past. 

Memories, we know, are not recorded the same way photos or videos of past events are recorded. This has huge implications for accounts of the past based on people's memories. Students need to explore this idea and revisit it every time they encounter first hand accounts of past events. These accounts cannot be treated as inherently accurate. So many factors influence what and how we remember the events we experience. 

The course I teach is Western Civilization. So, for this class, the arrow in the diagram is headed towards Europe's past. Students, who by default are used to be being passive recipients of facts about the past, are more than willing to let their teacher jump right in and start teaching the facts. Resist this urge! I think that the time spent working with models, especially early in the opening days of the course, will pay off as the course progresses. 

There is much more than can be explored and connected to the above model.