Author: 4QM Teaching

One of the most challenging problems history and social studies teachers face is managing the enormous scope of content that we are responsible for teaching. One teacher we worked with a few years ago referred to that content as “a behemoth.” The Four Question Method gives teachers a way to tame that behemoth: by focusing on the story of the unit and choosing “representative events” to tell it.

Story First, With Representative Events

Gary and I are currently writing an elementary school unit on the Renaissance for Nashville Classical Charter School in Tennessee. The school uses the Core Knowledge Foundation’s history and geography text, which is lively and well written. It also includes nine chapters on the Renaissance, with a total of eighty nine pages of text. As I said, this is a good textbook: it’s clear, coherent, and does a good job explaining historical events — none of which are givens among textbooks in our field. But can we really expect nine and ten year olds to remember all the artists and popes and places listed in these eighty nine pages? We cannot. And if we actually tried to teach all that content, we’d crowd out all the time for students to practice their own historical thinking: the kids would have no time for the skills of narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment. We need to pare down the list of content in our unit, but we need to do it in an efficient way that has positive effects on student learning.

At 4QM Teaching we say that social studies teaching starts with “Story First.” The key to paring down your content is deciding what story your unit will tell. Every historical event that makes it into our curriculum is big and complicated — there’s a lot you could teach, and there are many different ways you could construct your narrative. But you only have one school year for all your content, so you’ve got to decide which story you’re teaching this year. 

An important way to tame your story is to choose a small number of “representative events” to focus on. Most big historical stories have a lot of similar events in them. Wars have many battles. European imperialists conquered many places. The thirteen American colonies protested many English policies during the 1760s and 1770s. Don’t make your students learn all of them to the same depth. Choose one or two that are important and can represent all the others, and focus on them — then tell your students that there were others that were similar in most key respects. 

Florence: Cradle of the Renaissance

The nine Core Knowledge textbook chapters on the Renaissance include three on specific cities: Florence, Venice, and Rome. We decided to only teach Florence. It’s a great representative event for our unit story. Merchants become wealthy through trade (in the case of Florence through the wool trade), expand their business into banking, and use their wealth to explore classical learning and patronize artists. Our choice of Florence also helped us to decide what specific artists to include in the unit. We’re only holding students responsible for da Vinci and Michelangelo, both of whom had strong connections to the city. We can tell students that there were other Italian cities that followed a similar pattern to Florence, including Venice and Rome. But we don’t have to read those chapters and teach those cities, or their artists. (I was sad to have to cut Titian, a Venetian master whose work I love. But unit planning for kids should be built around a lean story, not including everything their teacher loves. We’d never get through the school year that way.) 

Time For Student Thinking

Choosing representative events to tell your unit story buys your students the time they need to practice historical thinking skills for themselves. We’re planning a day to teach the story of Florence, and then a day to have students use storyboard cards to tell the story back to each other. Historical narration is a very challenging skill, especially for students learning something for the first time. If we were rushing from Florence to Venice, the students would not have time to practice telling either story for themselves, and only the most capable students would remember both stories a week or two later. 

Of course our unit goes well beyond narration. We’re going to have kids do a drawing exercise on perspective, and interpret da Vinci’s Last Supper and a detail of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. We’re building a Question Three puzzle on why the Renaissance spread where and when it did (trade!), and a Question Four discussion class on vanity. We’d never be able to do all that if we were actually assigning all nine chapters in the textbook. 

I’ve written about cutting unit content before, and in our book we describe the 4QM unit planning process in much more detail. The bottom line is that social studies teachers always have to select a story from among many, which means they have to decide what not to teach. Selecting representative events to carry your unit story is a great way to make those decisions. 

J.B.

In this post Gary describes some quick ways to get students thinking about Question Three: “Why then and there?”

Question Three — why then and there? — is the hardest of the Four Questions. The Russians had a revolution in 1917. We can tell the story easily enough after consulting a decent textbook. We can say what Lenin, the leader of the revolution, was thinking by reading some widely available texts. To say with any degree of confidence and integrity why the Russian revolution happened when and where it did, on the other hand, we need to know an awful lot about Russia’s (and the world’s) economy and finances, its social institutions and political geography, and its culture. And we need to know how all these things were changing in the period leading up to the revolution. That inquiry project is not for the faint hearted. 

The good news is that Jon and I nailed down the procedures for tackling Question Three in our book, From Story to Judgment. In the book, we share a rubric and a template that breaks down the steps for teachers and students, from finding correlations between contextual factors and the outcome we’re interested in to testing explanatory hypotheses on comparable cases. Follow the steps. It really works! The book lays out a case study you may already use in your modern world history classes: Japan’s modernization and China’s collapse in response to imperialism. Why then and there, indeed! 

Still, gathering the materials necessary for students to formulate reasonable hypotheses about why events happen when and where they do, let alone to test them, is challenging and frequently laborious. Jon and I have started producing DBQs for 4QM teachers to use in the classroom to tackle Question Three in the classroom, like the one we designed for the book and others we have produced for clients. Once we’ve got a bunch ready, we’ll let you know when and where to find them.  

Quick Question Three Activities

In the meantime, there are actually lots of quick and relatively simple ways to practice the logic of explanation — the Question Three thinking skill — without conducting a full-blown explanatory inquiry. Here are some fun classroom options. 

1. For a classic quick hit of Question Three, use your maps. Earlier this fall, I did two of these with my 9th graders. First, we looked at a map of river valley civilizations. I asked them to notice the pattern: early agrarian societies by living major rivers. Why there and not elsewhere? They supplied the plausible mechanisms: fresh water for farming and drinking, and water-control projects for ambitious leaders. Then, another Q3 puzzle: the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Indus Valley civilizations were overrun by invaders. Their cultural and institutional traditions vanished. The Yellow River civilization became China. Why there and not in those other places? Again, our map tells a story (and our textbook tells it, too): China was relatively isolated by mountains, desert, and a vast ocean. Two chances to explain a difference with a difference in the same lesson!
2. The key to the map activities is that they present lots of information in a condensed, visual form. Charts and graphs can do the same thing. Any time you have one, use it to identify correlations — patterned associations between events that may (or may not) reflect a causal relationship. For example, we reported here on a conference workshop we did in 2019 on political protests in Hong Kong, a topic that feels even more poignant now that the Chinese government has dissolved the remnants of independent politics there. The Financial Times made Question Three easy for us by gathering salient data in graphic form. Here’s one rich example:

    

   That data is already old, but the trend still holds: Hong Kong used to be a major economic engine for China. Now, it plays a diminishing role in an increasingly industrialized country with many points of access to the global economy. Similar charts, widely available, show that China as a whole constitutes a much larger part of that global economy than it did back in 1997, when it was returned to China by Great Britain. Together, these charts help us to generate hypotheses about the timing of the central government’s abandonment of the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement it promised to uphold in 1997. We can know how Chinese leadership justifies its crackdown on Hong Kong by reading its public statements. (That’s Question Two.) We can figure out the timing of its decisions by considering Question Three in light of these pithy charts.

3. This one doesn’t even require charts or graphs: ask your students to identify the questions they’re asking and the claims they’re making. I recently did a judgment activity with my students. (That’s Question Four: What do we think about that?) As always, lots of what comes out in brainstorming in response to Question Four are claims about what will happen — great or terrible — if we choose a course of action. So, our deliberations about the virtues of political meritocracy as opposed to electoral democracy involved us in claims about how well each system deals with corruption and incompetence in leaders. Those are researchable Question Threes. We don’t actually need to know the answers in order to identify the core values and principles at stake in both systems. We do need to know what kinds of claims we’re making and questions we’re answering. Training students to get good at that makes them more faithful and effective discussion partners and much clearer thinkers.
4. The same logic works for reading the typical tertiary sources we rely on for so much of learning in history classes. Our textbooks tell us what happened. They are also chock full of causal claims — answers to Question Threes — typically presented without evidence. Teach your students to identify those claims. Ask them what evidence would and should satisfy them that they’re true. That exercise alone will make them better, more astute readers.

There’s no substitute for practicing the full-blown inquiry we describe in the book. But excellent preparation for it is all around us. Enjoy!

G.S.  

One of our favorite things about the Four Question Method (4QM) is how it helps social studies teachers to sort through and make better use of existing curriculum materials. We were reminded of this at a recent workshop when an eighth grade teacher said that he’d been using SHEG materials for years, and they sometimes work well in the classroom and sometimes don’t. He was really excited because he recognized that the Four Question Method gives him a framework to understand why some SHEG lessons work and others don’t, and the tools to make them succeed much more consistently. Understanding the 4QM makes planning engaging units and lessons using existing materials a lot easier. 

Most Curricula Don’t Understand Question Types

If you’re a social studies teacher or curriculum coordinator, you’ve probably heard of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) and maybe used their free curriculum materials. They’re a huge presence in our field. Another popular organization with a lot of free social studies curriculum is C3 Teachers. Like SHEG, it organizes social studies curriculum around student inquiry, and uses a lot of primary sources.

The problem with both of these groups’ materials is, as the teacher at our workshop found, that they don’t have a strong understanding of the different types of questions they are asking. This may be the pre-eminent problem in social studies curriculum. Most curriculum writers can’t identify the intellectual structures that differentiate between question types, so many of their inquiry lessons ask ambiguous questions, or boring questions, or questions that are rhetorically cute but impossible to answer honestly. (“Can Peace Lead To War?” Every time! Except when it doesn’t!) Without a clear understanding of question types, social studies teachers are left with vague similes and guesswork to determine what to ask students in order to elicit responsible thinking about the past. Sometimes they (or the curriculum writers) guess right, and the lesson goes well. Sometimes they guess wrong, and the lesson isn’t so great. Students don’t experience the cumulative intellectual growth that consistent questioning over time can produce. 

4QM Eliminates Guesswork

The Four Question Method takes the guesswork out of social studies inquiry. Teachers who understand the 4QM can use it to make existing curriculum materials much more effective in their classrooms. SHEG and C3 have done a great job of collecting and curating a wide range of primary and secondary sources related to important history topics, and presenting them in student-friendly formats. Most of their lessons can be tweaked into a 4QM format that will use those materials to teach social studies thinking clearly and consistently. 

Of course the gold standard would be curriculum materials designed for the Four Question Method from the beginning. We’ve started writing those materials, and our book describes how you can do the same. Let us know if you’d like to start a conversation about 4QM curriculum for your school or district. And in the meantime, apply the Four Questions to your existing curriculum materials — we think you (and your students) will enjoy the results.

J.B. 

In this post Jon describes how a storyboarding activity helped his students to make sense of lecture notes they’d taken on the Spanish Empire.

This week in my tenth grade AP World History class we were learning about the Portuguese and Spanish Empires of the 15th – 18th centuries. I gave the same lecture on the Spanish Empire to my two sections, first period and third period. I’m a big proponent of lecture as a teaching technique, especially for Question One, “What Happened?” A successful lecture is just a good story well told, and I was pleased with how well mine went. Most of my students were attentive, and most took pretty good notes, writing more than I had on the board, and some asked good questions.

But critics of lecture as a teaching technique are correct that unless we ask students to do something with the information they’ve noted, we can’t be sure of how much they’ve actually learned. So I followed my Spanish Empire lecture with a classic 4QM classroom activity: I had my students retell the story by illustrating a four-box storyboard. 

Storyboards As A Classroom Learning Activity

At 4QM Teaching we train teachers to use storyboards in unit planning, but we also use them a lot as a classroom teaching technique. They are a brilliant tool for forcing students to use information they’ve learned (whether from a lecture, reading, or some other source) to create a coherent and accurate historical narrative. Storyboarding is a powerful learning technique because it requires students to make decisions. They need to decide what information is relevant and important enough to include on their storyboards, they need to create illustrations that reflect a clear and accurate understanding of the story, and they need to decide how to divide the story into four sequential chapters that cover the whole assigned time frame. Making all of those decisions, especially if students are working with a partner or small group, requires a lot of interacting with and thinking about historical content.

From the teacher’s perspective, storyboards also function as an excellent check for understanding. Listening in on student conversations and asking questions about illustrations quickly reveals what students understand and don’t about the historical narrative you think you taught. 

Storyboarding can be scaffolded up or down, depending on what your students need. Many of my tenth graders don’t yet read or write on grade level, and it’s still early in an unusual post-pandemic school year. (If you’re a teacher, you know what I’m talking about — it’s been a rather bouncy fall, right?) So I made this storyboarding task a bit easier by giving students the date range for each box, keyed to turning points in the story I had articulated in my lecture. You can make the task harder by just giving a start and end date, and having students decide how to break the story into four chapters, or by giving no dates at all and having them make all the decisions.

Students were assigned to create a title for each box that reflected the events of that box’s date range, and to illustrate the box with appropriate pictures. I emphasized that art is not being graded (my “people” are usually just lollipops), but comprehension is. I scored the storyboards out of eight points: one each for the title and illustration in the four boxes.

How’d It Go?

The results were interesting, and humbling. Here’s some of what I noticed. 

First off, nearly everybody enjoys storyboarding. It’s fun to talk with your classmates, and it’s fun to draw. Second, the conversations about what to put in each box are great. Students pore over their notes, trying to figure out why I chose the dates for each box, arguing over what goes where, and debating appropriate titles. I had a lot of students waving and beckoning, asking me to “Check mine! Check mine!”

Second, a significant percentage of my students had taken what looked like good notes, but they didn’t fully understand them until they had to use them to retell the story. Students were confused about who was a Spaniard (Hernan Cortes) and who was an indigenous American (Moctezuma). They were confused about the sequence of events (the “Columbian Exchange” happened over many years, and after 1492). Storyboarding was an excellent way to surface and correct those misunderstandings. 

Third, because of scheduling, my third period class did the storyboard on the same day we finished the lecture, while my first period class did it the following day. The students who did it the same day had a much easier time of it. If there’s a cognitive scientist reading this, I’d love to know which you think is more effective for learning — I suspect waiting a day actually produces more retention, but I don’t actually know that. Comments welcome!

Fourth, drawing is a great way to have students whose written English is not strong express their understanding of historical narrative. As I mentioned before, many of my students are not yet strong writers.This activity put a premium on thinking about the history, not on thinking about spelling, sentence structure, word choice, or all the other things that go into writing.

I’m posting a picture of a sample storyboard from a strong student below. The box titles are:

1469 – 1492: The Catholic Kingdom

1492 – 1502: Discovery of New World

1502 – 1533: Conquering the New World

1533 – 1750: Social Hierarchy in Americas

If you’ve never tried storyboarding with your own students, I highly recommend it. We talk about it extensively and include an example from American history in our book, From Story To Judgment, and you can always reach out to us through the comments or by emailing us at info@4qmteaching.net if you’d like to talk more about it. 

J.B.

In this post Gary describes two quick ways to get students practicing the historical thinking skills of narration and interpretation.

In our new book, From Story to Judgment, we describe gold-standard activities — we call them “inquiry labs” — for practicing the Four Questions and the historical thinking skills associated with each of them: narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment. It was important to me and Jon to get those inquiry labs right, because we wanted to be super clear about what skillful thinking really means and how we can practice it with real students in real classroom settings. There are lots of empty-calorie activities out there and lots of fakery in what are billed as ‘rigorous’ activities and assessments. We want teachers to take their questions seriously so that students learn how to do it, too. That’s what drives real and skillful thinking. So we worked hard to lay out what that means for each of the Four Questions. 

We also included playcards in the book, in which we describe lots of ways to practice those thinking skills without committing the substantial class and prep time a full-blown inquiry lab requires. The playcards include quick-hit activities that can exercise the minds of students in the ordinary flow of a lesson. 

This year, I’m finding tons of cool, quick ways to get my students practicing elements of each of the core thinking skills, many of which I’ve never tried (or imagined) before. What’s great about these quick activities is that they require very little preparation on my part beyond selecting decent narrative sources for my students to read. 

The NARRATIVE SYNTAX Game

Here’s an example: my students read a textbook section on an early Chinese dynasty. There isn’t much story there: the Shang dynasty consolidated power, coerced workers into building walled cities, oversaw irrigation projects, and made war against border tribes. Then the dynasty collapsed and a new aristocratic family, the Zhou, took over the Yellow River valley.

The textbook version of the Shang story is fairly static. Aside from coming to power and losing it, the ‘story’ is basically a list of actions and accomplishments. That, it turns out, is no obstacle to practicing narration. We played a game: tell me what the Shang rulers and people did. In table teams, my students made lists from their notes of all the things the Shang did. Then we went around, in turn and at pace, with no repetition allowed. Much vigorous talking ensued.

It sounds perfectly obvious, but the action is all in the syntax. Every qualifying utterance must be a sentence, and every sentence has to start with a subject — the Shang rulers, the Shang people, someone historical and identifiable. And every subject must be followed by an action verb. That, it turns out, is genuinely challenging for students who are accustomed to copying lists of information from their textbooks. Students couldn’t respond with “irrigation” or “bronze weapons.” They had to say, “Shang rulers built irrigation canals,” or even better, “Shang rulers made their subjects build irrigation canals.” 

The thinking skill we were practicing is drawn right from the narration rubric in Chapter One in the book. The second row of that rubric describes “Agency,” the narrator’s capacity to say who did what (to whom). That’s a core element of storytelling. Learning to read through that lens is a core element of an essential historical thinking skill. My students got to practice it. 

The INTERPRETation Game

The next day, we played a similar game with Question Two. This time students had to say what the Zhou rulers thought or believed using the information in the textbook. Just from reading their notes, students could say, “The Zhou thought that natural disasters were a sign that the ruling dynasty had lost Heaven’s approval for their rule.” Once that Question Two claim has been aired, things get interesting. Now you need to begin making inferences about what the Zhou must have assumed to be true about the world if they believed in the Mandate of Heaven. For example, students now had to say things like, “The early Zhou rulers probably believed that they would do a better job controlling floods than the Shang.” That activity made for a great, low-cost and high-return practice in one of the core elements of interpretation: unpacking the assumptions implicit in an author’s meaningful text or utterance. 

My students have already done and will continue to do all the usual 4QM stuff this year. We made storyboards for the creation of the imperial system, from Zhou to Han. We did a full-blown interpretation, with rubric and template, of selections from Confucius’ Analects. And we’ll do a formal judgment exercise on Confucianism as a governing ideology soon enough. 

But it’s good to know that we can practice thinking every day, simply by focusing on the language we use to recount what we’ve learned about what people did and what they were thinking while they did it. The activities may be quick, but they add up. I’m wagering that, among other things, that daily focus on language will make my students better readers of historical sources, which are chock full of responses to Question One and Question Two. 

G.S.

We history and social studies teachers know we should be asking our students to think about the history they’re learning, not just memorize it, so we often ask questions that look like thinking questions. But many of these questions don’t actually require the kind of historical thinking that we say we want students to do. Many of them are impossible to answer honestly — so our students fake it, and so do we. Fortunately, there’s a better way. By focusing on the Four Questions that are at the heart of our discipline, students and teachers can practice real thinking every day, and can get consistently better at it over time. 

Fake Questions Are Like Fool’s Gold

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Last week I was digging through some old curriculum materials for my AP World History course (taught to tenth graders at the urban charter school where I work) and I came across a set of slides for a lecture on the Ottoman Empire. The slides were pretty good: well organized, with engaging images, light on text. They outlined a clear narrative of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, from the 1300s through the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent. Then the last slide was a classic fake question. It asked students to use their notes to write a short paragraph in response to the prompt, 

“Identify the leading cause of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.”

This looks like a thinking question. We imagine that students would have to review their notes, identify elements of the narrative that “caused” Ottoman expansion, then weigh them against each other and identify one as the “leading cause.” But this question is intellectual fool’s gold: it only looks like the real thing. A few moments’ honest reflection will show us that the question can’t really be answered with the information we’ve provided. The slides tell students that the Ottomans were among the first military forces to use gunpowder weapons, and that their military was very well led during their expansionist phase. Was one of these the “leading cause” of Ottoman expansion? Which one? Let’s imagine a “debate” between two students, one of whom insists that all the excellent leadership in the world wouldn’t result in expansion without gunpowder weapons, and the other  insisting that gunpowder weapons would be useless in the hands of poorly led troops. Both positions seem quite logical.

A typical history teacher move in this situation is to tell students, “There’s no right answer. As long as you can give evidence to support your thinking, you’ll get credit.” But there’s no “evidence” available to students that would demonstrate why either gunpowder weapons or military leadership was more important to Ottoman expansion. So all we’re really asking students to do is to find and repeat back to us one of the things we just told them in the lecture. We’re not asking for rigorous cause and effect thinking. 

When we ask this kind of question we’re asking students to fake it, and when we tell them “there’s no right answer” we’re telling them that we accept their fakery. We’re taking intellectual payment in fool’s gold.

Fortunately, we don’t have to do that. We can use a typology of Four Questions to engage students in real thinking, and help them dig for real intellectual gold.

A Better Way

The “leading cause” question is an example of what we at 4QM Teaching call a “Question Three: Why Then and There?” Question Threes are rigorous and a lot of fun — but doing them honestly is challenging. That’s part of the reason it’s Question Three, rather than one or two: students need to know a lot before they can answer questions about historical causality well. 

My lecture slides on the Ottomans were actually answering Question One, “What Happened?” History and social studies teachers often rush through Question One because it seems like it is not a thinking question. But if you’ve ever asked students to retell a narrative that you just taught them, you’ll find that the thinking skills of chronology, selecting key elements of the story, and accurately showing change over time are actually very demanding. In our book and in our blog we have a lot of suggestions about how you can get students to exercise their narrative thinking skills. One of these would be a good closing activity (or homework assignment) for my Ottomans lecture, rather than asking students an unanswerable question. 

Good Questions

In our book we identify the Four Questions that are at the heart of teaching and learning in social studies, and show teachers how to use them in the classroom. They’re simple and direct, but also intellectually demanding and rigorous. Building lessons, units, and courses around the Four Questions cuts out the fakery and teaches real historical thinking skills. 

We had a gratifying moment at a workshop last summer when a middle school social studies teacher told us, “These questions are MUCH better than the ones I’ve been asking.” She knew she’d been faking it, and was thrilled to have the tools to make thinking real for her students. The Four Question Method can make thinking real for you and your students too — you can stop trading in intellectual fool’s gold, and dig for the real thing instead.

J.B. 

In this post Jon plugs an awesome book on teaching writing, and explains why templates are a great tool for teaching students to think.

“They Say, I Say”

On the recommendation of the presenter at an AP workshop I attended this summer I recently picked up a copy of They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. This book does a truly excellent job of breaking down analytical writing into its component parts (“the moves that matter”) and teaching them to students. The major tool the authors use to do that is templates. Graff and Birkenstein give a whole series of sentence frames — sentences with blanks for the specific information — that show students precisely how good writers do things like, “Introducing Quotations,” “Explaining Quotations,” and “Disagreeing, With Reasons.” Their chapters explain how to use the templates to create powerful academic essays. It’s a great book.

Interestingly enough, the book’s preface makes it clear that not everyone shares my opinion. There’s a whole section called, “OK – But Templates?” that opens with the acknowledgment that “some instructors may have reservations about templates” (xix). But the authors respond with this explanation: 

The trouble is that many students will never learn on their own to make the key intellectual moves that our templates represent. While seasoned writers pick up these moves unconsciously through their reading, many students do not. Consequently, we believe, students need to see these moves represented in the explicit ways that templates provide. (xix)

This passage resonated strongly with me for two reasons. First, as a veteran history teacher who spent years in wealthy suburban district schools before returning to urban education in 2018, I am constantly reminded of how many intellectual moves middle class kids learn unconsciously that less privileged students need to be taught explicitly. Second, explicit instruction in intellectual moves — through templates — is precisely what we offer in our own book, From Story to Judgment. 

Make The Implicit Explicit

Most social studies teachers and students are only unconsciously aware of the questions that define our discipline. Consequently, most of us don’t think explicitly and carefully about the intellectual moves required to answer them responsibly. I know I didn’t, until developing the Four Question Method with Gary and writing a book about it forced me to. The goal of our book is to allow everybody in the social studies classroom — those who pick up the intellectual moves of history unconsciously through their reading and those who do not — to have an equal shot at understanding and success. We’ve seen the Four Question Method improve teaching and learning in all types of schools, from wealthy to high-poverty. While the leverage is greatest for students who face great disadvantages, it turns out that everyone benefits from more intellectual clarity in the social studies classroom.

That goal, and our use of intellectual templates to achieve it, means that From Story to Judgment shares a world-view with They Say, I Say. I’ve written before about other books that have this same outlook, most notably  Reading Reconsidered and The Writing Revolution. Like the authors of these books, Gary and I believe that complex cognitive tasks like reading, writing, and thinking about history can be “x-rayed” and explained in ways that are comprehensible to everyone. And we believe that social justice demands that all students be given explicit access to this knowledge and these skills. We hope that our book will join these others in helping to achieve that goal.

J.B.

It’s official. Our book, From Story to Judgment: The Four Question Method for Teaching and Learning History, is out in the world. Judge for yourself! 

Whatever happens with the book — whoever reads it and whatever they get from it — writing it did a ton for us. Having to explain the Four Questions patiently in print certainly made us clearer about our method and the thinking skills it aims at. In the book, we work through specific examples of how to answer each of the questions in a skillful way. Creating those demonstrations, knowing that we’d have to share our work with an adult audience of professionals, forced us to practice what we’ve been preaching in a sobering and edifying way. The book has already made us smarter, better teachers.  

We hope that reading our book does the same for you. We think the odds are good. If you’re reading this blog post, you’re already an unusual teacher. You’re looking for things to read and do beyond what you’ve already figured out on your own and with colleagues. You’re hungry enough about your craft to seek more stimulation, more advice, more engagement about how to engage students in thinking about the human world in your classrooms. It’s safe to say that you are more likely than the average teacher to read a book like ours. You’re also more likely to implement whatever you learn from it independently in a way that improves your teaching practice. 

Most teachers don’t do that. That’s not meant to be a knock on “most teachers.” Lord knows that our field is challenging enough as it is without adding independent professional learning to the mix. Math majors who become teachers start their careers pretty much knowing all the math they’ll ever need. History and the social sciences produce no undergraduate experts. Even if you’ve got a masters or doctorate in one of our disciplines, what you don’t know vastly exceeds what you do. And history keeps piling up, to say nothing of fresh discoveries and interpretations of our past. That should keep us all plenty busy. 

But the reality is, a book on how to teach and learn social studies will help primarily those with the drive and discipline to make changes on their own. That’s a minority in any field; ours is no exception. So, I’m thrilled the book is out and available. And I believe that *you* will profit from it, without any supplements. 

But there’s a lot even a spectacular book, let alone one by first-time book authors, simply cannot accomplish.

Our book is an expression of our consulting practice. We’ve done lots of workshops with teachers from lots of different kinds of schools. We learned a ton doing that. Eventually we wrote it down, and now our learning is out in the world as a book. Fortunately, writing a book is only one way to share what you’ve learned with a larger community. 

And so, on to the next 4QM project. We’ve discovered, again through our consulting practice, that designing workshops around 4QM-aligned curriculum materials is a tremendously effective way to train teachers in the techniques that have improved our own pedagogy. For example, we recently wrote a unit on the rise and fall of the Roman Republic for a client. We then built workshops around that curriculum, working through each of the Four Questions as we went. The workshops were productive and the teachers, both veterans in the topic and those new to it, appeared to profit. And the teachers got to leave the workshop with the curriculum ready to go for their classes. 

We used that same curriculum again with groups of teachers from another district. Again, the value of teaching an open hand of model, 4QM-aligned curriculum was clear. We’re under no illusions about that second workshop. It demonstrated a method for teaching students to tell a great story, take it apart, and practice thinking skills along the way. But for those who aren’t going to teach ancient Rome, they need one more step: bona fide 4QM curriculum for the courses they actually teach. 

Workshops, books, and demonstrations are all terrific. For teachers with the drive and time and gumption to work things out for themselves, that’s all you really need. But there’s no good reason that a quality curriculum has to be fashioned teacher by teacher, classroom by classroom. We’re not interested in scripting daily lessons. Only teachers know who they and their students are in the classroom, and so only teachers are well equipped to make pedagogical decisions at that granular level. But we are very keen on providing teachers with the resources they need to build daily lessons for their own students that harness the power of story and lead them, step by step, from story to judgment, giving them practice in core thinking skills along the way. 

Meanwhile, a new school year is underway. Once the dust settles, we’ll get going on our next project, writing 4QM curriculum materials. Meanwhile, you hard-core folks should buy the book. I’m quite confident you’ll know what to do with it. 

G.S. 

We’ve known for a long time that primates like puzzles. In this post Jon explains how the Four Question Method leverages that reality for social studies classes, using examples from the 4QM Teaching book, From Story To Judgment.

Reading About Monkeys

As part  of this year’s back-to-school professional development at the school where I teach tenth grade world history we read about a well-known study of motivation in monkeys. In 1949 some University of Wisconsin psychologists put some mechanical puzzles into monkey cages, and were surprised to find that the monkeys put a lot of effort into solving the puzzles, even though they got no extrinsic rewards for doing so. They seemed to enjoy the puzzle solving just for the fun of it.

The point of the professional development reading was clear: if we can harness intrinsic motivation of our students by giving them fun puzzles to solve, we can motivate learning more effectively than we can by setting up a transactional relationship between work and grades. At 4QM Teaching we agree completely. One of the main advantages of the Four Question Method is that it gives history and social studies teachers a practical tool to turn history/social studies lessons into puzzles. Humans are the most sophisticated primates, and primates like puzzles.

4QM = Puzzle Building

Gary and I joke that if we had 4QM bumper stickers they would say “Story First!” Question One is, “What Happened?”, and 4QM trained teachers coach their students to answer it by telling a true historical story. At first glance it may seem that this question doesn’t offer much opportunity for puzzle-building. It’s true that Question One relies on another powerful feature of human brains in addition to our interest in puzzles: the fact that we really like stories. But when teachers launch a 4QM history unit, we set up the story of the unit as a puzzle. Here’s a common example from U.S. History:

In 1763 the thirteen British colonies in North America were happy and proud to be British, and had just defeated France in a major war. Only twenty years later they had declared their independence and allied with France to defeat Britain in a war to secure that independence. What happened?!? 

It may seem counterintuitive to tell students the ending of the unit story on the first day, but it’s the contrast between the story’s setting and outcome that sparks our puzzle-solving curiosity. For curious students, the story of the American Revolution then becomes much more than a list of names, dates, and “key terms.” It becomes the solution to the puzzle of how such a dramatic change happened in such a short time.

Question Two is, “What Were They Thinking?” Once we’ve established our story, we introduce students to some of the interesting people in that story. Some of these people will do things that we find dramatic, or significant, or confusing — which gives us another opportunity for puzzle-building. Here’s another example from U.S. history:

Jane Addams was a wealthy college educated 19th century American woman who decided to live in a poor immigrant neighborhood in Chicago — the kind of place young ladies like here were most definitely advised to keep clear of. What was she thinking?!?

Good Question Two puzzles activate our curiosity, then take us out of our present world and immerse us in the past. Addams had some ideas about helping the poor that we would recognize today, and had others that we would probably find unfamiliar. When we start to understand Jane Addams on her own terms we’re really learning something new.

Question Three is, “Why Then and There?” This Question pulls back from the story and the people who made it happen, and asks about underlying conditions and context. In our book we explore a classic Question Three from world history about the age of imperialism.

In the mid-19th century both China and Japan were forced open to Western trade, and had to reckon with their military and political weakness compared to the industrialized imperial powers. Modernizing reformers existed in both places, but by the early 20th century only Japan had become an industrial power. What factors explain why modernizers failed in China but succeeded in Japan? 

A full Question Three puzzle gives students documents and data that allow them to compare and contrast two different places or two different times, so that they can identify relevant factors and hypothesize about how those factors might explain the different outcomes. (Our answer to this question focuses on the political power of the landowning classes, who tended to oppose modernization and were stronger in China than in Japan.) But you can engage students’ curiosity around Question Three without curating a full document and data set — once they understand how Question Three puzzles work, they can identify them themselves, theorize about possible explanations, and describe the data they’d need to support them. Most students genuinely want to know why wars are lost or won, why some countries are rich and others are poor, why movements succeed or fail. These are all examples of Question Three puzzles.

Once students know a story and have explored the thinking of the people in the story and the context in which they made their decisions, they are ready to answer Question Four: “What Do We Think About That?” Question Fours are puzzles of self-reflection. Students judge someone or something from the story, and have to say if they find them admirable or not — and why. If we’ve set the question up well, the answers aren’t easy, and students will disagree. The point of a Question Four puzzle is not to arrive at “the” answer; it’s to understand ourselves, and to understand how different people might arrive at different judgments from ours. In our book we ask about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa, people who had committed political violence during apartheid were offered a kind of bargain: make a full confession for the public record, and be released from any possible prosecution or punishment. This process is known as “restorative justice,” and it contrasts with the most common form of justice in Western societies, which is called “retributive justice.” We ask students,

“Was restorative justice a good choice for post-apartheid South Africa?”

In answering this Question students need to understand the history of South Africa, but they also need to develop an understanding of their own beliefs and values, and to begin to articulate some general principles that they would be willing to stand by in their own lives in the present day. Good Question Four classes become examples of civil and civic discourse, something that seems to be sorely lacking in our current climate.

Grades and Puzzles

In whatever format they are given, grades are an important tool for communicating whether students are mastering the knowledge and skills we want them to learn, and as such they can be a positive motivator. But if the intellectual tasks that lead to mastery of knowledge and skills are set up like puzzles (and stories), our students are much more likely to find enjoyment in the work that leads to mastery. After all, primates like puzzles.

J.B.

Click Here to Order From Story To Judgment: The Four Question Method for Teaching and Learning Social Studies

Gary and I are high school teachers, but as we’ve been expanding our 4QM work we’ve been doing more with the middle and elementary grades. This post describes some great 4QM curriculum written by Alex Hoyt, an award-winning fifth grade teacher in Hudson, Massachusetts. Read on to see how the Four Questions can make the American Revolution come alive for ten and eleven year olds, and to get links to Alex’s materials!

“The Swiss Army Knife of History Teaching”

Hudson is an economically diverse suburb west of Boston that has embraced 4QM training for its social studies department. Alex describes the Four Question Method this way: 

“The Four Question Method is the Swiss army knife of history teaching. It gives me four tools, each with multiple uses. It cuts through all the red tape I have in my head about planning, and gives me and my students a clear and smart way to think about what we’re learning.”

Not surprisingly, we love this quotation. We especially like the metaphor of “cutting through all the red tape” around planning. Alex explained that planning lessons can feel treacherous, especially when you’re new, because you feel your responsibilities deeply — and you have a lot of them. You’re supposed to address your state content standards, and one or more lists of “historical thinking skills.” And don’t forget to emphasize civics (very hot these days!), and make sure you design lessons that are student-centered and engaging. In Alex’s experience, the Four Question Method allows him to meet all his responsibilities without having to overthink. If you plan your unit around the Four Questions, you’ll be teaching historical thinking skills. If you design lessons in which students do the intellectual work of actually answering the questions, your lessons will be student-centered and engaging. If you have them discuss their answers with each other while reflecting and debating, you’ll be teaching civic dispositions. And of course you’ll address your state content standards, because 4QM teaching always starts with a story.

What Was King George Thinking?

This spring Alex created a 4QM style unit on the lead-up to the American Revolution. He decided to tell the story of the events between the French and Indian War, which the British won in 1763, and the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major military engagement of the revolutionary war. His clever hook for the unit was to put the students in the position of British King George III. In each lesson he would teach them a little bit of the story (each called “the situation” in the attached materials), and then ask what they would have done if they had been King George III. He then taught them what the King actually did, and asked them to consider Question Two: What was King George thinking?

The summative activities for the unit included activities for Questions One, Two, and Four. For Question One, Alex had students retell the story they had learned using a storyboard. He gave them a choice of words or pictures for their storyboard boxes, and introduced a fun new twist for this assignment: he would roll a die to determine how many boxes each student got to tell the story. The minimum allowable number was three, so he simply rerolled if the die came up one or two. 

The Question Two activity was a writing assignment that asked students to sum up what they had determined about what the King was thinking at the start of the conflict, and then after the Battle of Bunker Hill. And the Question Four activity was a class discussion about the question, “Did King George do anything wrong?”, followed by individual writing in response to the question. Check out Alex’s materials here.

4QM In Grade Five

Alex took about a week to teach this unit; three days for the situations and King George’s responses, and two days for the storyboards. He reported that “It was fun, and according to the products kids made, effective as well!” This is a great example of how the Four Question Method can help teachers and students in the elementary grades make social studies memorable and meaningful. Over the next year, we’re planning to produce more 4QM teaching and learning materials, focusing on grades four through eight. Hopefully we’ll see more from Mr. Hoyt!

J.B.