Category: 4QM Teaching

We claim at 4QM Teaching that there are four social studies thinking skills and that one of them is “narration,” the ability to tell a true story about human interaction accurately and coherently. Now, since storytelling is ubiquitous and, as cognitive scientists tell us, “psychologically privileged,” you might think that there’s not much there to teach or learn. If that’s your hunch, here’s a simple test of the proposition: ask a novice to try it. 

My wager is that you’ll have the same results I did. Once Jon and I figured out that our students should be telling stories in our classes, I started asking mine to do it. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet figured out how to teach them to do it well. The results were revealing: most of them listed events. This happened, then that happened, etc. No actors, no intentions, no causal connections. More knowledgeable students provided longer lists. All were equally boring. 

If David McCullough or Jill Lepore did that, you would have no idea who they were. That you do is a result of their skillful deployment of their capacious knowledge of American history. Our students can learn their techniques. They must: it will make them more knowledgeable, more analytically precise, and happier about having to learn all this stuff anyway.

Storyboarding = Thinking

In Question One (What happened?) lessons, we ask students to learn a true story and tell it back. The tell-it-back part is crucial, and the part we history teachers most often overlook. Having students tell the story back has a bunch of benefits. First, students get to practice and consolidate what they just learned. Second, both they and you get to see what they know, what they sort-of know, and what they simply got wrong. In other words, telling a story back is a great technique for formative assessment. Third, your students get to practice narration, one of the disciplinary thinking skills that define our omnibus field, social studies. 

There are lots of ways to tell a story. Our favorite for student storytelling in a Q1 lesson is storyboarding. (Movie-makers use storyboards to plan their films. But remember: our stories are better than Pixar’s!) 

Storyboarding in history class works like this: each student gets a blank storyboard with four boxes in landscape orientation on an 8.5 x 11” sheet of paper. Their task, working cooperatively in a small group, is to chunk the story they just learned into those four boxes and assign each box a brief descriptive title and date range. Once the group has come to consensus on box titles and date ranges, each student then illustrates the main action of the box on their own. (Here’s an example of a completed storyboard from our US History course.) 

In order to complete their storyboards, students need to do a bunch of beneficial things with their brains. First, they have to decide where to begin and end their version of the story. Then they have to make decisions about how to chunk the story into coherent chapters. All of that requires decision making about the relative importance of actions and events. Given the space constraints of the storyboard, they also have to figure out what to omit entirely. As a group, they need to condense further by agreeing on a descriptive title for each box. Then, working individually, they need to figure out how to use images to represent the action they talked about. 

As we know from Daniel Willingham, we remember what we think about. Students who make storyboards remember more stories! 

Storyboarding = Engaging Assessment

In a 4QM classroom, as students work in their groups they typically check their notes and correct one another. Sometimes they call the teacher over to settle a dispute. Often they’ll settle it themselves. In any case, when they’ve completed their storyboards, we generally ask several students to present their storyboards to their classmates. (Document cameras are great tools for this job.) The presentations also allow us all to deliberate as a class about the meaning and relative merits of the inevitable variation in narrative choices. They also give our students salutary repetition of the story—more practice, more memory. 

Both activities, storyboarding and oral presentation, give us as teachers an opportunity to provide our historical narrators-in-training with low-stakes feedback on their work using our Q1 rubric. 

Students can get good at narration pretty quickly. (That may be where the psychological privilege comes in.) When they do, they feel great. And since they’re now telling stories rather than reciting arid lists, listening and responding become relatively effortless for auditors. And so, there’s one more reason—besides improving memory, stimulating thinking, and creating opportunities for feedback, metacognition and skillful practice—to have your students do storytelling in class: it’s terrifically good fun. 

G.S.

Is your pedagogy student centered? Are your assessments authentic? Is your curriculum relevant to today’s students? Are your lessons focused on 21st-century skills rather than mere content? If so, you’re an educational progressive. We’re not. At 4QM we’ve recently taken to calling ourselves “neo-traditionalists.” Here are three defining characteristics of our approach.

1. We believe that content comes first 

People can’t think about what they don’t know, so the first goal of school should be for students to learn stuff. If you think learning content is irrelevant today because of smartphones or AI, you misunderstand how the human brain works. All the “critical thinking skills” that progressives want to teach kids are predicated on content knowledge. If your working memory is tied up figuring out your search terms or reading whatever ChatGPT just told you (hallucinations and all!), you don’t have the cognitive resources left over to “think critically” about anything. If you don’t learn a lot, you won’t be able to think a lot.

The original educational progressives were rebelling against 19th century schools that required students to memorize content and recite it back, full stop. They were right to complain about that. But today’s progressives are totally wrong to denigrate content knowledge. You can’t ask intelligent questions if you don’t know where to begin asking. That’s why our mantra at 4QM is “Story First!”

2. We believe that “relevance” is irrelevant 

When educational progressives trumpet “relevance” they sometimes talk about the “real world” or “authentic” experiences, as if things that happen outside of school are ipso facto more interesting to students than things that happen inside school. At other times they push the notion that children’s interests never wander far from themselves and things they’ve directly experienced. Both of these premises are demonstrably false. If you’ve ever seen a four year old who is excited and deeply knowledgeable about dinosaurs, or a teenager who is entranced by the Roman Empire, you know that the progressive “relevance” trope is simply wrong. You know what gets young people excited about content? Learning it in a way that helps them succeed with reasonable effort and guidance. Learning it in a way that builds their knowledge coherently. Learning it in a way that reveals the structure of the discipline beneath the content. 

The original educational progressives complained that learning dead languages like Latin and Greek were not relevant to most students. They had a point. But today’s progressives are wrong to think that all kids care about is their own here and now. Students become interested in content if we teach them well and structure their learning so that they can succeed. 

3. We believe that technology is a distraction 

Recent technological innovations – smartphones and social media – were explicitly designed to be distracting. But even the older ones – computers and laptops – are just as distracting in the classroom. That’s because computer technology does not change the essential task of education: to teach kids important content and how to think about it. Technology puts a shiny bauble in between kids and learning. Technology is expensive for schools and without educational benefits for most students. Most defenses of technology in the classroom are just variations on the “relevance” arguments addressed above: we need computers in the classroom because they’re important in the ‘real world,’ or because kids are familiar with them already. This makes no sense. Airplanes are important in the real world, but we don’t need them in the classroom. Kids are familiar with microwave ovens, but we don’t need them in the classroom.

Instead of getting distracted by flashy new inventions, we should use technology that actually helps kids learn. The 4QM curriculum is built around students articulating their thoughts through writing. By hand. Writing is an old technology — one that doesn’t distract from learning, but enhances it. 

These three principles separate us from educational progressives. We’re “neo” traditionalists because we’re not advocating a return to 18th century schooling — we acknowledge that educational progressives got some important things right. But today they get too many things wrong. 

How should students prepare for their new world? Learn a lot. Think a lot. Read and write a lot. Argue and get feedback. Sounds like school, right? We’ve got work to do.

G.S & J.B.

This post is by guest author Christopher Blake Waller, of Center Middle School in Center, Texas.

When I first became an educator, I wanted what every educator wants for their students. I wanted them to master the content, to demonstrate growth, to think critically, to be challenged, and to have opportunities to develop meaningful, transferable skills. I also wanted them to grow in their capacity to articulate their thoughts and opinions, both in writing and in speech.

It wasn’t very long, however, before something more pressing began to weigh on me. Observations of students, colleagues, social media, and the news led me to a frightening reality: people often struggle to have meaningful and productive conversations with those who disagree with them. I wanted my students to practice and strengthen their ability to listen attentively, especially when we hear things that don’t align with their own beliefs and values, and to seek to understand others and their worldviews before jumping to judgment. 

Like many social studies educators, I struggled to find a cohesive curriculum that addressed my concerns and helped me to meet my goals. When it came to lesson planning, I had tons of resources at my disposal and teacher tools in my belt. Still, it always felt like I was piecing together a complicated puzzle: one made from the pieces of five completely different puzzles! Getting the materials, lessons, and resources to work together successfully was impossible – haphazard at best, educational malpractice at worst. 

And then, by happenstance I stumbled upon From Story to Judgment and devoured it. When I recognized how the four questions worked together and turned every unit of study into a practicum in judgment, focusing on the very things that were near and dear to my own heart as an educator, I put the impossible-to-solve, five-in-one puzzle back on the shelf. No turning back.

Now I start every school year by sharing a story with my students that sets the tone for the year and helps them get oriented to the Four Questions – it’s my take on “Story First!” It helps them understand the bigger picture of the skills we will be learning and captures the heart of what drew me into this method in the first place. The story I share is fictional, but relatable, especially for my 8th graders. It goes like this: 

Aren’t we so quick to jump to judgment?

Imagine this: a fight breaks out in the cafeteria. In the middle of one of the lunches. Administrators and the school officer are present. The risks are extremely high, and the consequences are likely to be severe. Yet – it happens. Two of your classmates tie into it – right there in the lunch line.

And what happens? News spreads fast. Quickly, students who weren’t even in the cafeteria begin excitedly sharing the news: “Did you hear that Jimmy and Janie had a fight?”

“Did you hear who won?”

“Can you believe what Jimmy said?”

“Did you see what Janie did?”

“I heard the Principal said…”

And before long, there are multiple stories, multiple sides, multiple interpretations of what happened. And what are we often quick to do? Jump to judgment and pick a side. Spread the details before verifying anything. 

Have you ever shared something in a situation like this, only to find out that your assumptions, your judgements, your understanding of the situation were way off base and that knowing the context actually changed everything… dramatically? We’ve all been there. 

What if instead we slowed down and asked: What happened? What is the story? Gain the facts – the real facts. That involves some intentional, hard work. Who was involved? Who said or did what? Who was actually there? And so forth.

What if once we had the facts of the situation, we asked: What were they thinking? What was going on in the heads of those involved? Prior, during, and after? We get into the heads of those most directly involved and affected and begin to develop some clearer interpretations.

And then, what if we asked: Why then and there? Why in the cafeteria? In the middle of lunch? With administrators and the school cop very near and present? Where there was so much risk? What was so explosive about the moment – what factors and conditions led to it breaking out here, of all places? And not some other place? (Where the Principal wouldn’t immediately sweep in and take charge…)

And what if once we gained all of that information – systematically, methodically, intentionally – we asked a final question: what do WE think about that? The emphasis is on the WE because civil discourse is so important – fleshing out our ideas and arguments and understanding within a community that has decided to hold each other accountable and sharpen one another. The WE doesn’t mean we have to all agree, but it does mean we treat each other with respect and hold learning, high expectations, critical thinking, and good old-fashioned hard work in high regard. This is when, with all the work of the former three questions clearly held before us, we give our opinions and understandings of what happened. It’s the opposite of jumping to judgment. We flesh out arguments and ideas. We develop guiding principles and apply them to real-world situations. We debate and refine our thinking.

We love to give our opinions – especially when it is behind a screen or a keyboard – but, and I’ve been guilty of this time and time again, we often fail to do the hard work required of asking the simple, yet profound questions of: What happened? What were they thinking? Why then and there? It can be so easy to fall into this trap in any given situation as it relates to world events, politics, community struggles, or even the stories and dramas of our own personal lives. Only when we have done the hard work of answering the first three questions are we ready to begin exploring together the final question: what do we think about that?

What my students learn from this story

One lesson of this story is, I hope, obvious: be leery of gossip – it is a dangerous beast. But a more important lesson is that the story raises questions for my listeners – and those questions are directly related to each of the four skills that we learn in 4QM: narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment. This was exactly what I was longing for my students to begin learning and mastering: the ability to move from story to judgment through the learning of meaningful transferable skills.

Would our world, our communities, our schools be a bit different and a bit better if we operated this way, utilizing the skills embedded within these Four Questions with fidelity?

I think so.

And my students do, too.

Blake Waller
Center, TX

This post is also available on our Substack.

We have a motto at 4QM: Story First! We even made “Story First!” stickers. I have one on my computer. It’s a good conversation starter when I’m working at a coffee shop. 

“Story First!” condenses an argument about how to teach and learn social studies well. Students can’t think about what they don’t know. Since we want our students to learn to think skillfully about the human world, we first need to make sure they acquire some knowledge about that world. “Story First!” means, then, that social studies education has to start with historical knowledge, an answer to Question One: What happened?

That’s the first part of the argument. The second part is this: the best way to build content knowledge about the human world is through learning and telling stories. 

This post assumes that you’re on board already with building knowledge to enable thinking. Below, I defend the second part, about storytelling. 

Why Stories Work

Daniel Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, explains why stories are so effective at getting students to understand, engage, and remember what we teach them. 

We’ve all heard repeatedly that we should build on prior knowledge – connect what you want kids to learn to what they already know. That’s fine, but what happens when I have to teach my students about, well, anything that happened anywhere before 2011?  

It turns out that story form is the prior knowledge we build on. Here’s how it works: 

[S]tories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events don’t happen randomly in stories. There must be a causal connection, so if the cause is not immediately apparent, the audience will think carefully about the previous action to try to connect it to present events (p. 67).

I may not know the story you’re about to teach me, but I do know what a story is and how it works. And I knew that as a small child. I knew, from both listening and living, that a story consists of someone doing something, which in turn triggers a reaction from someone else, and so on. Or, as Willingham puts it: “The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as ‘psychologically privileged’” (p. 65). Stories are velcro for the learning brain. 

Second, according to Willingham, stories are inherently interesting. That’s because stories work like puzzles and games; all of them require problem-solving. As Willingham says, “Problem solving brings pleasure” (p. 9). 

Well-crafted stories require their auditors or readers to make repeated “medium-difficulty inferences.” For example, a story will invite us to wonder what purpose an actor or character had for doing whatever they did. (We will try to infer their intentions and motivations.) We will also wonder about what will happen next – how others will respond, how the actor’s plans and projects will turn out, whether they’ll solve their problem or make it worse. We don’t have to try to do this when we audit a narrative. It’s just what our brains do in response to narration. That’s why it’s hard not to listen in at the cafe when someone at the next table is telling a juicy story.

When we guess right about a story, we feel good, just like we feel when we solve a puzzle or win a game. And if one in our series of medium-difficulty inferences turns out to be wrong – I thought the character would get away with that! – we get a backup reward: surprise. And, not to worry, another opportunity to predict will be along shortly. 

Finally, stories are memorable. We want students to remember what they learn, of course. Consider, then, how stories work to make information memorable. Remember those medium-difficulty inferences? They have another, more generic name: thinking. 

It turns out that, as Willingham says (in many places), “memory is the residue of thought” (p. 53). We remember what we think about. Well-told stories help our students to think and remember. 

History Beats Pixar

The first question our students need to ask and answer about any topic in social studies is Question One: What Happened? And now we know: the most effective way to answer Question One is with a (true) story. Luckily for us, almost all our stories come preloaded with exactly the elements that Willingham says define an effective story: conflict, causality, complications, and character (p. 63). People pay good money to be entertained by Pixar and Disney who, notoriously, make their stories up. Our stories are better – weirder, gorier, more surprising, more dramatic – and they’re actually true! 

In our last post, Jon explained why our 4QM curriculum has exactly four lesson types, one for each of the Four Questions. For us, every Question One lesson consists of two main activities. First, students need to get the story. Whatever your format, your source needs to be an actual story, not a list or compendium. 

Once students have learned a story, they need to tell the story back. That’s the crucial second half of every Q1 lesson, and the part that social studies teachers most often overlook or misconstrue. Every competent teacher knows by now that we need to formatively assess the extent to which our students have learned what we’ve allegedly taught them. The problem is that we all too frequently assess our students in a granular way, abandoning the power of stories precisely when it’s most powerful for learning. Fact-checking names and dates is fine. Telling the story back is way better.

Is Storytelling a Thinking Skill?

In Question One lessons we’re giving our students practice in a disciplinary thinking skill essential to our field: narration. It takes lots of practice to get good at narration, one of the tipoffs that it is, indeed, a skillful activity. It’s worth the effort, because the payoff is enormous. As students learn to tell true stories well, they become better readers of narrative history. Telling stories themselves allows our students to see what authors do when they compose a story. In other words, they become more attentive to and knowledgeable about the genre of narrative history. That, in turn, allows them to learn more efficiently and effectively from reading. 

So, yes, storytelling is a thinking skill. For history students (and their teachers), it’s the first of four essential thinking skills they’ll need to master in order to become disciplinary experts in the study of the human world. Story First!

G.S. 

This post is also available on our substack. And while you’re on substack, you might want to check out this teacher, who also simplifies lesson design, for some of the same reasons we do!

Do you remember the first time you had to make a PowerPoint deck? Maybe it was for a school or work assignment, or maybe you were asked to give a presentation to a group of people on something you cared about. Because it was your first time, your preparation consisted of two jobs that taxed your working memory: you had to think about the substance of your presentation, and you had to learn how to use the software. Simultaneously. If you took three or four hours making the slides, you probably spent half that time figuring out how to make the text center, how to get the margins right, or how to make the colors match. All that mental energy, all that thinking about the software platform, was stolen from the job that really mattered: making the substance of your presentation as clear and insightful as it could possibly be. 

I can remember the frustration of that experience vividly, and I still relive it every now and then when my software automatically updates (to make my experience “better”). It’s annoying, because I can feel my brain getting distracted by things that are unrelated to my main intellectual task. It’s like trying to run while my legs are tied together. 

By contrast, when I know how to use the software my mind runs free. I’m writing this post on  a google doc. Because I have lots of practice with this platform (and it hasn’t been recently updated), it takes me no mental effort — no cognitive load — to move paragraphs around, delete and replace sentences, cut and paste words. My mind is fully focused on what I’m trying to say. 

Lessons Are Like PowerPoints

For our students, lessons are like making PowerPoints. Each one has two elements that require mental energy and attention: the subject matter of the lesson, and the formatting that the teacher requires. Every moment that a student has to think about the formatting, about how to execute the lesson, is a distraction from thinking about what really matters: the content we want them to learn. Humans have limited cognitive capacity. Teachers need to reduce students’ distractions — their cognitive load — to an absolute minimum, so that their minds can run free on the stuff that matters.

With the Four Question Method every lesson is focused on one of only four questions, and the specific thinking skill associated with answering it. Students are always trying to figure out:

1. What Happened? (Narration)
2. What Were They Thinking? (Interpretation)
3. Why Then and There? (Explanation)
4. What Do We Think About That? (Judgment)

Our curriculum mirrors our framework in its clarity and simplicity: it has only four lesson formats. In  Question One lessons students learn a story, take notes in a two-column template, and use their notes to tell the story back. In Question Two lessons students approach a primary source by contextualizing it, establishing its plain meaning, then interpreting the author’s purposes and assumptions. Question Three and Four lessons have their own specific formats as well. As students go through the school year they quickly learn how each lesson type works. The cognitive load they require to execute the lesson drops significantly, freeing their minds to focus on what really matters: narrating, interpreting, explaining, and judging the history we want them to learn.

Isn’t That Boring?

But wait a minute, I hear you saying: isn’t class boring if there are only four lesson formats? No. Try this thought experiment. Think back to the golden age of Hollywood movies, before streaming. Back then, everyone experienced movies in the same format every time. People went to theaters, bought tickets, stopped at the concession stand for popcorn, then sat together in the dark and watched the movie. Were movies boring because the experience of going to the theater was the same every time? They were not. The common cultural norms of movie going allowed people to focus on and enjoy the movies, instead of wondering how to buy a ticket or worrying about where their popcorn was coming from. History class is the same way. Our lesson content is the movie, and our lesson procedures are the movie-going experience. We want our students engrossed in the movie. 

History class can be like the movies in another important way as well. When historical stories are well told, they are engaging in the same ways as movies: there are characters we come to know, action, conflict, and resolution. When we use those true historical stories to launch historical puzzles of interpretation and explanation, they’re also engaging — and in a more rigorous way than a superhero movie. Judgment discussions feel meaningful, and take on nuance and depth, when they’re built on the foundation of deep understanding that the first three questions construct. Having a small number of lesson formats clears the way for historical narratives and deep thinking to captivate student minds. 

I sometimes think software engineers issue updates just so they can justify their salaries. As far as I know, there’s no real reason to change the formatting or location of software features every eighteen months. It just slows down my thinking until I learn the new system. In the same way, creative and innovative lesson formats might be fun for teachers, but they’re the equivalent of an automatic software update for students. Let’s keep the updates to minimum, and student thinking about history to a maximum.

J.B.

This post comes to us from Tyler Schumacher, a fifth grade teacher in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can also read it on our Substack. 

My sixth year of teaching, which happened to be my first year teaching fifth grade, was supposed to be the year I finally got social studies right. I’d spent previous years caught in what I now recognize as the curriculum-writing trap. It’s cognitively rewarding work, piecing together units and lessons from scratch, but it’s also incredibly time-intensive. Over time, I learned what Gary and Jon have been arguing on this blog: curriculum design exists as a profession for a reason. It requires a unique skill set, distinct from classroom teaching. Most of us weren’t trained for it, and we certainly weren’t given time in our contracts to do it well.

Doug Lemov captures this distinction nicely in Teach Like a Champion 3.0, where he replaces a chapter on “planning” with one on “preparing.” The shift sounds subtle, but it’s massive. Planning implies building the plane while flying it: coordinating units, sourcing materials, interpreting standards, creating assessments, staying current with research…while also teaching. Preparing assumes we have solid materials in hand and can focus our limited cognitive energy on what actually matters in the classroom: anticipating student thinking, rehearsing key moves, and showing up ready to teach with a firm grasp on the content.

This year I wanted to be preparing. But when I turned to social studies, I found myself right back in planning mode.The materials available to me were written as if I had an hour a day, five days a week for social studies. The reality in elementary school is often, generously, forty-five minutes, three days a week, with competing demands at every turn. I tried to massage what I had into something coherent and rigorous. Predictably, it didn’t go well. Then I discovered the Four Question Method.

4QM Curriculum Is A Game Changer

I’d heard Gary and Jon on the Knowledge Matters Podcast and was intrigued by their framework. When I found the first unit (freely available) of their U.S. History curriculum, I knew immediately I’d stumbled onto something different. This wasn’t simply a collection of activities or a pile of primary sources to sort through. It was a complete, coherent course built around a clear intellectual structure (Four Questions!) and packed with everything I’d been trying to cobble together on my own: spaced retrieval practice, interleaved review, carefully edited primary sources, sentence-level writing exercises, discussion protocols, slide decks, narratives, and daily lesson plans paced for forty-five minutes. The clear structure and high quality teacher-facing materials (specific historical content, written for adults!) meant I could actually prepare instead of plan.

But what’s convinced me most is what’s happened in my classroom. The common wisdom in social studies is that “inquiry-based learning” means students should form opinions and draw conclusions through open-ended exploration. In practice, I’ve found this often means asking kids to opine on things they don’t really understand. Their conclusions end up vague, their reasoning thin. The 4QM curriculum flips this: students learn a story first, then think hard about it. The result is that their thinking has become focused and precise.

The lesson arc on Bacon’s Rebellion was a turning point. My fifth graders found the narrative genuinely surprising to the point of being almost unbelievable. A man named Bacon, involved in a rebellion sparked partly by a dispute over pigs? Fact is stranger than fiction! When we turned to the primary source, Elizabeth Bacon’s letter, students had the context they needed to actually interpret it. Gone were the haphazard guesses at meaning or skimming for keywords. Instead, they were reading carefully to construct understanding, arguing from evidence, and building historical empathy for people whose world was radically different from their own.

And the learning stuck. The takeaway from that unit, that colonial Virginia had become dangerously polarized along class and racial lines, set the stage for later lessons on the French and Indian War, settler attitudes toward Native Americans, and the alliances that shaped the Revolution. My students didn’t just accumulate facts; they built a coherent mental map of early American history.

Preparing Is Better Than Planning

I’m back to preparing now. I read through the upcoming lessons, do the exercises myself, and think about where my students might struggle or surprise me. My working memory is freed to think about the craft of teaching rather than the grind of curriculum design. The predictable structure of the curriculum drastically reduces my own extraneous cognitive load, as I am not spending hours trying to make sense of bloated materials. That’s how it should be.

If you’re a teacher who knows social studies matters but doesn’t quite know how to make it work, give this curriculum a try. It’s the real thing.

-Tyler Schumacher

This post is also available on our substack.

In my last post – Dear Teachers: Don’t Write Curriculum. Demand It. – I argued that subject teachers need a full-blown curriculum as basic equipment for their job, and that it’s their school or district’s responsibility to provide it for them. Briefly, writing curriculum and classroom teaching are two different jobs. It may be cheaper for schools and districts to hire the same person to do both jobs, but it’s a bad bet for students. If you’re a school or district leader who is economizing in this way, this post is for you.

Many school districts provide curriculum for their elementary teachers in ELA and math. Some provide instructional materials for science as well. Very few provide a separate curriculum for elementary social studies. If your elementary students learn any history or social studies, it’s likely by way of materials incorporated in the ELA curriculum or by teacher discretion. 

When your students get to the secondary level, teacher discretion reigns. The standard excuse is that subject teachers at the secondary level have the expertise to design their own curriculum. In fact, you’ve simply left teachers on their own, or, in the vernacular, given them “autonomy.”  

If this is true in your school or district, then you likely can’t answer the most basic question a curious parent might (and should) ask you: what is my child learning in school? 

Teachers Decide

If you’re lucky enough to lead a school or district in one of the thirteen states that tests in social studies, you can give a rough answer for the tested grades. If you’ve provided your secondary teachers with textbooks, you can point to those as a rough approximation of what all students are expected to learn in social studies. How rough? That depends on your systems for supervision, evaluation, and professional development. The odds are high that your resources are thin in these areas, and that whoever does the supervising and evaluating is not a content expert. 

So, if you’re honest, you might tell the inquiring parent, “I don’t know what your child is learning. We haven’t provided a curriculum, so teachers decide.” 

The fact is, you’ve delegated final responsibility for deciding what children in your district should learn about the human world to individual teachers – new teachers, veteran teachers, well-trained and knowledgeable teachers, and not-so-well trained and not-so-knowledgeable teachers. Some of them aren’t even social studies teachers, but rather generalists, or subject switchers, or coaches. 

If that’s your situation, then imagine a student’s journey through your district’s classrooms. Let’s just consider middle school, grades 6-8. If teachers choose what to teach in social studies, then what students learn in social studies in Grade 6 depends a lot on which teacher they get. In grade 7, teachers probably need to assume that the students they’re inheriting know different things and need to plan accordingly. They themselves are probably teaching different things, so Grade 8 teachers need to plan for students who have had a variety of combinations of Grade 6 and Grade 7 teachers. They themselves probably teach different content in different ways. 

Then those students go to your high school, and the same randomization project begins again. The result is that your students’ disciplinary knowledge and skills develop in a haphazard way. 

The same is likely true for your teachers’ knowledge and skills. By saddling subject teachers with two jobs, curriculum writer and classroom teacher, it’s unlikely that they will achieve excellence in either one. 

An Alternative

There’s an alternative world we could choose to live in. It looks like this: 

Each district, CMO, and independent school has adopted a complete, coherent social studies curriculum that aligns with the science of learning for each grade and course it offers. This curriculum has been reviewed by experts in the field, aligns with state standards (such as they are) and has been made available to the community at large. What students are expected to learn is not a secret. Teachers have adopted, internalized, and implemented this curriculum in each course and grade. They receive professional development aligned with the curriculum they teach. They routinely share best practices for effectively communicating the curriculum to all of the students in their charge. 

Now, when parents ask what their students are learning, you can answer the question with confidence. 

How do we get to this different and better world? A bunch of things have to happen. It won’t be easy. But the first step is obvious: as an educational leader, decide that it needs to happen. 

G.S.

You can also find this blog post on our Substack. 

I was 39 when I started teaching high school social studies. Before that, I had lectured and conducted seminar discussions in a university setting for over a decade. So, assume that I knew almost nothing about teaching. 

When I started, my department chair – now my 4QM partner – assigned me two courses, premodern world history and modern world history. It was a typical assignment, and came with the usual provisions: a textbook for each course, a department library containing some volumes of primary sources and reference materials, a set of atlases, and a mentor. Curriculum? Not exactly. My colleagues were lovely, and the ones who taught the same courses shared materials generously. 

That first year I did two jobs, though it took me twenty years to realize it. First, I taught students, which, as it turns out, was mostly new to me. That happened every day in the classroom, during reflections and observation debriefings, and as I read, graded, and commented on student work. Second, I planned, which meant writing lessons, units, and assessments. That mostly happened in the evenings and weekends. 

Am I crazy, or is this crazy? 

Here’s the alternative: I’m 39 and basically new to teaching. My department chair tells me I’m going to teach premodern and modern world history. Then he gives me a curriculum for each course and a mentor who has taught this curriculum before. My mentor shows me how to interpret and adapt the curriculum for my students. My planning consists of reading the curriculum in advance and doing the exercises I’m about to assign to students so that I’m prepared to coach and correct them. Most of my energy, at least for those first few daunting years, is spent learning how to be a teacher rather than a curriculum writer.

This now seems obvious to me, and the alternative cruel and counterproduction: schools and districts must provide every teacher with a high-quality curriculum for every course they teach. That curriculum should include daily lesson plans and all the materials teachers will need to teach and students will need to learn, including assessments and answer keys. The curriculum should align with what we know about how children and other humans learn and with the academic standards appropriate to the subject. It should be clear and simple to use, with predictable format and structure, and leave space for teachers to adapt, accommodate and scaffold as necessary for their students.

Teachers should demand to receive such a curriculum when they are hired to teach students. 

But: shouldn’t curriculum be written by teachers, people who understand the classroom and have taught real students? Yes. But not by all teachers as a condition of employment. And, for sure, not by new teachers as a condition of employment. 

Teachers already have a job: teaching. They work all day, in the classroom, providing and guiding instruction, giving feedback, managing behavior and social interactions. In order to do all that, they need to prepare for class the next day, grade and comment on student work, and communicate with families and other educational professionals. By loading “write your own curriculum” into “prepare for class,” we’ve made the teaching job absurdly demanding. 

And, by gratuitously lumping curriculum writing in with teaching, we’ve also denigrated the former. Curriculum writing is a skillful activity distinct from classroom teaching. Skillful curriculum writing requires research, planning, and, well, writing. It requires the ability to design coherent lessons that fit together into meaningful units and units that fit together into a coherent course. Content knowledge needs to be chunked, spiraled and assessed. Skillful practice needs to be integrated into content lessons and scaffolded and sequenced in a way that makes sense for the way human brains work at whatever grade level you’re writing curriculum for. Assessments, formative and summative, need to be integrated and paced for maximum impact on student learning. All of this is demanding and time-consuming work.

It stands to reason that some teachers will, over time, as they master their teaching job, develop the capacity to write high-quality curriculum. The ones that do, should, just as the ones who master classroom techniques should teach them to others. Teaching should have a career ladder, like all professions. 

After a couple of decades in the classroom, I’m now writing curriculum full time. It’s extremely demanding. It’s taken three of us, each with decades of classroom experience and obsessive reading habits, more than a year to write one complete year of curriculum. It’s far better than anything I wrote myself as I was muddling through my other full-time job. It’s exactly the kind of support I needed back then. 

I have no doubt now that I’d have become a much better classroom teacher if I’d devoted all of the time I spent trying to write premodern and modern world history courses early in my career, more or less from scratch, to interpreting a curriculum for my students, paying attention to how they responded, and assiduously giving them frequent, actionable feedback on their work. 

I can’t start over, but new teachers can start right. If you’re new to teaching, know that your late nights and chronic anxiety are not your fault – and that even if the world were better structured for new content teachers, you’d still have plenty of work and anxiety. But it would be clearer that the school that hired you wanted you to succeed if they gave you all the tools you needed to teach well, including a complete curriculum for every course you teach. We should all demand it. 

G.S.

Most social studies teachers and curriculum writers think it’s very important that students work with primary sources, and we agree, with some key caveats. We’ve seen a lot of primary source based lessons that don’t go very well. Our work this year with teachers at an urban charter school in the northeast and with district schools in Texas provided us with recent examples of a common problem: teachers assign primary source excerpts that are too long for students to read effectively. If we want students to actually comprehend the documents we put in front of them, we need to keep the readings short enough for students to read them carefully. 

Invest in Establishing Plain Meaning

The problem is usually not that the students can’t decode the words in the documents teachers give them; most students in fourth grade and above can match the letters on the page to the sounds they represent. It’s that they can’t initially understand what all the words mean, especially when they are grouped in long and sophisticated sentences. Just understanding the plain meaning of difficult text takes time and effort. (Think about the last time you read instructions on how to file your taxes—you probably had to slow down and read them at least twice.) And when a document is too long for the time available, everyone in the room, teacher and students alike, has an incentive to rush through this crucial step in student learning and thinking. After all, we want to get to the fun part: the “advanced thinking” of “document analysis!”

But rushing the intellectual task of establishing the plain meaning of the document is a mistake. In their landmark text on literacy instruction, “Reading Reconsidered,” authors Lemov, Driggs, and Woolway emphasize that if we want students to think deeply about a text, they first have to understand it. This means reading closely and carefully, not just getting the gist. That requires investment from both teachers and students.

An Example

Imagine a lesson on the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. Teachers might be tempted to give the students the text of all ten—none is especially lengthy, and they would all fit on about a page and a half. But students will need considerable time and effort to understand each one. Here’s the full text of the First Amendment: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This is a single sentence, but what a sentence! Look at the language: “respecting,” “establishment,” “exercise” (as a verb), “abridging,” “petition” (as a verb), “redress” — this is hard stuff! If we’re reading a lot of amendments in one lesson, the teacher’s temptation will be to ask students to summarize each one briefly, or even worse, to summarize it for them: “The first amendment protects freedom of speech!” Accepting or providing a summary or “gist” reading of a document means missing important opportunities for student learning.

Three Steps to Interpret a Document

When 4QM students interpret a document, they follow the same three steps every time: contextualize it, establish its plain meaning, and only then interpret the author’s purpose and assumptions. 4QM teachers tell us that “establish plain meaning” is both the most time consuming and most valuable step. It forces everyone to slow down their reading and their thinking, so they actually learn new vocabulary and how complex texts are structured. And it lays the foundation for truly rich classroom discussion about the authors’ purposes and assumptions. 

Why did the authors of the first amendment follow the establishment clause with the free exercise clause? Why did they use the verb “abridging,” instead of another word? What did they assume about the national government? Students can’t offer or argue over answers to questions like these if they don’t know what the words in the amendment mean. And they can’t learn what the words mean if they have too much text to interpret in a given lesson. 

We were classroom teachers for decades, and we know that establishing the plain meaning of primary sources is hard work. And at first it feels like a lower-level intellectual task than interpretation (or “analysis”). But anyone who claims to interpret a text they haven’t actually understood is fooling themselves, and maybe their social studies teacher too. Kids like learning new words, and they especially like doing the kind of real interpretive thinking that their new vocabulary makes possible. And if your students have any kind of assessment that uses primary sources  (as do AP tests and many state exams), they need regular practice in closely reading such texts. 

Shortening primary source excerpts to focus on key passages is hard work for teachers, and truly reading them for understanding is hard work for students. We think the payoff in student learning is well worth the effort.

JB

Drew Perkins runs ThoughtStretchers, an organization committed to improving instruction on all grade levels. His url is “wegrowteachers,” which pretty much says it all! Drew’s latest podcast features Gary and Jon in conversation about knowledge and inquiry in social studies. Check it out!

The ThoughtStretchers Podcast: Knowledge-Rich Inquiry With 4QM Teaching