Category: 4QM Teaching

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

Gary and Jon are featured in this episode of the “History Matters” podcast! We’re interviewed by Barbara Davidson of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. It’s less than twenty minutes, and is a great introduction to the Four Question Method and how and why it works in real classrooms.

Ep. 7, The Four Questions That Make History Come Alive | History Matters Podcast

This post originally appeared in the “In The Know” blog of our friends at the Knowledge Matters Campaign. We encourage you to visit their site and learn more about their excellent work! 

A few years ago, consultants came to one of our high schools to review the social studies program. They were nice people, and they had some good suggestions. But their rubric for classroom observations revealed a common misguided assumption: it included a check box for “use of primary sources.” The more primary sources teachers put in front of students, the higher the quality score for teacher and lesson. Lots of documents every day got you high marks.

We’re not against teaching with primary sources—as longtime classroom history teachers and, more recently, founders of an instructional method of historical inquiry, we’ve seen the power of original language and artifacts to not only inform, but inspire. But we don’t think that the mere presence of primary sources in a history classroom is ipso facto evidence of good teaching and learning. In fact, we believe that overloading kids with primary sources has become a common social studies pedagogy problem. It’s too much, too fast, and with too little context.

Novices, not experts

Educators present students with primary sources with good intentions and what seems like a logical assumption. Teachers, instructional leaders, and curriculum writers assume that because historians work with primary sources, and because we want our students to “do history” like historians, we should make our students work with primary sources too. The mistake here is that historians are adult experts at “doing history,” while history students are utter novices. And the novice’s task of learning history is not at all the same as the expert’s task of doing it.

Like experts in any field, historians have enormous amounts of content knowledge. They also have learned, practiced, and mastered procedures for inquiry that they can effortlessly deploy. An expert takes almost no mental energy, or “cognitive load,” to recall basic facts, concepts, and comparisons, or to apply disciplinary tools for inquiry and analysis. Old letters, manuscripts, and photographs can immediately come alive for a historian, who applies a deep understanding of historical context and interprets artifacts with skills honed by years of practice.

Novices are different: they need help. When people are new to a field, they have very little content knowledge and a tenuous grasp of inquiry procedures. Content recall and problem solving therefore take enormous effort. Novices must expend large amounts of their limited cognitive load to simply understand the topic they are investigating, let alone how to carry out an investigation. Burying history students in primary sources pushes them into cognitive overload, where learning slows to a stop, because as novices they lack the content knowledge to contextualize primary sources and the skill to interpret their meaning.

Too often, history lessons fail to account for this difference. We’ve seen one widely available curriculum in which a typical lesson requires middle school students to read and interpret five nineteenth century documents—in 20 minutes! In another curriculum, students are expected to compare and contrast five documents from the 17th and 18th centuries in a single class period.

Even for experts, completing these assignments thoughtfully in the time allotted would be difficult. For novices, it’s impossible. Students faced with such a lesson will either tune out or fake their way through it. If they learn anything about the discipline of history, it will be that historians don’t read carefully and history questions aren’t serious—the exact opposite of what the focus on primary sources is supposed to do.

Building content knowledge and interpretation skills

We need to respect our novices and equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to understand history, including through primary sources. That’s why the Four Question Method (4QM) starts with the following steps:

• First, learn “What Happened?” and intentionally build knowledge about a coherent story from history. Students need to know what happened in the past before they can do any further thinking about it. Teachers can start with the facts of the matter, and guide students in practicing narration by making a storyboard of events, with titles, dates, and illustrations, or telling the story in “Because, But, So” sentences—which we include in 4QM and cribbed from The Writing Revolution. Whatever technique teachers use, history learning should always start with the story. That lays the foundation for deeper understanding.
• Second, focus on the important actors in that story and ask, “What Were They Thinking?” In this step, teachers help students dive into the heads of the people in the story and understand their world as they themselves did. And here’s where primary sources come into play. Teachers dedicate an entire class period to helping students closely read and skillfully interpret a single primary source. By looking at the “main characters” and primary sources in a history topic, students develop understanding and empathy.

Teachers can further help students by practicing the same routine each time they work with a primary source. First, identify and contextualize it (place it in the story we just learned). Then read it slowly and carefully to establish its plain meaning (these are hard documents that usually use archaic language!). Finally, interpret the purpose and assumptions of the author. Have students write up their interpretations and voila: you’ve got a brief formative assessment that demonstrates the extent to which they truly understand what characters in history were thinking.

Giving history the time it needs

These activities take time to do well. But by giving lessons the time they need, we’re able to teach students that historical questions are serious, that they take serious intellectual work to answer, and that our answers won’t always agree. Further, when students practice the same intellectual routine for each primary source, they get better at understanding and interpreting them over time. This is the polar opposite of random acts of primary sources or artifact overload—it is deliberate and builds both knowledge and skills over time.

And we have evidence that it works. Among teachers who use the Four Question Method, we hear that students tend to struggle at first with “What Were They Thinking?” because they aren’t used to the level of intellectual rigor a strong answer requires. But by mid-year, teachers say, students who encounter primary sources on assessments have no problems with them. We’re so committed to helping more educators implement this method in the classroom, we recently wrote our first curriculum, covering U.S. History from 1492–1877.

Our method and our curriculum wouldn’t earn top marks from social studies evaluators. Working slowly with three to five primary sources in each unit means that students will see many fewer documents than in other approaches, where they encounter three to five sources each day. But we’ve seen that engaging with fewer, well-selected primary sources and undertaking the rigorous intellectual work it takes to interpret them seriously fosters a deep understanding of history and the historian’s task. And so our novices carefully build the historical knowledge that can lead to expertise.

J.B. & G.S.

Our friends at the Knowledge Matters Campaign are now focusing on history instruction. As we know, social studies instruction in the early grades is a key to literacy. The “History Matters” campaign is aimed at making that more widely understood. In their most recent blog post, Amy Holbrook makes the case for dedicated history instruction in the early grades. We couldn’t agree more!

“Digging History Uut of the Dustbin: A Literacy-First Approach for Elementary Classrooms”

We Finally Wrote A Curriculum

When we first decided to try to spread the Four Question Method beyond our own classrooms, we were very naive. We figured we’d go to conferences and give workshops, and teachers would go back home and implement the method. It turned out that we could get invited to conferences and we gave pretty good workshops that teachers liked a lot – but very few of them went back home and revised their teaching materials to reflect the Four Question Method. That’s because rewriting all your lesson plans is a lot of work, and the Four Question Method takes practice to learn; it’s a discipline that you don’t master after a day at a conference. Teachers are real people with real lives, and they’re not going to take hours to re-do everything they have because they liked a workshop.

So then we decided we should write a book to explain 4QM thinking and planning processes. We figured teachers would read the book, and then they’d use its sage guidance to implement the method. That also turned out to be very naive. We did publish a book, and every now and then we hear from a teacher (like Ryan from Spokane!) who has read it and is actually revising their teaching materials based on its principles. But most readers don’t do that. That’s because rewriting all your lesson plans is a lot of work, and the Four Question Method takes practice to learn; it’s a discipline that is difficult to master after just reading a book. Teachers are real people with real lives, and they’re not going to take hours to re-do everything they have because they read a book that says it’s a good idea. 

Finally we came around to facing reality: if we want to spread the Four Question Method beyond a small number of classrooms, we’re going to have to write 4QM curriculum ourselves. We avoided this for a long time because, as we have already noted above, writing curriculum is a lot of work. Quite frankly, we just didn’t want to take it on. But we finally did, and like a lot of things we try to avoid in life, writing curriculum turned out to be more fun than we thought it would be. 

Today we’re almost done with a 4QM U.S. History course that covers 1492-1877. It’s a full school year: ten units, 10 -15 lessons per unit. Each lesson has a complete lesson plan, slides, student handouts, and teacher exemplars for everything. The 4QM team wrote our own narratives for all the Question One lessons, edited primary sources for all the Question Twos, researched data for all the Question Threes, and hashed out all the Question Fours. It’s all there. If you’re reading this blog you probably know that “HQIM” stands for “High Quality Instructional Materials.” That’s what this course is, built from the ground up around the Four Question Method.

We Learned A Ton

Throughout the process we learned a ton from the community of teachers who are testing the curriculum in their own classrooms. We’ve got teachers in three states in grades six through ten using the lessons and giving us regular feedback. (We wrote the curriculum pitched at grade eight, but of course it can scale up or down depending on student skill level.) Because of them, units nine and ten are much better than units one and two – so now we’re going back and revising all the early units to be like the later ones. Stuff we learned:

• It’s better to write our own narratives. One of our slogans is “Story First!” because kids need to know a story before they can think about it. We were trying to use a variety of open sources for kids to learn the historical stories for this course, but it was difficult to find narratives that were clear, complete, and engaging. So we ended up writing our own.
• Teachers need flexibility to differentiate. Our curriculum is being used in an expensive New York City private school, an ex-industrial city in New England, and rural school districts in Texas. We need to provide complete and specific lesson plans, but with options for teachers to push stronger students and support those who struggle. We started giving teachers three options for all Question One lessons, and identifying “mild, medium, and spicy” options for many of the others.
• Practice helps students – and teachers. We heard from several teachers that it took 2-3 units for their students to get the hang of the curriculum. Some reported that their kids weren’t used to thinking this hard in social studies, so there was a bit of a transition period. But as students got familiar with the lesson types and thinking skills that went with each Question, they got better and better at them and started enjoying social studies more than they had before. Teachers also found their own out of school prep time dropping way down as they got familiar with the formats for each Question.

Teachers Shouldn’t Have To Write Curriculum

Gary and I both came from schools where individual teachers were expected to create all their own lessons, and we thought that was normal. It might be normal in a lot of places, but we no longer think it’s good. Teaching is a full time job. Curriculum writing is also, or should be, a full time job. Excellent teachers know how to recognize HQIM, how to adapt it to fit their classrooms and their students, and how to effectively execute the lessons that they choose to use. We’re hoping that now that we’ve written a full course of units and lessons, with more to come, more teachers will choose 4QM. 

J.B.

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