Category: 4QM Teaching

New teachers need a lot. There are lots of ways to know that. Start by asking one. I sit down with the newbies in my department each week for a one-on-one supervision session. I ask how they are. They tell me they’re tired. 

I like to think that our rookies are well supported, but still: every day, they take in a flood of new information and make more decisions than they had in the month before they started teaching. And many of those decisions will turn out to be wrong. 

Nationally, lots of teachers don’t make it to Year Two. That’s especially true for teachers in high-poverty schools. We also know that rookie teachers, wherever they teach, are typically less effective than those with three or more years of experience in the classroom. 

So what do new teachers need in order to become effective and preserve their health and sanity? Besides the obvious — decent pay and working conditions, adequate academic preparation for the kind of teaching they’re doing — what kinds of support and guidance do new teachers need in order to become proficient, happy professionals? 

Apprenticeship or Scripting? 

For curriculum support, there are two standard models, apprenticeship and scripting. The suburbs usually opt for the apprenticeship model. New teachers, budding artisans, learn their craft from an experienced mentor, who shares curriculum and shows them how to use it. That’s how I learned (at age 39) when I started teaching in a large suburban high school. 

The success of the apprenticeship model depends entirely on the quality of the materials and mentorship provided by the experienced teacher. That quality varies greatly. If running a consistent program with aligned curriculum and pedagogy matters to you, the apprenticeship model is not the way to get it. And in many cases, particularly in high-need schools with lots of teacher turnover, the model simply isn’t viable — there aren’t enough master teachers available to train the apprentices.

Some districts and charter networks have tried to address the demands on new teachers by providing them with scripted curriculum. The logic is clear enough. Newbies have an awful lot to learn and think about. If you can take curriculum planning off their hands, they’ll have more energy and brain space to devote to getting to know their students and learning how to manage them. Supervisors can then focus on classroom management and school culture, which is the priority for many high-poverty schools. 

Our friends at Uncommon have done about as well with scripted curriculum as I can imagine an organization doing. They coach teachers to “spar” with the questions posed in the lesson. They give lots of feedback on lesson delivery. They write their own lessons, so that they’re pitched at the right audience, their own Uncommon students. Still, the problem we were called in to help them with was the problem of internalization. Just because you’re reading from the script doesn’t mean that you’re actually playing the part. An actor who doesn’t understand the character or the play won’t give a very convincing performance. A teacher who is not knowledgeable about and engaged by the lesson content is unlikely to move and educate an audience of captive young people. 

A Better Alternative

It’s unrealistic and, frankly, irresponsible to think that students in a class will learn and think more deeply than their teacher. In the apprenticeship model, there’s no guarantee that the apprentice will actual learn what the lessons are about, or even that the mentor really knows. Lots of what passes for curriculum training is in fact activity sharing. Likewise, scripting does guarantee some common practices, activities, and utterances in the classroom. But if the point is to get kids thinking in increasingly sophisticated ways about history and society, there’s no reason to expect even a thoughtful script to train a new teacher to assume that responsibility.

So what’s the alternative to apprenticeship and scripting? It’s what at least some new teachers actually say they want. I recently did a workshop for middle school teachers at an urban network. All the teachers in their first few years were hungry, even desperate for guidance. They had access to scripted curriculum, but didn’t really understand it. They told me explicitly: the thing they needed most was to know what they were supposed to teach. They didn’t want scripts. They wanted to know what their students were supposed to learn and why and how they were supposed to learn it. They wanted what Lee Shulman dubbed “pedagogical content knowledge.” 

Jon and I have begun to create 4QM materials that address this need directly. We’re writing MA standards-aligned storyboards and unit guides for core history courses in grades 6-11. If you’re a veteran of our workshops, you know that the storyboard provides the outline of our unit story, the answer to the big Question One of the unit: What happened? Our unit guides contain the specific versions of each of the Four Questions that we’ll expect our students to ask and answer during the course of the unit. The unit guide also previews the unit assessment and identifies key actors, events, and ideas. 

Knowing the story and questions for a unit helps a ton. So does knowing the answers. So Jon and I are providing model answers for each of our unit questions. Teachers will still need to spar with the questions themselves, but they’ll see what proficiency looks like when they practice. These unit guides with model answers provide enough guidance for teachers to begin to acquire pedagogical content knowledge.

Finally, we’ve created a playcard for matching learning goals and pedagogical techniques. Every NFL coach consults a laminated playcard on the sidelines during games. Third and long? The coach checks the playcard to see what plays they’ve practiced that would work in this situation. For us, the 4QM Playcard lists techniques for teaching and assessing each of the four questions. Working on a Question Two with a group with a wide range of literacy skills? We’ve outlined the options for teaching students how do interpretation and then for assessing and giving feedback on their performance.

The Power of Appropriate Scaffolding

Our 4QM apparatus scaffolds curriculum for teachers the same way expert teachers scaffold assignments for students. Students don’t learn from copying. They learn from making decisions with guidance, constraint, and feedback. Our materials provide the guidance and constraint for teachers, who ultimately have to make choices about curriculum and pedagogy, informed by the students they teach and the circumstances in which those students learn. We insist on providing training for teachers who will use our unit guides and playcard. Teachers need to internalize the 4QM framework in order to be equipped to make sensible choices about how to use our material. In the end, though, there’s no substitute for supervision and real-time feedback. That’s why we like supervisors to do our training with their teachers. 

Dropping new teachers into the deep end doesn’t do them or their students any favors. Neither does handing them a script. Being a new teacher is hard. Since the learning curve is steep, there’s no time to waste: teachers need to start learning right away. They need help, guidance, and support. For content and curriculum for history teachers, we think we’ve got exactly what they need. Give us a call and we can set up a time to show you. 

G.S.

It turns out that Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of Amazon, the Washington Post, and tons of other stuff, is a fan of the Four Question Method! 

Well, not really. We assume that he has no idea we exist. (Feel free to re-tweet this at him, or send it to his linked in if you have that kind of access.) But I’m convinced that he would be a fan, because of something I read in the (hard copy!) November issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. 

The article is by Franklin Foer, and it’s called “Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan.” It’s not very flattering; it’s in the tradition of Ida Tarbell and the muckrakers of the Progressive era. But on pages 58-59 I found this nugget: 

“Bezos insists that plans be pitched in six-page memos, written in full sentences, a form he describes as ‘narrative.’ This practice emerged from a sense that PowerPoint had become a tool for disguising fuzzy thinking. Writing, Bezos surmised, demands a more linear type of reasoning. As John Rossman, an alumnus of the company who wrote a book called Think Like Amazon, described it, ‘If you can’t write it out, then you’re not ready to defend it.'”

This is pretty much exactly why Gary and I often use four-sentence stories as a formative assessment tool. For high-ranking Amazon executives, six pages is a limiting device: they have to express their ideas clearly in order to make them fit under the limit. That means selecting what matters and leaving the rest out, which means understanding the idea well enough to know what matters. For our history students, the four sentence story works exactly the same way: they have to really understand the story in order to boil it down to four sentences. And because the story format is ”narrative” it does indeed “demand a more linear type of reasoning.” If our students are doing it well, their four sentences link together in a way that makes clear sense.

I also agree completely with the Rossman quotation. For my students I’d change it slightly to say that “if you can’t write it out, you don’t understand it.” Once you start asking students to write out the stories you think you’ve taught them through lecture or reading or documents or videos, you’ll find that many of them don’t actually understand the chronology, or how events connect to each other. You’ll also find that as they get more practice at writing four sentence stories they get better at it — in part because they start to anticipate the assignment, and they pay attention to the narrative structure of the history they’re learning as they learn it. 

Here’s a good four sentence story one of my tenth graders submitted last year. The assignment was to “Write a four sentence story of the Nazi rise to power between 1919 and 1935. Avoid passive voice, and remember, people do things!”

1. The economic crisis from inflation and the great depression in the 1920s and 1930s made the German people very angry at the Weimar Republic and drove them toward the Nazis and the communists.
2. The Nazis appealed to the angry German people by promising nationalism, militarism, and racism which led to the Nazis to get the majority vote at 37% in 1932.
3. In 1933 Hitler is appointed chancellor and the Reichstag fire hits which led to Hitler calling a state of emergency where they arrested communists for the fire, but he also suppressed freedoms and established the enabling act.
4. Finally in 1934 the President died and Hitler is appointed Führer and he established the terror system and the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 which restricted the Jews from public life.

This student shifts tenses, which is a common problem, I don’t like the use of “they” in the third sentence, and I had to explain the difference between a majority and a plurality to her. But she’s got the events in the correct order, and makes clear links between the economic crisis and angry voters. She narrates a story that is coherent and meaningful. I’m confident that this student understands how Hitler achieved dictatorial power in Germany.

And while I don’t know what Jeff Bezos would give it for a grade, I’m pretty sure he would approve of the assignment.

J.B.

Jon and I regularly present at two conferences a year, MCSS in the fall and NERC in the spring. For the past few years, the conference organizers have graciously allowed us to present in each of the available workshop slots. Our first presentation is always an introduction to the 4QM. (If you’ve storyboarded Cinderella and puzzled over the Salem witch trials with us, you’ve attended a version of this workshop.) Then we do focused workshops on as many of the questions as we have time to address. 

China Trade War & “Soft Persimmon”

Last Friday, at the most recent MCSS conference, we repeated our overview workshop and then introduced two brand new presentations. For the second of our three sessions, Jon focused on Questions One and Two. First, he gave a narrative lecture on China’s “Century of Humiliation” — imperialism from the Opium Wars to the Boxer Rebellion. Then he posed a great Question Two, ripped from the headlines:  What was Xinhua, the party-line newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, thinking when it editorialized as follows this past spring? 

“If anyone today regards China as the China of old, prey to dismemberment, as a ‘soft persimmon’ that can be squeezed at will, their minds are stuck in the 19th century and they’re deceiving themselves.”

That would be the 19th century Jon had just lectured on. Once you know that story, as everyone in the room did, Xinhua’s statement opens up like a, well, some kind of ripe fruit, anyway. It becomes meaningful and engaging. So we engaged: we paraphrased, then talked purpose and audience. Interpretation — the mental act required to answer Question Two — pursued seriously, typically raises a variety of plausible alternatives. So, should we read this statement as aggressive posturing in the China/US trade war? Or does the statement betray sensitivity and insecurity about an ignoble past? Or maybe the domestic audience, bearing the costs of a protracted trade war, could do with a reminder that the Party had redeemed China from abject victimhood…? 

Hong Kong Protests

For the third workshop, I demoed how to 4QM a contemporary topic. It seemed sensible, after Jon’s presentation, to rip another big China story from the headlines: the Hong Kong Protests of 2019. I’d been keeping track of the story on my own, but for preparing this model lesson, I read overview articles and briefings from a handful of news sources: The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Financial Times, the South China Morning Post, and the Hong Kong Free Press. Naturally, I checked to see what Wikipedia had to offer on the topic. 

Once I had the lay of the land, I made a storyboard to answer Question One, present-tense version: What’s happening right now in Hong Kong? My storyboard has the following headings: 

• One Country, Two Systems (1997)
• Article 23 (2003)
• Umbrella Movement (2014)
• Extradition Bill (June 2019)
• Protests and Standoff (June 2019 – October 2019)  
• Resolution?

For the purposes of the workshop, I told the story lecture-style, with a handful of images. For closer-to-full independence, I’d write a brief narrative for my students and chunk it exactly I storyboarded it. I had also culled six short news excerpts describing the main events of the protests from June to October — Box Five in my storyboard. I’d have given my students that chunked source and directed them to storyboard that on their own. The source is easy to read and pretty dramatic. (The last episode is the shooting of a young protester in the face by Hong Kong police.) At the workshop, for the sake of time, I just told that story, too. 

The coolest way to let students lead on Question Two is to have them nominate targets of inquiry: identify the actor in the story whose decision or action is the most complicated, peculiar, or puzzling. Depending on time and student ability, you could let students gather their own primary sources and try to interpret them. In fact, I prepared two document packets, one excerpting statements by protesters, the other containing passages from two speeches by President Xi Jiping related to Hong Kong, once very recent, and one from a 2017 speech on the twentieth anniversary of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that has governed Hong Kong, at least until now. At the workshop, we focused on Xi’s most recent comments. 

For Question Three, always the most challenging to prepare and teach well, I was lucky to find a terrific short article in the Financial Times called “Hong Kong since the turnover in charts.” Charts and graphs: those are solid clues that you’re in Q3 territory. That part was rich and efficient in the workshop. Participants came up with lots of ideas about the implications of changes in the economic relationship between the mainland and Hong Kong. As one participant noted, the economic dependency has shifted pretty dramatically. A less-dependent mainland could plausibly be expected to pursue a more muscular policy of integration. Meanwhile, there’s a housing crunch in Hong Kong, largely driven by the influx of mainland investment in the Hong Kong real estate market. The young people protesting in defense of their independent legal institutions may have literally been squeezed onto the streets. 

We concluded, as I would in class, with a discussion that, ideally, students could run themselves. The issues are clear enough: the protesters are defending their civil rights and staking a claim for political voice in running the territory they view as their homeland. The Chinese Communist Party considers Hong Kong an integral part of China and the British legacy of rule of law a vestige of imperialism. What do we think about that? At the workshop, it took a little prodding to get past interpretation and into judgment. (It’s always tempting, particularly in a room full of strangers, to avoid first-person arguments and instead offer up what others might think.) Once we broke the ice, we mostly supported the Hong Kongers’ demand for rights and democracy. But, as a room full of history teachers, we were aware that the “Century of Humiliation” is real to the Chinese leadership, and Hong Kong a key symbol of that history. The point, in any case, is less to settle the question than to cultivate a keener sense of the issues involved in the judgment. Judgment is easy — too easy — when we reduce conflicts to a single value or principle. The trick is to acknowledge the right level of complexity.    

The takeaway of the day for me and Jon was that people want to see the 4QM in action. Content lessons help people see what we mean when we say that history teachers should teach students to ask and answer the Four Questions. And doing new material increases the likelihood that keep old friends coming back for more. So stop by and visit us at the next NERC or MCSS. We promise to have something new to share!

Last week Gary wrote about the persistence of “Essential Questions” in our field, even though we know that they don’t help teachers plan or students learn. I’m going to tag along here with a short post on the same topic. During our recent workshop day with curriculum planners at Uncommon Schools I had a similar experience to the one Gary described last week. I was working with a pair of teachers, and we were finalizing the narrative for a unit in world history when one of them suggested, “Maybe we should connect it back to an essential question to tie it all together.” So I asked, “What did you have in mind?” She suggested, “Does religion impact culture, and does culture impact religion?” 

I think this experience epitomizes two problems with essential questions. First of all, teachers reach for them out of a sense of obligation. The unit we were working on was coming along fine — there was nothing wrong with it. But I think the teacher who suggested the essential question did so because she felt that the unit was somehow incomplete, or lacking. So many of us are conditioned to think that if we’re not teaching about some hugely important overarching concept we must not be doing a good job. We don’t want to be the history teachers who “just teach facts.” We don’t want to be boring. We want to be teaching about Big Ideas — and essential questions seem like Big Ideas. 

Second, the actual question that this teacher suggested is so generalized that it is in fact boring. “Does religion impact culture?” Yes. “Does culture impact religion?” Yes. The question, if taken seriously, is meaningless. Wiggins and McTighe, the inventors of the essential question, have some doozies in their classic Understanding By Design: “To what extent do we need checks and balances on government power?” “In what ways does art reflect, as well as shape, culture?” (p. 115). Try to answer these questions seriously, right now. You’ll find that without a specific narrative to give them shape, they become meaningless. Under what circumstances are we making a judgment about the need for limited government? Art reflects culture in lots of different ways in different times and places — which art in which time and place are we asking about? And why do we care about either question anyway? Give us a specific story to bring these questions to life, and all of a sudden they feel vital. “Should Trump be impeached?” “How and why did Lutherans use printed illustrations to spread their ideas?”

The solution to these two problems is straightforward, but requires some courage. First of all, don’t be afraid to claim your content. Assuming someone has made a good decision about what historical stories to tell (you might be the one making those decisions yourself), Big Ideas will be embedded in the stories. Your students can’t grapple with those ideas until they know the stories that bring them to life. There’s nothing wrong with teaching students the facts of history, so long as we don’t stop there. Math teachers are not embarrassed to teach the multiplication tables, because knowing the multiplication tables  is a prerequisite to thinking effectively about more advanced mathematical questions and concepts. Our discipline is the same: stories are our multiplication tables. There’s no need to dress up your story with the costume of an “essential question.” Once your kids know what happened, they’ll have plenty of important and engaging questions to deal with as they wonder about what the key people in the story were thinking, why the story happened when and where it did, and what they think about all of it.

Second, make your essential questions specific to your story. The 4QM typology of questions is a guide to writing strong and engaging questions that come directly from your story. Last week one of our twitter followers took issue with Gary’s dismissal of essential questions and wrote to suggest some of his own: “An EQ should usually be rooted in the discipline, so: What caused the Great Divergence? Who is most to blame for WWI? Were Germans Ordinary Men and women or Hitler’s Willing Executioners?” I replied that his questions were excellent, and easily categorized using the Four Question Method: they are a Q3, a Q4, and a Q2. They’re also good because each one grows out of a specific story. We could rewrite them in the typical generalized essential question style, and then they’d become lifeless and dull: “What causes some societies to advance while others stagnate? Is someone always to blame for war? Can ordinary people do evil?” 

So we’re all in favor of giving students engaging, important, “essential” questions. We just think that you can do that consistently and effectively if you tell a story first and use the 4QM typology as a guide to what you want to ask next. 

J.B.

Jon and I had another excellent day with our friends at the Uncommon Schools charter network in Newark last week. It was particularly gratifying to see how deeply the Uncommon middle school team has embedded the 4QM and, in particular, storytelling into their planning and teaching. Uncommon History teachers in the middle grades now charge their students to demonstrate knowledge in a way that makes sense to *them*: “Tell the story of…” That’s a lesson objective that a fifth grader can relate to. 

I’m confident that’s true because we saw visual evidence. At a previous meeting, we reviewed footage of a brilliant fifth-grade teacher leading her students in a collaborative exercise that required them to sort four name cards into proper chronological order and to justify their choices. The students did so with garrulous energy. My favorite moment was when a boy named Maurice pointed out to his teammates that John Locke *had* to have come before Thomas Jefferson, because Jefferson had used his ideas when writing the Declaration of Independence. Fifth grade, and already tracking Enlightenment ideas in history. 

One thing I noticed at our breakout sessions, though, got me wondering. In the morning, we’d focused on Question One, and in particular on how to get students talking and thinking in response to historical narrative — like they did in the video of Maurice’s class, but at all grade levels. The charge for our breakout groups was to redesign the opening lesson of a cycle or unit so as to make it hook students and get them engaged in questioning and conversation, or, as the Uncommon folks like to say, to set them up to spar with a story. So far, so good. 

I worked mostly with two US History high school teachers. We focused on a cycle on the Mexican American War. We started with a lesson on the topic already written by one of the Uncommon planners (also a teacher, as is everyone on the planning team). After sparring ourselves over where to start and end the story, the other team member suggested that we define an essential question to help us decide. That gave me pause. 

Now, figuring out where your story begins and ends is definitely “essential,” and our decisions about those endpoints must clearly reflect our understanding of what the story is about and what kind of thinking we want our students to do about it. On the other hand, we 4QM people don’t talk about “Essential Questions” anymore, for very good reasons. If you want to teach students to ask and answer discipline-specific questions in a thoughtful, coherent way, you need to teach them how to identify question types pertinent to our field. We contend that there are four of them. What the old EQ did was to encourage teachers to conjure a generically debatable question and tack it onto a predigested unit. It identified no specific thinking skills. Very, very few teachers could give a coherent account of how they arrived at their essential question. The impact on students was, so far as we could tell, negligible. 

There are four essential questions in History. We’ve numbered them for easy reference. I wanted to say that in response to our teammate’s recommendation, but I didn’t. (I’m the gentle one. Jon’s the efficient one.) I let the conversation play out for a bit. The original planner and the EQ recommender batted around ideas for a few minutes. Then I suggested that we abandon the enterprise and return to our original charge: design a lesson that tells students a compelling and engaging story, and then cook up some ways to get them talking about it. 

In our small group, our essential question was clear. It was a Question One: What happened? Until we had the story down, any attempt to abstract from it was likely to be barren. In fact, the “Essential Question” conversation added nothing memorable or notable to our conversation. Of course, once we completed our planning process, our Q3s (Why then and there?) and Q4s (What do we think about that?) would end up looking a lot like what typically passes for EQs. But the point of getting the story down first — of answering Q1 first — is that embedding broad, debatable questions in a story makes them more meaningful and actually answerable for students. The helicoptered EQ is almost always either trivial or unanswerable without narrative context. Hence it’s systematic failure in practice. 

So why is the EQ such a powerful temptation? The tool doesn’t work very well, but people reach for it repeatedly. How come? Though it sounds immodest, part of the problem is that there isn’t, besides 4QM, much of an obvious alternative. But that explanation doesn’t work for this particular group. Everyone in the room had been trained, directly or indirectly, in the 4QM. 

But it turns out that planning the 4QM way is fairly arduous, in two ways. First, our method for designing curriculum is a discipline. It requires both training and practice. The steps are easy enough to enumerate — create a storyboard, find Q2 opportunities in the story, identify Q3s and Q4s, revise. But that summary is deceptive. Each of those steps requires lots of decision making and, well, thinking. “Create a storyboard” means defining the beginning and end of the story you want your students to learn, narrowing down to the key actors and events, and chunking and sequencing in a way adds up to a coherent story. If you don’t know your story well, or haven’t thought through the dynamics it contains very deeply, this turns out to be a difficult exercise. And that just gets you started — three more questions to go, then revision. Then you still have documents to find, edit, and scaffold, activities to plan, and lots, lots more. 

Learning a discipline is hard. Thinking constantly is hard. The human brain is poorly designed for both operations. Mine is, at any rate. Nonetheless, teaching well requires disciplined thinking. Learning well requires it as well. We can settle for “Essential Questions” that aren’t actually essential. To their credit, the Uncommon people don’t settle. That doesn’t make the work any easier…

G.S.

I’m working with an MAT (Master’s in the Art of Teaching) student this year. She’s assisting in two of my classes, and in the spring she’ll take primary responsibility for one of them part of the time. She’s terrific: smart, engaged, thoughtful, and dedicated; I think she’s going to be an awesome teacher. One of the projects she worked on recently was designing some lessons on the Haitian Revolution. I sent her off on this task knowing that it’s challenging: the Haitian Revolution is really complicated. It would be convenient for history teachers if the story were simple: The French Revolution calls for popular government and equality of all people; the enslaved people of Saint Domingue, the French sugar colony in the Caribbean, hear about it and demand to know why revolutionary ideals don’t apply to them; they rebel and create a republic, establishing a democracy that recognizes all races of people as equal. The reality was much messier than that. It involves at least three different social and racial groups, foreign intervention by Britain and Spain, French flip-flopping on the legality of slavery, and lots of infighting among the would-be founding fathers of Haiti. 

My MAT student eventually came up with a great activity for our class (I’ll describe it shortly), but what’s relevant for this blog post is how she did that. When we were talking about her planning process she reported that, “the Four Questions were really helpful while I was reading through all this stuff. They really grounded me as I was researching, and kept me from going down rabbit holes that would have taken me really off track.” As she was researching, clicking on links and reading articles, getting sucked into the complications of the story, she would regularly pause to ask herself, “What Question is this thing that I’m reading right now trying to answer?” Once she determined that, she could then make a thoughtful decision about whether it was worth reading on or whether she should stop and get back to something more relevant. She was primarily interested in getting the story down, for herself and for our students. So if she found herself chasing a Question Two (“What were they thinking?) for an obscure minor participant in the story she’d stop and get back to something more directly connected to the narrative. Question Three (“Why then and there?”) is really interesting, but was not going to be the focus for this lesson. And Question Four (“What do we think about that?) has to wait until kids know something about the first three Questions. So by keeping the 4QM in mind as she read, she was able to make efficient use of her time and resources.

She ended up designing a great Question One lesson. The culminating activity was built around a series of paintings about the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture by Jacob Lawrence. She made laminated color copies of six of the paintings, and after kids had done some reading about the Revolution she gave them the paintings and had them put them in the correct order and use them to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution out loud. It was a challenging activity, because the story is complex, and putting the paintings in the right order required accurate knowledge of both the revolution and L’Ouverture’s role in it. 

We’ve often said that the Four Question Method can be a reading tool for students. Of course it works well as reading tool for teachers too.

J.B.

Here are three ways we can teach our students a story about something interesting or important that happened in the human world: 

1. We can give them a reading (or video) that contains the story and teach them how to find that story in the reading (or video)
2. We can tell them the story ourselves, out loud, with props and dramatic devices
3. We can do both at once — reading and telling — by framing a narrative puzzle and then curating documents that allow students to reconstruct the story on their own. 

All three methods are most effective when the teacher gives clear guidance and instruction, naturally. No matter what the format — reading, lecture, or DBQ — we need to model for students how to identify the key actors and major events and then to connect those events (or identify missing connections) in a coherent sequence. 

For both reading and lecture (1 and 2 above), the first step is typically note taking. “Take notes” and “find the main ideas” are cop-out directions. Show students how to track the action in a narrative by marking up the text for actors, decisions, and events. Make their notes look like a storyboard-in-training. For narratives, that’s what notes are. 

For document-based storytelling, the trick is to frame the narrative enterprise — give students the setting in advance — and then to provide enough description in primary, secondary, and tertiary excerpts for students to reconstruct a chain of linked actions and events. 

These techniques for transmitting stories to our students are not mutually exclusive. In real life, history teachers use all three, and the first two are staples in most history classrooms. For each, it helps a ton to tell students what they’re doing and why: they’re answering Question One. They’re trying to get the story of what happened, so that they can start to understand how people think, why things happen when and where they do, and how to make complex, thoughtful judgments when confronting real-life problems. 

Do Your Students Know The Story?

So let’s say your students have learned a story through reading, lecture, DBQ, or some combination of the three. Do they know it? Unlikely. And for sure, if they haven’t practiced it, they won’t know it for long. 

Here are three ways of getting your students to tell (and retell) a story. 

1. Storyboard it
2. Tell it
3. Write it, in character

Once your students are done reading, listening, or both, put them to work on a storyboard. The storyboard, as we show and tell in our workshops and as we’ve explained in blog posts, forces us to make lots of salutary, brain-stretching decisions. How do we chunk the story? How much detail do we include? When and where, exactly, do we begin and end? Which version of the story will we tell? What images will make the events in our storyboard vivid and clear? The mental exercise involved in making these decisions trains our brains and consolidates our memories. That’s good, important work for our students. 

Once you’ve got a storyboard, you’ve produced the script you need to tell the story orally. In fact, once you’ve made your storyboard, you’re probably ready to narrate without it. So try it. Telling a story to a classmate, or telling a chunk of a story and handing it off to another classmate, with or without verbal or visual cues, is terrific practice. It makes the logic of the story clear and memorable. And stumbles are good. They mean either that you need to practice more, or that you’ve actually stumbled upon something that doesn’t (yet) make sense to you. 

You can write a story, but flat-out omniscient narration in writing can be a hazard for students. My students find it hard not to write boring encyclopedia entries in this format. And sending them home to work on standard written narration is an invitation to consult, without attribution, said boring entries. Instead, having students write in character animates the human sensibility that they deploy almost effortlessly when they tell their own stories in their own, non-school voices. 

So instead of, “Tell the story of the Reign of Terror,” try, “You are a sans culotte, or a friend of Marie, or a pious peasant, or a Girondist. Describe Robespierre’s rule in a letter to a trusted friend.” Perspective makes the task harder, but also more personal. Your students need at least a provisional answer to Question Two for their character — what were they thinking? — before composing their facsimile narration, but that’s an integral part of the learning in any case. 

When my daughters were young, I was amazed by their appetite for stories. The exuberant command came as soon we we finished the last page of a picture book: “again!” The clever retort, which I discovered far too late: “you tell me!” Precious wisdom, for parents and history teachers alike. 

G.S.

I’m teaching an AP course this year: AP World History. (I reverse the title so that I can call it “WHAP” in all my materials.) It’s been some years since I’ve been so intimate with the College Board, and this is my first AP course since Gary and I finalized our Four Questions and started been blogging and doing workshops for teachers. The great gift that the Four Question Method gives to teachers and students is intellectual clarity: we know at any given moment what question we are trying to answer. That clarity is what drives 4QM teachers’ decisions about pedagogy, assessment, and evaluation. Unfortunately, I’ve found that the College Board seems to value murkiness in its questioning. An old friend of mine used to have a bumper sticker on his truck that said “Eschew Obfuscation.”  I’m thinking of having a bunch of those stickers made up and sent to College Board Headquarters. They probably wouldn’t think it’s as funny as I do.

Clear As Mud

There’s a much longer article to be written here about the problems with the College Board’s “AP Historical Thinking Skills,”* but for now I’ll limit myself to decoding one of the “Task Verbs Used in Free-Response Questions” given on page 200 of the “AP World History: Modern Course and Exam Description:” What does the College Board mean when it asks students to “Explain?” 

The first tip-off that there’s a problem is that the verb “Explain” is followed by a full paragraph of clarification. “Explain” apparently requires a lot of explanation. Here’s the full text:

“Explain: Provide information about how or why a relationship, process, pattern, position, situation, or outcome occurs, using evidence and/or reasoning. Explain ‘how’ typically requires analyzing the relationship, process, pattern, position, situation, or outcome, whereas explain ‘why’ typically requires analysis of motivations or reasons for the relationship, process, pattern, position, situation, or outcome.”

This paragraph seems designed more to defend against a possible lawsuit than to actually give students guidance in thinking like historians. There’s the long list of things that could be “analyzed” (whatever that means), which is preceded by the ultimate weasel word, “typically.” This amounts to a nearly incomprehensible definition that still leaves the door open for test makers to use “explain how” and “explain why” in some manner not covered by their definition. How teachers are supposed to prepare students for a question that uses “Explain how” or “Explain why” in an atypical fashion is beyond me.

College Board Code

Here’s what I think they’re really after. I told my students that“Explain how” is College Board Code for Question One: It means, “Tell the story of something that happened.” And I think “Explain why” is College Board Code for Question Two: It means, “Say what someone important in the story was thinking.” I suspect that part of the reason the College Board doesn’t write its essay questions in 4QM style is because they think simple questions are perceived as easy. But as anyone who’s tried to get students to give an accurate and clear answer to any of the Four Questions knows, simple questions can be very difficult to answer. If your whole brand is based on “college level” academics and you need to appear rigorous at all costs, then I guess asking students to “provide information about how or why a relationship, process, pattern, position, situation, or outcome occurs, using evidence and/or reasoning” makes you look more demanding than if you simply asked them to tell you a clear and true story.

The point here for teachers is that the Four Question Method can help you to figure out exactly what it is you want your students to be thinking about when they’re answering an essay question. And if you know that, you can write clear questions. And if you do that, when you grade your students’ papers you’re actually evaluating their abilities to think like historians – not to decode your muddy questions. 

J.B. 

*”Skill 1” is actually two plural nouns: “Developments and Processes.” It’s like saying that skill 1 for driving a car is “wheels and engines.”

Students can’t intuit history. They can’t know what happened in other times and places unless someone shares that information with them. Once they’ve learned enough history, they can begin to make educated guesses. But even then, they need to check reliable sources in order to confirm or, more likely, correct their guesses. In any case, most of our students will remain apprentices during their time with us.

So what does it mean to run a student-centered classroom when you’re committed, as Jon and I are, to a “story-first” approach to history education? If you believe, as we do, that higher-level inquiry and argument must follow and not precede historical knowledge, must you be committed to starting all units and learning cycles with teacher-directed lecture, reading, or video?  

Yes and no. In order to prepare our students for semi-independent inquiry, we need to equip them with enough narrative knowledge both to inspire curiosity and to facilitate reasonable interpretations, explanations, and judgments. And in order to equip them that way, we need, at least, to select and curate materials that will give them the story. 

But that hardly means that you need to precede every attempt to answer Question Two (What were they thinking?) with a lecture that narrates an answer to Question One, What happened? It’s fine to lecture, by the way, when your students are up for it. We live in the great age of Ted Talks and podcasts. People love hearing stories. The students in your class can love them, too. 

On the other hand, Ted Talks and podcasts require substantial resources to produce. And most of the audience for them is not 15 and compelled to listen. 

Activate The Inherent Drama

The key to making your story-first teaching as student-centered as it can be is to recognize that stories are inherently dramatic. That’s why storyboarding works so well in History class. The logic that makes storyboarding an excellent way to capture both sequential and episodic narratives — human action, chunked into events and richly visualized — can be a template for a pedagogical technique that engages students while it informs them about things they don’t yet know. 

Imagine your classroom as a dramaturgical space. What students need in order to enter into a dramatic story is a sense of setting, character, and conflict or tension. That’s something that you, the teacher, simply have to provide. We did a summer workshop a year ago in which teachers practiced setting the hook for their unit stories. It was terrific fun. Setting the hook, selling the contrast between where the story begins and where and how it ends, is like loading a spring. Set your trap, catch some students. 

Once your story-hook is set, then engage students in a series of near-field puzzles to drive the story forward. Imagine this: Louis XVI called the Estates General, a kind of representative assembly that hasn’t met in over a century. It is thoroughly old world: divided by rank. Louis only calls them because he needs to raise money. Seems straightforward enough. Three years later, his head is in a basket (along with his wife’s), and France has declared itself a republic (of virtue, no less!). What happened?!? 

A traditional way to tell that story is to, well, tell it. Teacher lectures, students take notes. Supplement liberally with reading and video. The alternative is to imagine your class as a theater troupe. Three estates? Assign them. And a king and queen, if you like. Then, direct your drama. At each turning point — at each box in your daily storyboard — ask your students to make a decision-cum-prediction. What will the estates say and do? How will the king and queen react? 

The dramaturgical classroom exploits the power of near-field inferences to keep your students engaged in unraveling a story. Provide short documents and images at intervals, and ask your student-actors to make decisions. Then show them what comes next. 

In order to make classroom dramaturgy work, you probably need to think about note taking as a formative assessment rather than as a means of recording teacher communication. Imagine this: students role-play the story, with your guidance. Then they achieve oral proficiency in telling it. Then, finally, they record it in their notes. Story first, notes last. 

When your students are fully bought in and doing school, they’ll take notes on anything. Feel free to lecture. But for reluctant or struggling students, recording a story they already get can make the whole enterprise of history learning more comprehensible. Notes lock in your learning. (Storyboards along the way don’t hurt, either.)  

There’s no getting around knowledge. But if we think of knowledge not as lists of data but rather as dramatic stories of real humans doing real human things, then maybe we can expand our range of teaching techniques by borrowing from our friends in the theater arts. All the world’s a stage, no?

G.S.

At our workshops, Jon and I typically tease the audience with imaginary swag. We don’t have any — no pens, no mugs, no stickers. If we did, our swag would be T shirts that said “Story First!” on the front, and each workshop participant would get one. Alas, no T shirts either…

So we believe that good history teaching starts with storytelling. We believe that because we’ve observed it and tried it ourselves. Jon cited Natalie Wexler in his blog post last week. She believes it, too, apparently on account of the work of Daniel Willingham. Willingham is a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia who writes about reading and education. After reading Wexler’s book, The Knowledge Gap, I read Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? to see what the fuss was about.

Mid-Range Puzzles Engage The Mind

What’s great about Willingham’s book — and it is great — is that he explains why stories work. What motivates children (and adults) to learn new things is puzzles in the midrange. If your brain has nothing to figure out, it gets bored. And if the puzzle it confronts appears irresolvable, it grows frustrated and avoidant. But get the puzzle in the midrange, where it is challenging enough to stimulate but tractable enough to provide a satisfying resolution, and the brain gets jazzed. 

It turns out not to matter what the puzzle is about. It just isn’t true that “relevant” content will motivate our students. On the contrary, a puzzle-less curriculum on a high-interest topic will be inherently less engaging for students than an appropriately challenging one on a topic completely foreign to them. 

So what do midrange puzzles have to do with storytelling? Willingham’s theory about why stories work — why they’re so engaging and memorable — is that they typically consist of a series of mildly challenging puzzles, all driven by the question: what happens next? A well-told story, with enough information and coherence to make the next action predictable without being completely obvious, will engage and stimulate the brains of our students. 

And, it turns out, the puzzles we think about become the contents of our memory. One of the reasons stories are so memorable — as opposed, say, to lists, arguments, or descriptions — is that they keep us thinking. When we audit a story, we’re constantly anticipating, trying to figure out what comes next, and we’re constantly relating prior events to subsequent ones. That active reckoning during storytelling is preparation for later recall. 

According to Willingham, one of the crucial differences between proficient and struggling readers is that good readers know more, and so understand more of what they read. Likewise, acquiring a critical mass of historical narratives is crucial to historical thinking. The more we have loaded into long-term memory, the less taxed our short-term memory will be. That’s important, because short-term memory is fixed and fragile. The more we can store and chunk — like the events in a story, or a story itself — the more we can actively and effectively think about things. Once you know your story, then you can ask and answer Questions Two through Four. Story first!

Finally, as teachers, we’ve all been encouraged to build on our students’ prior knowledge. New learning sticks to old, like velcro. The challenge for history teachers is that we want to introduce our students to people they don’t yet know, who lived in times and places different from their own, who had ideas about things that frequently seem unusual or even bizarre to us. 

Story Form = Mental Velcro

The most startling idea I found in Willingham’s book is this: telling stories about strange people and times and places actually does build on the background knowledge of our students. It recruits their knowledge of narrative structure. As Willingham explains, stories are “easy to comprehend” (67-68). We all get the format: one thing leads to another. Our students have been hearing and practicing this form since they could make sense in language. If we start from what they know — how stories work — we can then relate the foreign and distant to the local and personal. Those historical people — they’re people like us, doing things with and to each other, just like we do. The story form is the velcro. 

Willingham adds a bit of advice for storytellers in all disciplines: don’t give away too much or too little. Since storytelling is essentially a puzzle exercise, it’s important to omit enough information so that the listener or reader has to do some mental exertion to fill in the gaps, to infer what’s missing. (Relentless inclusion of detail is a good way to put your audience to sleep.) But it’s also important to include enough information so that the listener will be successful in making those inferences. When you ask a listener, implicitly or explicitly, to make an inference about what happened next, make sure to give them enough information to make a reasonable one. 

Notoriously, we all suffer confirmation bias. We latch onto evidence that supports our assumptions and beliefs and discount evidence that contradicts them. So maybe I like Willingham because his argument about narrative fits ours. On the other hand, Willingham has lots of experimental data to support his conclusions. Likewise, Jon and I have lots of years of practice and revision in the classroom under our belts. Anyway, if you do manage to convince us that storytelling isn’t the foundation of successful history teaching, we promise to change the slogan on our T shirts…

G.S.