Category: 4QM Teaching

There are a bunch of ways a history lesson can go wrong. One way is deceptive, and perniciously common: students are “engaged” in an activity that they “enjoy.” I don’t mean to sound like a grouch, but so what? The money question is: what are students thinking about? Even better: what are they *learning* to think about? If those are hard questions to answer, then the lesson, however engaging and enjoyable, is a failure. The point, after all, is to teach our students how to think well about the human world. 

Good history teachers match engaging activities to meaningful questions. Great ones do so consistently and transparently, in a sequential, scaffolded, and artful way. Our 4QM project has been all about helping history teachers to identify the meaningful questions that drive great history teaching and matching those questions to engaging activities. We’ve tried to help new teachers get good and good ones to become great. 

Hot Storytelling

Though we’ve got Four Questions, we actually just have two ideas. The first is a frequent topic in this blog space: Story first! We’ve said a lot, here and elsewhere, about how to tell great stories and how to teach students to tell great stories. For what it’s worth, clients, colleagues, and our workshop visitors almost all adopt storyboards readily once they practice using them with us. I take that as evidence of the successful transmission of our first idea. 

Storytelling is fun and engaging. Framing a dramatic story to launch a unit or lesson — advice we give all the time — is a way to come in hot. When you hear (or tell) a good story, your brain will almost irresistibly try to complete the thought: What happened next? That’s why storytelling is engaging. 

But our charge is not just to engage our students. Once we’ve hooked them with a story, our job is to teach them to think about it in skillful ways. We do that by teaching them how to interrogate a story systematically. We tell a story, then we take it apart. That requires us to turn down the temperature. 

Cool Thinking

A story that fits a pattern we already know — rags-to-riches or Cinderella, heroic triumph or rise-and-fall — should raise our suspicions. For sure, we want our students not just to engage with stories, but to exercise some skillful skepticism on them. Start with some obvious interrogatives in the Question One family, like, Is this story true? Are our sources reliable? How do we know we’ve got enough of the story to see how one thing actually led to another? Is the shape of the narrative a good account of the action or a procrustean bed…? 

Asking those questions cools things down, for sure. Question Two, which asks students to dig into an actor’s thinking, is somewhere between luke and warm. Thinking like someone else, trying to plumb their motivations and unearth their assumptions, gives us contact with another mind. That’s human warmth, done well. But answering Question Two, What were they thinking?, also requires cool consideration of sources and ideas that may be quite different — even jarringly so — from our own. That’s cooler than a story. 

Question Three is cold. As we step back from the actors’ consciousness and consider the structures that conditioned their choices, we substitute “factors” for “actors.” What feels like human drama in the story can feel like icy dissection when we ask and answer, Why then and there? 

Question Four is most challenging for getting the temperature right. Judgment typically starts hot. When we ask students to make judgments about their forebears, they are typically eager to do so. In hindsight, we may see things the people we study missed. We want them to have done better. We wish they’d left us a better world. 

On the other hand, if we’ve done a good job with the first three questions, we should see our own situation with greater clarity and complexity. Complexity — understanding how our choices are conditioned by ideas and structures that we inherit rather than invent — can be an ice bath for those who first encounter it. A simpler, more Manichean world, with good people and bad people fighting it out, gets us much hotter under the collar. When we learn that very little human action reduces to that simplicity, we cool off. And judgment, the payoff, is, in the end, a dish best served cold.

Typically, our temperature goes down as we engage more regularly and proficiently in systematic thinking. We tell stories to heat the room. As you progress through the questions, and teach your students to do so, you should expect the temperature in the room to cool. That’s okay. Seeing more and thinking about it clearly is a refined pleasure. We want our students to learn to enjoy it. We want them to see that taking a story apart can be just as engaging — more, actually — than just telling it. 

G.S.

In the United States the big players in the “historical thinking skills” space are the College Board and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). Both identify “contextualization” as a key skill that history students should learn, and at 4QM Teaching, we agree. But we think we’ve got an easier way to make that thinking skill accessible to students than they do. In this blog post I’m going to argue that their definitions are needlessly complex, and give you a suggestion for a much easier way to teach kids to contextualize sources, people, events, and ideas.

COMPLEX DEFINITIONS

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you know that I think the College Board makes their materials overly complex for no good reason (see my earlier rant here). Their definition of the historical thinking skill of contextualization is no exception: it is delightfully vague, and uses Gary’s favorite weasel word, “analyze.” Contextualization is College Board Historical Thinking Skill 4, and is defined as, “Analyze the context of historical events, developments, or processes.” They offer two sub-definitions of this skill, 4A and 4B: “Identify and describe a historical context for a specific historical development or process” and “Explain how a specific historical development or process is situated within a broader historical context” (College Board). I think these sub-definitions are synonyms: I can’t see the difference between “identifying and describing the context” for something and “explaining how it is situated within a broader context.” Definition 4A is pretty good — if they had just gone with that alone I’d have no significant complaints, but of course they can’t be that simple and direct – they’re the College Board, and must appear rigorous at all costs.

SHEG’s definition of contextualization is more straightforward: “Contextualization asks students to locate a document in time and place and to understand how those factors affect its content.” Seems pretty clear. But their “Contextualization” poster, which is meant for classroom display and thus to help students practice the skill, asks students to answer questions that are not especially helpful in contextualizing, except for the first one: “When and where was the document created?” That is followed by these three: “What was different then? What was the same? How might the circumstances in which the document was created affect its content?” (SHEG). The middle two questions are so broad as to be useless, and the last one presumes a lot of thinking skills that students may not have. I think we can do better.

CONTEXT = STORY

When we teach history with the Four Question Method we always start with a story of the unit. So when we ask students to contextualize a document, person, event, or idea we can do it by relating it directly to the story of the unit. Our 4QM Primary Source Analysis Sheet, for example, starts by having students identify and date the source, identify the author, and then asks them to contextualize this way:

“What has happened in our unit story at the time this source was created?”

“How is the author or creator related to the story so far?”

“What might you assume about the author given their relationship to the story?”

These questions work really well because they’re straightforward and direct, and most kids can actually answer them with a little bit of effort. Take the example of an important document from American history: the Declaration of Rights and Grievances of the Stamp Act Congress. The document was created in October of 1765, by a committee of colonists meeting in New York City. Assuming your American Revolution unit starts with the Seven Years War, we know that Britain has accrued a very large debt in fighting the war, and is seeking ways to pay it off. We know that the authors of the document are related to that story in that they will be the ones who have to pay, and we might assume that they won’t like that. We might also assume that they’re going to be seeking public support for their position.

I think that our “contextualize” questions are what both the College Board and SHEG are actually after with their definitions. We all want students to be able to relate the document (or person or event or idea) to the broader historical story that it’s a part of, and we all want students to understand that sources are shaped by their creators to serve particular purposes. But by prioritizing “story first,” the Four Question Method makes is easier for teachers and students to practice and demonstrate those thinking skills. 

So don’t let the big guys push you around. If your students find the College Board’s or SHEG’s definition of “contextualization” confusing or clumsy, don’t blame them and don’t blame yourself. Ask your students how the document, person, event, or idea fits into the story of the unit instead. I bet you’ll find that more of your students can contextualize than you thought!

J.B.

How do you start your units? Do you hook them? 

Textbooks, and textbook teachers, start their units with tasks. Make a map. Copy the vocab. Memorize the main “causes.” 

Don’t do it. Start with a hook. If you’re introducing a new unit, hook the story that frames the unit. Something new and notable happened. British colonists rebelled, and started a new country. The Samurai led a modernizing revolution from above, and the imperialized became imperializers. A prophet appeared among the Arabs in Mecca, and transformed both Arabia and the world. 

In literature, stories often begin in the middle, or so an English-major friend has told me. We learn something about the main character and action from an episode drawn from the middle of the arc of the plot. Then the writer takes us back, or backward and forward, from that point and fills in the rest of the story until we see it whole.

If you’re particularly literary, that would work in History class, too. But there’s an easier and more straightforward way to hook a story: contrast the beginning and end. Everything we teach that’s worth teaching is the appearance of something new and notable in the human world. Humans did things one way, and then they ended up doing something else. Or they were minding their own business and then a plague or a scourge beset them. Something happened. 

Jon and I coach teachers in hooking stories. We use the contrast technique. If you’ve planned your unit or a lesson narrative well, then you know where it ends, what new and notable thing in the world humans have done or lived through. Start before that has happened, when it’s inchoate, brewing, on the brink. Then compare that prior condition — once upon a time! — to the outcome you’re interested in narrating. The contrast between those two states of affairs creates narrative tension. It generates curiosity and interest. It makes the story real and compelling for your students.

TEXTBOOKS DO IT WRONG

Hooking the story is on my mind right now because of a recent coaching experience with a new teacher, Ms. S. She’s a very bright and extraordinarily sensitive person. She’s also brand new, and so easily misled by textbooks. Textbooks often try, lamely, to hook stories using the middle-of-the-story technique. That’s what’s in those cute boxes before the main narration begins. 

But then they load up on geography and generalizations, which is meant to provide context for the story. Ms. S. is teaching the Great War, which we now know as World War One. She told me that she started with MAIN, which is the way she learned it, and the way the textbooks “teach” it. MAIN, or MANIA, is context robbed of meaning. “Militarism,” the “M” in MAIN or MANIA, means that governments in newly industrialized countries were busy building up their armies and generals were busy writing plans to use them. Alliances, imperialism, nationalism — yes, the newly rich and powerful were doing those things. (If you’re interested in why the MAIN “causes” aren’t causes at all, see Jon’s blog post of 1.11.18.)

The point is that the world looked dangerous in 1914, at least to some astute observers, and in retrospect to most of us. But MAIN sucks the drama dry. And worse, it obscures the contrast that is actually the point of the story. 

Ms. S. didn’t know what she wanted her Great War unit to be about until we talked. In conversation, she shared that she was most struck by the attitude toward war of the participants. At the outset, they seemed to think it was like a game. We talked about the evidence for that claim and conjectured about the relationship between that impression of war and the experience of imperialism, in which military service mostly meant deploying modern weapons against outmatched opponents. Not exactly sporting, but you could see how people could get the wrong impression. 

In the Great War, the deployment of modern weapons on all sides led to a very different kind of horrifying outcome. This one had the effect of transforming how participants and observers thought and felt about war in general. That, it turned out, was the story she wanted to tell. The outcome she wanted her students to know about was a transformation in cultural consciousness — a new and notable answer to Question Two! 

Before the war, for the central protagonists, war was a game and the globe a chessboard. That’s what MAIN obliquely describes — an attitude about warfare. By the end of the war, there are a range of reactions, but all of them shot through with disillusionment. As Paul Fussell argued in his classic book, the Great War turned irony into the dominant trope in literature and the arts. We still live in its shadow. (And not for nothing, the quirky war lovers among the disillusioned — the fascists — came out of the war resentful that they didn’t get enough. And they turn out to be crucial protagonists in our next unit story…) 

LET THE STORY DRIVE THE UNIT

Once we both got clear on what the Great War story was about, Ms. S. had the tools she needed both to design a hook for the unit and to make sober, rational decisions about what exactly about the Great War her students would need to know. In other words, getting clear on the particular story she intended to tell allowed her to trim and tighten the unit, while better preparing her students to answer meaningful questions about it. 

The tipoff that a teacher hasn’t figured out what story they’re trying to tell is that they load up on context at the beginning, like textbooks do. That’s a delaying tactic, and the wrong way to think about context, in any case. Historical context is the information we use to ask and answer meaningful questions. Before students know the story they’re being asked to think about, context is meaningless. And so, trying to learn the “causes” of the Great War before you know what the Great War was is, technically speaking, ass backwards. Once you know something about what happened in the Great War, you can generate some genuine curiosity about it, curiosity that will then require adducing context. What were they thinking? Why then and there? These are the classic questions that beg for context. 

Story first, as always. It’s not as simple as it sounds, of course. It requires that you figure out what story you actually want to tell. Once you do, though, the enterprise gets lots more interesting, for teachers and students both. 

G.S.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, or if you’ve attended one of our workshops, you know that we believe that good history teaching starts with teaching the story first, and you know that we believe that you should make time to formatively assess your students’ abilities to tell the story you taught them. We often use four-sentence stories to do that assessment: require students to tell the story of the industrial revolution, or the Meiji restoration, or whatever you’ve taught them, in only four sentences. But what if your students struggle to write good sentences? I have found myself in that situation this year, and over the winter break I started reading a book that gave me tremendous insight into and practical tools for solving that very problem. This post is a straight-up plug for The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler.

SUBURBAN V. URBAN STUDENTS

I started my teaching career at a small Catholic girls high school in the South Bronx called Saint Pius V. There were no white kids at the school, and our families were all working class or poor. When I moved back home to the Boston area I ended up taking a long detour into suburban district schools. But this year I’m back in the city, teaching tenth grade at an urban charter high school that reminds me a lot of Saint Pius. It’s been great to get back to my roots, and it’s been an intense (re-) learning experience. One of the most significant differences between my suburban students and the kids I teach now is their writing. I’ve always prided myself on teaching writing well, but this year I realized that my pride was misplaced.  In the suburbs I only had to coach writing for a few students each year, because most of my students already knew what to do when I told them to “make this sentence more clear” or “tighten this paragraph.” I just had to tell them what to do — for the most part they already knew how to do it.

My current students are different. Many of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants, and English is not their first language. Most of them have parents who did not go to college, and many have parents who did not complete high school. They need much more explicit instruction about how to write well in standard English. I realized right away that we needed to start with a focus on sentences, (their badly written paragraphs or essays were usually just the cumulative result of grammatical and syntactic errors at the sentence level), and I found that I already had a perfect tool for the job: The four-sentence story. I can use it to assess student learning, as I did in the suburbs, and I can also use it to teach good sentence writing. But having the right tool is no guarantee of using it well, and I have found it challenging to coach students who don’t who don’t have many models of good writing in their lives. 

THE WRITING REVOLUTION

Enter The Writing Revolution. I started reading it over this winter break, and I got that excited feeling you get when you read something that seems to be speaking to you directly. The authors validated my students’ struggles to write clear sentences: “Producing even a single sentence can impose major cognitive demands on students, especially if it requires them to explain, paraphrase, or summarize sophisticated content” (10). They validated my decision to coach them on writing clear sentences: “Sentences are the building blocks of all writing” (10). They validated the Four-Sentence Story as a formative assessment: “When students write, they — and their teachers — figure out what they don’t understand and what further information they need” (11). They validated the 4QM emphasis on content knowledge: “The content of the curriculum drives the rigor of the writing activities” (13). 

Beyond giving me all that validation, Hochman and Wexler also gave me some specific tools for teaching writing well. The book breaks down writing instruction into explicit pieces that make it accessible to everyone. I’m already revising my coaching on how to write Four Sentence Stories, and thinking about how to integrate the book’s techniques into my coaching students to write paragraphs and essays. If your students are struggling to write good four-sentence stories, I recommend prompting them with the ten subordinating conjunctions listed on page 43. Tell them to start each sentence with one of these words: before, after, if, when, even though, although, since, while, unless, whenever. So a four-sentence story on the industrial revolution in Britain might look like this:

1. Before 1750 most cloth was made by hand, by farmers working in their houses.
2. Since this method was slow and inefficient, inventors created machines to do the various jobs of cloth-making and put the machines in water-powered factories.
3. After the steam engine was perfected, factories could be built anywhere, so businessmen put them near ports and transportation hubs.
4. Since factories needed large numbers of workers, cities quickly grew up around them, and Britain had a period of rapid urbanization in the nineteenth century.

A WORLD-VIEW IN COMMON

Along with The Knowledge Gap and Reading Reconsidered, The Writing Revolution is one of a set of books that share a world-view about teaching with the Four Question Method. They believe that complex cognitive tasks like reading, writing, and thinking about history can be “x-rayed” and explained in ways that are comprehensible to everyone. They believe that content knowledge is crucial and ought to drive rigorous instruction for students of all levels. And they believe that social justice demands that low-income students be given explicit access to this knowledge and these skills. As I’ve been reminded this year, there are myriad academic skills that middle-class students seem to simply absorb, but that low-income students need to be taught in school. If you’re using  the Four Question Method you’re already explicitly teaching the four thinking skills that are at the heart of the disciplines of history and social studies. These three books can help you do that even more effectively.

J. B. 

In a post on 11/12/19, “What New Teachers Need,” I mentioned that Jon and I had created a lesson-planning playcard. For each of our Four Questions, the playcard lists teaching techniques and formative assessments. This week, we’re heading back to Newark to work with our friends at the Uncommon charter network. We’ll be unpacking and workshopping a piece of the playcard: formative assessments for Question One, What Happened? (That’s the right box in the playcard row copied below.) 

4QM Lesson Playcard: Row One

It’s bread and butter for History teachers to teach their students a true and interesting story. It’s pretty much malpractice, though, not to check to see that they’ve actually *learned* the story. You can wait till the unit test, but that’s not giving students a chance to practice with feedback, and not giving you a chance to see how effectively you’ve communicated. Everyone’s happier when you formatively assess what your students have learned, early and often. 

Formative Assessment Is Fun!

It turns out that formatively assessing your students’ grasp of a story is one of the coolest things you can do in a classroom. There are tons of great, lively activities that will trick even the most reluctant students into taking themselves seriously as scholars of history. Jon and I typically group our formative assessments into the “individual” and “collaborative” categories. The individual ones are either writing or formal recitation exercises. A classic is the four-sentence story: boil down the narrative you just learned into four grammatical, coherent, sequential sentences. Doing that reveals a ton about what students don’t yet understand and effectively consolidates what they do. 

But the fun stuff is collaborative work on stories. For instance: I once printed out sets of images associated with the story of the American Revolution. Most of them the students had seen before, either in a slideshow accompanying a lecture or as in illustration in something they read. Some were new but referred straightforwardly to an event they knew, or should have known. In groups, I directed the students to put the images in proper historical sequence. The first group done would win a prize (unspecified, as I recall). Students called me over when they thought they’d completed the sequence. Most required revision. I’d simply look, say “not yet,” and walk away. 

If you like a quieter room — that one got pretty loud — you can try a narrative Write Around. The classic Write Around gets students to elaborate on each other’s thinking in response to a prompt. The narrative version, which formatively assesses Question One, requires them to alternative sentences, starting at the beginning of a story you specify and ending wherever you tell them to stop. No speaking, just writing. Once they finish writing, they get to read aloud what they’ve composed and revise it. 

If you want to get dramatic, you can name an event and have students act it out. If you want to practice oral presentation collaboratively, you can try a Pecha Kucha, and have a team of students hand off slides to one another. You can play the brackets game, where you pair off key terms from a story — actors, events, or ideas — and have groups of students argue out each round, saying which of the terms is more integral to the story, until you’ve got your original list of 16 terms down to a Final Four. Then they tell the story using those terms — and all the rest are taboo. 

Or, get back to 4QM basics. Teach students a story, though lecture, reading, and video, and then have them storyboard it in small groups. Storyboarding forces them to chunk the narrative, to name and date the events, and most important, to talk through the logic of events in the story. What they produce consolidates that logic and captures it in images. In fact, all of these formative assessments are designed to do the same thing: force students to think through the logic of the story. 

One more: once you’re pretty sure your students know the story, make them generate questions. Any story you really know should stimulate your curiosity. There’s so much we will have left out, of necessity. And so, if nothing else, we can always ask for *more* of the story, or more of some actor’s role in it. In any case, you know our wager: whatever questions your students generate will turn out to be one of four different types. If you’re teaching them well, they’ll know what they are and be able to identify them. And if you’ve planned your unit well, at least some of the answers to their questions will be on deck in the days to come. 

G.S.

If you’re a regular reader or have been to one of our workshops you know that we believe that almost all historical scholarship and debate can be described by our Four Questions. I recently came across a great example of a scholar making a classic 4QM style argument in J. C. Sharman’s short and polemical book, Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of Europan Expansion and the Creation of a New World Order. Sharman is polemical because he’s trying to knock down a dominant thesis about how it is that Europeans came to rule most of the globe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and one of his main arguments echoes an exercise we do in our introductory workshop, where we storyboard “Cinderella.” 

Start With The End

The first step in unit planning is to decide where your unit will end. When we coach teachers to plan with the Four Question Method, we give them a six-box storyboard and tell them to fill in the last box first: What’s the new and notable thing in the world that you wish to explain? What story is it you want to tell? We start this way because choosing your end point influences pretty much everything else about the unit you’re going to teach. It determines how much historical time you need to cover, what prior events will be judged important or irrelevant, and the overall tone of your story as you teach it. It’s impossible to plan a coherent unit without knowing the end point first. 

We illustrate this principle in our workshops by having people storyboard “Cinderella.” You probably know the story: the scullery maid turns into princess via the intervention of a fairy godmother and a persistent prince searching for someone to fit a glass slipper. When we storyboard it in our workshops the last box, the outcome or end of the story, is dated “June,” and filled in this way: 

“Cinderella and the prince are married in a beautiful and gigantic destination wedding. Her gown is gorgeous, and she wears glass slippers.”

This is literally a fairy-tale ending, and it makes the story seem like a happy one. The focus of the unit then becomes, “How did we get to this happy state?” 

But we also have an alternate storyboard, in which the sixth box is dated “Five Years Later” and filled in this way:

“Cinderella has three children, ages 4, 2, and 1. The prince is often away fighting expensive wars. Cinderella is often left at home alone with servants, who send regular reports to the prince about her activities; she has no friends or hobbies. The prince often gets perfumed letters that he won’t let Cinderella read.”

The Cinderella story told from five years further on doesn’t seem so happy. Our point with this exercise to make it clear to teachers that the decision of where to end any given unit of instruction has big implications for our teaching. 

When Should The Story of Europe End?

Sharman illustrates precisely this principle in his book, and uses it to make an interesting argument about Europe’s dominance. Sharman notes that, “deciding where to finish a story without a natural ending can make a lot of difference about the lessons drawn” (131). He then goes on to argue that previous historians have looked at the story of European dominance from the point of view of the twentieth century, when European empires were at or near their peaks. Sharman thinks that this is like ending the story of Cinderella on her wedding day. He wants us to take a longer view: “From the perspective of the early twenty-first century we know that the spectacularly rapid [European] empire-building of the nineteenth century was followed by an even more rapid process of imperial collapse in the few decades after 1945” (132). Sharman’s argument is that we’re actually asking the wrong question when we try to explain Europe’s global dominance, because Europe didn’t dominate for long. He claims that historians’ misplaced focus on the brief period when Europeans ruled large empires has distorted our view of world history, and by extension our perception of what’s “normal” in world affairs, in a decidedly Euro-centric way.

You may think Sharman is spot on, or you may not — but it’s fun to see current scholars (Sharman is a professor at the University of Cambridge, in England) providing such a clear example of how the Four Question Method really does define thinking in our discipline. 

So when you plan your next unit, remember to pick the end of the story first, and ask yourself if you’ve really chosen the best ending. It’s fun to look at wedding pictures — but historians know that there’s usually more to the story.

J.B.

The most charismatic teacher in my department, Robert G., retired last year. I’m not sure he was ready to go, but his spouse got a great job outside of commuting distance. And as Robert said at the time, quoting an African proverb, “a change is as good as a rest.” 

Robert started at my school in the 1990s — before my time there — and during his tenure won our Teacher-of-the-Year award and the well-earned admiration and affection of his colleagues and generations of students. He even turned a whole bunch of those students into college History majors, for better or worse. 

I attended a belated retirement party for Robert over the Thanksgiving weekend. At his party, we told stories about Robert and he told stories about himself. That’s what we expected. Robert is a storyteller down to his bones. Among many others, Robert told a story about a post-observation debriefing early in our relationship as teacher and supervisor. In his telling, I had just watched him lecture on Andrew Jackson, whom he was particularly fond of imitating. That was one of Robert’s winning techniques: he didn’t just tell you stories about people. He *introduced* you to the actors in the stories he told. Students felt like they were in the room with people from the past. 

In Robert’s version of the story, after the lesson observation, I told him that that was all well and good, but that his job wasn’t to tell great stories. It was to teach *students* how to tell great stories. In fact, Robert was wrong about what I said to him. My feedback came in the form of a story, one I’d recently heard on the radio. A teacher, highly regarded in his own school and district, told an interviewer about a student who approached him after he’d given what I imagine as a Robert-style lecture. “That was awesome, Mr. Teacher. When are you going to teach *us* how to do that?” I suppose it doesn’t matter much which version is true, mine or Robert’s — mine is, by the way — except that teaching with stories is almost always more effective than issuing directives. 

Robert told that story — close enough to the truth — in a spirit of gratitude, which I deeply appreciate. It says a lot about him that a guy who was already secure in his job and quite confident in his abilities was willing to hear and accept a challenge to get even better. And so he did. 

Robert never stopped telling stories in the classroom. But he also did new things, too. Once he discovered “Facetube,” a discovery he announced with much glee at a departmental lunch, he created a virtual soundtrack for his US History course. The parent of a student who learned the history of rock and roll from Robert spoke at his party, and said that her son had become a more serious student as a result. (Something that *real* could be *studied*?!?) Robert also became, more in imitation of his younger colleagues than in response to anything I said to him, much more “student centered.” His students worked in groups on documents and gave each other comments on essay drafts. They debated and presented. 

Robert was also in on the ground floor of the 4QM. He was the first one to put up posters of the questions on the wall of his classroom. And as I’ve mentioned in this space and say frequently at workshops, Robert was the audacious soul who told his 9th graders to read about and then “4QM” the Crusades on their own. I remember coming into his classroom and seeing groups of them working on storyboards and dividing up questions to research. 

Some teachers like the 4QM because it helps them to make planning decisions more rationally and efficiently. Others really like using storyboards in the classroom. Robert was a quick study and a long-time veteran. In any case, he was done worrying about curriculum planning by the time I met him. (His enormously strong narrative sense also made the task relatively straightforward for him. He always knew what story he wanted to tell.) He liked the storyboards well enough. What he really liked was getting students to think with categories. He liked seeing how sharp they felt when they were able to distinguish between a Question Two and a Question Three, say. And he liked challenging them to think that way. 

Robert was also, for all his stories, an anthropologist at heart. He loved teaching anthropological concepts to students, and was the one 9th grade teacher who refused to relinquish the Neolithic Revolution and cede it to our middle school History colleagues. Robert needed to be the one to teach broad explanatory concepts like kinship and affinity and descent and, especially, race and culture. Last year we hired a new teacher who had studied with Robert as a 9th grader. Those culture and race lessons were among his most vivid memories of high school, and part of the reason he became a Social Studies teacher. 

I think Robert saw in the 4QM that we were, in fact, naming and documenting what he did with apparently effortlessness: he told stories and trained students to think conceptually, with categorical clarity. Our documentation, and a little prodding, made it possible for him to see how he could include his students not just in his audience but also enlist them in the meaning-making enterprise as co-conspirators. 

Robert taught me a bunch of things about teaching. Almost all of them have to do with fear. Robert had (and has) none, at least none related to the classroom. In pursuit of knowledge and understanding — and, for sure, a good story — there’s nothing Robert wouldn’t try. The fact is, I was a pretty good and Jon an unusually good teacher before we started figuring out the 4QM. The conversation that became the idea that became our consulting enterprise has also forced us to rethink and relearn what we thought we’d figured out. That’s been a hard process, though undoubtedly worth every calorie of effort and worry. Robert showed me how to learn as an adult with grace and humility. For that, I’ll always be in his debt.

G.S.

Gary and I stack up blog post ideas in brief notations of one or two phrases to come back to later, and this week an experience in my tenth grade AP World History class brought me back to a file labelled “Q2/Q4 Problem.” This is a very common problem that happens in discussion classes and results in students avoiding difficult thinking; hopefully after reading this post you’ll be better prepared to deal with it in your own classes.

This week we are studying the French Revolution, and on Thursday we were discussing Robespierre’s speech on Justification for the Terror. I love this document because it’s such a clear illustration of radical Jacobin thought, it demonstrates Rousseau’s idea that sometimes government will “force people to be free,” and it sets us up nicely for future conversations about radicals who believe they know how to create justice and are prepared to use violence to achieve it (Lenin and Mao, for example). My lesson plan follows a classic “Q2, Q4” structure: students start by interpreting Robespierre, taking plenty of time with this difficult text to make sure they understand what Robespierre was thinking. Then in the second part of the lesson we shift to Question Four, and I ask the students if they think Robespierre did the right thing. That’s where the Q2/Q4 problem often arises, as it did in my class last week.

Here’s how this problem shows itself. We’ve established that Robespierre believed that he was part of a global struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny, and that violence was the only way to remove the enemies of democracy. He admits openly to using the methods of tyrannical governments, but justifies that by saying that it’s alright when he does it, because he’s using tyrannical methods in order to create justice, not to enforce more tyranny. (His actual sentence, which I find both elegant and chilling, is “The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny.”) So far, so good: this is all Question Two (“What were they thinking?”). Then we move to Question Four (“What do we think about that?”), and ask if Robespierre did the right thing. This discussion is often very powerful, as students grapple with their own beliefs and assumptions. If you believe that democracy is better than monarchy, should you support Robespierre? Do methods matter if the end goal is just? What if the methods seem to directly contradict the goal? Could it be that democracy is not always the best form of government? 

Students Duck The Hard Questions

The problem comes when students duck all of those hard questions by saying, as one of my students did this time, “I think he did the right thing because his intentions were good.” Variations on this include, “His heart was in the right place,” “his goal was admirable,” and “he cared about the people.” The problem is that all of these statements describe Robespierre’s thinking, not the student’s. This student is avoiding a difficult Question Four by answering a much easier Question Two. 

Of course there are many ways to respond to this in the moment. If your students are aware of the Four Questions you can simply point out the shift: “You’re answering Question Two: you’re telling us what he was thinking. I’m asking you a Question Four. Of course he thought he was right. Do you think he was right?” One way to make the difference between the two Questions clear to students is to ask the “monuments” question, which is an obvious Question Four: should Robespierre get a monument in Paris? What should it say? Bruce Lesh’s book, Why Won’t You Just Tell Us The Answer? has a chapter on this question, and it’s a great way to make kids see that making judgments about history is not the same thing as interpreting the thinking of historical figures. (For the record, Robespierre has no monument in France, just a metro stop named for him in a Paris suburb.)

My students all know the Four Questions, so this past week I pointed out to my student that she had confused Questions Two and Four. She then reconsidered, and decided that while she admired Robespierre’s passion for democracy and justice, she thought he had done wrong. She could not agree that terror, violence and suppression of individual rights would in fact produce democracy and justice. 

Hopefully this post has helped clarify the difference between these Questions for you as well, and given you some guidance on how you can push your students to do that hard thinking that makes history class engaging, rigorous, and fun! 

J. B.

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.