Category: 4QM Teaching

About a month ago I wrote a post about China and Japan’s different responses to Western imperialism, and how that made a perfect Question Three puzzle. (You can read that post here.) Today I’m circling back to that topic because I recently had a conference about it with student, and I think the conference was helpful in illustrating a fun and interesting phenomenon about Question Three.

Explanatory Turtles

Francis Fukuyama is one of my favorite authors (I know, I know, you think he’s wrong about The End of History, but we can talk about that later), in part because he has a wry sense of humor. In his book The Origins of Political Order he attempts to explain why human societies have developed as they have, and at one point he recounts the apocryphal story of a cosmologist who is giving a lecture on the structure of the universe. As she is describing the orbits of the planets around the sun she is interrupted by a man in the audience who tells her that she is wrong, and that the earth is in fact balanced on the back of a giant turtle. Without missing a beat, the cosmologist replies, “Ah yes, sir. But what is that turtle standing on?” The man replies, “It’s no use, professor! It’s turtles, all the way down!”

Fukuyama recounts this tale to illustrate the problem of social scientists trying to explain things. I asked my students to explain why China and Japan reacted differently to Western imperialism, for example, and got some plausible explanations. But as Fukuyama notes, “the turtle one chooses as an explanatory factor is always resting on another turtle farther down.” How do we know when to stop explaining? Fukuyama goes all the way back to human biology in his search for “a Grund-Schildkröte (base turtle) on which subsequent turtles can be placed” (438). We don’t usually have to go that far in our high school history classes, but we do need to go far enough in our search for base turtles to get past Questions One and Two.

Question Two Is Not Your Base Turtle

A common error in answering Question Three is to actually answer Question Two, which was what my student had done on his summative assessment. Answering Question Two is never a good base turtle – it’s  simply restating the explicandum, or the outcome we seek to explain when we ask Question Three. This photo of the board after my student conference shows the levels of thinking involved in a good Question Three puzzle, and the common mistake of stopping at Question Two.

On the top left is the Question Three: Why did Japan and China react differently [to Western imperialism?]. That’s the equivalent of the earth I drew on the top right: the circle on top of the turtles. This is the explicandum, the outcome we seek to explain.

Then below that is my student’s first answer to the question: “Japan and China reacted differently because they thought differently.” I put a Q2 in brackets next to that answer, because it’s not an answer to Question Three, but rather to Question Two, “What were they thinking?” This is the equivalent of the first turtle that I drew underneath the earth on the right. It seems like an explanation, but if you think about it for a moment you’ll see that it’s just a restatement of the explicandum. Obviously the Japanese and Chinese leaders thought differently — if they thought the same way, they would have acted the same way. Question Three asks us, “Why did the leaders think differently? What difference(s) between Japan and China made it more likely that their leaders would think differently in the ways that they did?” Question Three is the cosmologist saying, “Ah yes, sir. But what is that turtle standing on?”

On the bottom left is my student’s “base turtle:” a geographic explanation for why the leaders of Japan and China responded as they did. The student has identified a plausibly relevant difference between Japan and China, and has described a mechanism that links that difference to different ways of leadership thinking. Japan is small, and perhaps that led its leaders to feel vulnerable when confronted by the West, thus more willing to make significant changes in order to avoid being dominated and exploited. China is big, and perhaps that led its leaders to feel arrogance towards the West, and thus less willing to make significant changes in response to Western aggression. I’ve got an extra turtle in the diagram on the right, but the point is clear: when you’re dealing with Question Three, you’ve got to get down to a base turtle, or you don’t really have an explanation. The Question Two turtle needs to be standing on something else.

See You This Fall!

This will be our last blog post of this school year. We’re thinking of trying a podcast this summer, but in any case we’ll be back in this space in August. Fee free to email us with ideas for posts, suggestions for guest bloggers, or questions about anything you read. Thanks for reading!

J.B.

Our school gives collegiate-style final exams. At the end of June, when regular classes are done for the year, we schedule students for 90 minute exam blocks in each of the major academic subjects. All students, even the 9th graders, come in just for exams and otherwise study or sleep or wander where they will.

That’s our official arrangement, anyway. On account of state-wide testing, Physics, our 9th Science requirement, gives an in-class final at the end of May. The Physics final has become a formative assessment to get students prepared for MCAS, the state exam. World Language has long gone its own way, with a multipart final that includes speaking and listening exercises as well as reading and writing prompts. Since the exam takes longer than 90 minutes to administer, they also test earlier.

This year Math defected from the collegiate final system, too. The Math faculty decided they wanted to end the year with a project unit, something applied, engaging, and collaborative. It made no sense to haul kids back after that for a traditional exam, so they decided to administer their last exam in classes in early June, before starting project work.

That leaves, for 9th graders, at least, just Social Studies and English participating in the old, end-of-year system. And that, in turn, has forced us all to think again about why we give final exams in the first place. Maybe the practice is obsolete. Maybe we should just ditch the whole thing and end every course with a project.

Articulating Key Course Content

I’m not yet persuaded. Here’s why: a good final exam (and midterm, too) compels teachers to boil down what they expect students to know and think at the end of the year. For those of us teaching core history courses, it forces us to prepare to forget.

I taught some US History to my students this year, though less than I’d hoped. They learned some small portion of what I aspired to teach them. Much of that they’ve already forgotten. As I prepared myself to prepare them for our final exam, I did something predictable and reassuring for all of us: I made a storyboard.

To be honest, my first time through the US curriculum, I strung stories together until I got to the end. The units made sense — each one had a storyboard and 4QM-style unit questions — but my course really didn’t. At least, it didn’t tell a story I could articulate clearly. And so I couldn’t, in the end, ask my students to tell a version of that story back. My first time through, my final looked a lot like a jumbo unit test.  

I’ve got a better sense of the story I want to tell about US History now. The result is that I’m better able to sum up what I want students to take away from the course once it’s over. What I want is for my students to turn a complicated set of stories into a simpler and more memorable one.

My course storyboard — the ones my students will use as a template to help them study for the final exam — tells the story of Americans arguing over time about the answers to two big sets of questions:

• What should government do for people, and what should people (and groups) do for themselves?
• Who is included in “the people”? Who does the American government represent? What does it actually mean to be an American?

There are lots more things my US History course could have been about. These aren’t the only questions that matter to or illuminate US History. And there are lots of different ways to tell a story focused on just these questions. Like all teachers, I’ve had to accommodate limitations, my own and those of the time I’ve been allotted with my students. And so I’ve made choices about how to make my course coherent, about something worth trying to remember.

Telling A U.S. History Story

The six boxes in my final exam storyboard represent my choices. Each box, from “Founding” through “Republican Realignment,” represents a chunk of the American story. Each can be told as a story about how public debate over government and membership changed over time. Using the prompts I’ve given them — the titles and contents of the boxes — my students will prepare themselves to tell those stories on the final exam.

For example, they’ll tell a brief story about Democratic realignment as a result of the New Deal, and the way FDR’s administration changed debate about the role of government. They’ll do that again for Reagan and the Republican realignment of the 1980s. Likewise, they’ll tell stories about immigration politics one hundred years ago and today, and about the Civil Rights movement in between — stories about inclusion and equality, the terms of membership in the American polity. I’ll ask them, finally, to offer hypotheses about why, right now, American politics is more about membership than about the proper role of government.

Preparing for and giving our final exam each year has helped to prod me into something approaching narrative coherence about my curriculum. Preparing for and taking that final will force my students to connect the pieces of our course to a bigger, more enduring story. If your final is just a unit test with more questions, then it’s probably not worth doing. If it helps your students to get some perspective on what they learned, and helps you to design your course better to achieve that aim, then it’s essential.

G.S.

If you’re a serious student of history and the social sciences you know that data presentations can be very powerful. (Think of national debt curves, or social class pyramids, just to name two.) But knowing that data presentations are powerful, and knowing how to actually make the kind of tables, charts, and graphs that make up a compelling data presentation are two different things. And knowing how to teach your students to make them is another thing entirely. This spring Gary and I have gotten a chance to meet and work with Richard Donnelly of Bedford High School in Bedford Massachusetts. Rich is a whiz at data visualization for teachers and students, and in this blog post we’re going to let Rich share some of his techniques and give you access to the web pages he maintains for learning and practicing them. Thanks, Rich!

Three Basic Data Visuals

One of Rich’s big insights is that you (and your students) only really need to know how to make three types of data visuals: line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts. As Rich says, when it comes to data presentations “simple is better than complex.” This link will take you to Rich’s web page that has the slides from a conference presentation he gave on data visualization, a PDF guide to making basic data visualizations, and some great data sets on world history topics.

Google Drawing and Infographics

Rich has also worked on using Google Drawing to make infographics: visual presentations that combine different kinds of visuals to present information or arguments. As Rich describes them, “Infographics are basically visual essays.” This link will take you to Rich’s web page that has a presentation on teaching visual literacy to students, some simple instructions on using Google Drawing to make infographics, and some assignments he’s used with students along with grading rubrics.

Using Data To Answer Questions

Data presentations are great tools for working with the Four Question Method. As Rich says, “I think data can provide a good support to answering Q1 questions about the reality of a unit story. Data can reveal a larger story and the visualization make it easier to see that story. Specifically, I think data can be really good at putting substance to concepts. For example, two big important concepts with the Industrial Revolution are increased productivity and scale of production. These are tough concepts for students and text description does not have a lot of impact. Historic data makes the points clear.”

And data sets can also be helpful in answering Question Three: “Learning to work with and think about data involves learning about how to see trends and how to consider the way data can be a proxy to a larger understanding about what was happening in an event. Answering Q3 involves being able to see beyond the specifics of a historic event and make comparisons to other historical events. These are related thinking skills. The second way gets more to how statistics are useful for showing the significance of factors in historical events. In answering a Q3 question, it is important to figure out what factors were necessary and sufficient to make something happen. Answering why something happened at one point and not another involves identifying the factors that were necessary to making the event happen and separating them out from factors that were not sufficient to cause the change.”

Thanks again to Rich Donnelly for all his excellent work on this important topic! All readers are welcome to let us know if you’ve got suggestions or ideas for future blog posts. We can be reached at info@4qmteaching.net any time.

We’re taking our 9th graders to a new building next year. It’s an old building, actually, but it’ll be new to them, and to the faculty team who will teach there for the next two years while our main campus undergoes renovations. We’re taking this opportunity to launch some new common practices. During a series of meetings this fall, we came up with the outline of our plan. In all of our 9th-grade classes, across the curriculum, we’re going to share practices designed to get all 9th graders to do the three things we identified as crucial to their long-term success in high school and beyond. Our shorthand designation for these goals: GYST, Collaboration, and CER.

GYST stands for Get Yourself Together. (Among the adults, we preferred “Get Your Sh*t Together.” Gallows humor.) In coordination with our new Advisory program, classroom teachers will teach and model organizational and goal-setting practices that will help our students to manage the complex demands of high school and to ask for the help they need when they need it. Collaboration is what it sounds like. We’re going to teach students, using common rubrics and assessments, how to participate effectively in teams.

CER stands for Claim-Evidence-Reasoning. We didn’t invent the formula, obviously, nor is it new to any of our 9th-grade teachers, all of whom have been teaching the logic of argument all along. What’s new is our commitment to use common language and some common instructional techniques to get students to use the formula correctly and consistently.

I noticed during our planning meetings that, of the three packages of skills and habits we’ve committed ourselves to, CER is the one about which teachers seem to have the most confidence. Everyone does it already, even if they call it Thesis-Evidence-Analysis, or some other variation on the theme. And everyone agrees that evidence-based reasoning, for which CER is our shorthand formula, is a skill we all consider a top priority. In fact, CER is the agreement that worries me most.

I worry about CER because, deployed badly, it encourages students to make and teachers to accept bad arguments. Here’s what I mean.

CER and Spurious Correlations

Timmy was slow to develop. His parents had him tested. He had indicators of autism. He had also recently had an MMR vaccination. His parents googled around on the internet, put two and two together, and decided that he was likely a victim of thimerosal poisoning. (Thimerosal is the preservative used in vaccinations.) They had a claim: thimerosal causes autism. They had evidence: Timmy got the shot, then got autism. They had reasoning: the mercury in the preservative caused damage to Timmy, similar to damage reported by other parents on social media. CER.  

What went wrong was spurious correlation. Timmy’s parents connected thimerosal and Timmy’s diagnosis — which, to make this true story even more interesting, was probably inaccurate — in a way that conforms to CER protocols but amounts to terrible thinking. This particular correlation has now been debunked, though not eradicated.

Our problem as 9th-grade teachers, particularly in Social Studies, is that CER alone doesn’t prevent us from encouraging our students to make the same kinds of spurious correlations in what we allow to pass for reasonable arguments. On the contrary, we’ve been doing it for years.

Consider this claim: Augustus Caesar was a successful ruler because he mustered a large army, built roads (or had them built), and instituted an imperial cult. That sounds like a high school history thesis, right? (I can provide evidence, if you’re interested.) In the examples I’ve seen, each of the three elements of Caesar’s rule — roads, armies, cult — is the claim in a body paragraph. In each paragraph, the student author cites as evidence reliable testimony to the effect that Caesar did these things. And then, our student author supplies the reasoning: roads made military transport efficient and facilitated trade, thereby providing positive and negative incentives for compliance with imperial rule. The armies are obvious enough, and the cult is a model of political propaganda.

That’s all perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, our student author has given us no evidence-based reasons to believe that any part of it is true. Let’s accept that Caesar built roads, a claim for which our student author has indeed provided evidence. (The fact that that evidence is second hand, mediated by scholars, is a consideration but not a concern. Let’s take the facts as established.) And let’s assume, further, that Caesar was indeed successful. The reasoning in this case, about the likely effects of roadbuilding, amounts to a plausible hypothesis. It could be so, that road building strengthened imperial rule, and so contributed to Caesar’s success. But our student has supplied no evidence that that claim is true. All we know is that Caesar built roads and was successful. Just like Timmy was exposed to thimerosal and had symptoms of autism.  

CER and Hypothesis Testing

Did Caesar’s road-building projects actually strengthen the empire? That’s an awesome question. In order to answer it for real, we need to do something more important and more challenging than the mechanical application of a CER structure to an argument. We need to do some hypothesis testing. We could do that in a number of ways. We could look for evidence of cases where newly-built Roman roads led to military victories or increased trade. That would give us a tighter correlation, and some reason to believe that there’s a causal connection between the two. That’s the narrative approach — what a traditional historian would do. Or we could treat our hypothesis as an answer to a proper Question Three and look for comparative cases that confirm or disconfirm our hunch that successful empires engage in road building and unsuccessful ones don’t, all else equal.

As you can see, real CER — real explanation, that is — is pretty daunting. It requires not just the application of a formula, but real thinking. The point, especially in a high school history class, is not to provide definitive answers to any of the explanatory questions we pose to our students or that we encourage them to ask for themselves. As CER training promises, our goal is to teach students how to answer questions well, and how to judge whether a purported answer is any good.  

“CER” is a formalism. It’s not wrong. On the contrary. It reminds us that we can’t just assert claims and expect to be believed. If we make claims about how the world works, we need to respect our audience enough to give them reasons to think so, too. The problem with CER as a teaching mnemonic is that it encourages teachers and students to check for form but not content. If it looks like an argument, it must be one.

There are genuine techniques for historical and sociological thinking, which can be done more or less skillfully. Our Four Questions are designed to make those techniques clearer and more accessible. CER is supposed to do that, too. If you teach that formula alongside the 4QM, and take your questions and claims seriously, your students will learn to test hypotheses and exhibit a healthy skepticism about arguments in general. If you just check the CER boxes in a mechanical way, you’re like to come down with a case of thimerosal poisoning. Trust me.

G.S.

Question Three (“Why Then And There?”) is the most difficult of the Four Questions. It’s the most abstract, and the thinking it requires is generally unfamiliar to those of us not rigorously trained in one of the social sciences. (As a history major, I know this struggle personally.) It helps to remember that Question Three is inherently comparative. Answering it requires us to compare the story of a particular time and place with another story: either a story of the same place at a different time, or the story of a different place, or both. We’re looking for underlying factors that explains why the story changed, or why the stories of two places turned out differently. The formula we teach to students is, “explain a change with a change or a difference with a difference.”

This year I’m teaching modern world history, and the stories of China and Japan’s responses to Western imperialism offer a golden opportunity to practice Question Three thinking. These two stories create a kind of natural experiment. Consider: we have two Asian countries, both largely isolated from the outside world, and both initially contemptuous of Western culture and products. Both are forced open to international trade by Western military power, and leaders in both countries debate policy options: Should they resist Western domination by strengthening their traditional institutions and culture? Or should they try to strengthen themselves by dramatically changing their institutions and cultures to be more like the West? As most readers probably know, the traditionalists won the debate in China, and that country was largely dominated by the Western powers for approximately a century, from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. But the revolutionaries won the debate in Japan, which modernized and industrialized quickly after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Japan was soon able to stand up to the West, ultimately establishing an Asian empire that lasted until Japan’s defeat in what the West calls “World War Two.”

This is a classic Question Three puzzle. We have two places that share many similarities, who encounter the same problem in the same era. Yet they react very differently, with starkly different results. Why did China stick with tradition, while Japan opted for revolution? On my unit sheet the Question Three is phrased like this: “What explains why Japan responded to contact with the West so differently from China?”  

Working in their small groups, my students did a great job thinking through this puzzle this year. Here’s how they did it.

Step One: Define The Explicandum

We started out by reviewing our answers to Questions One (“What Happened?”) and Two (“What Were They Thinking?”) for China and Japan in the nineteenth century. Answering these questions had been the focus of our unit so far, so this quick review took only a few minutes. We then re-read the Question Three, and I reminded the students of the formula, “Explain a change with a change or a difference with a difference.” In this case, we were seeking to explain a difference between China and Japan’s responses to the West. So I had them turn to their groups and gave them ten minutes to see if they could identify any differences between China and Japan that might plausibly explain why the countries responded so differently to contact with the West.

In my first circuit around the room I heard several students making a very common error: they tried to answer Question Three by narrating the story, or stating what leaders in each country were thinking. These students said things like, “The Japanese responded differently because they were more open to Western ideas.” This is not an answer to Question Three, it is a re-statement of the explicandum — the thing we seek to explain. (Social scientists would call this the “dependent variable.”) We already know that the Japanese leaders were more open to Western ideas than the Chinese leaders. Question Three asks why that is. I was able to help these students see their mistake quickly; in every case there were other students in the group who had also seen the error for what it was and they chimed in to help. Good Question Three thinking starts with clearly defining your explicandum.

Step Two: Identify A Plausibly Relevant Change Or Difference

Once you’ve identified your explicandum, the next step is to identify a change or difference that could plausibly be related to it. In this case, my students quickly identifed two differences between China and Japan that they thought might be related to their different responses to the West. First, they suggested that while both countries were nominally isolated from the West, China had maintained and managed a subservient Western presence in their country for centuries. As Commissioner Lin’s 1839 letter to the English monarch notes, Western traders had always been “submissive” to Chinese demands for tribute and had acquiesced to Chinese regulations. My students had no evidence of a similar Western presence in Japan, and our sources had emphasized that the Japanese were astonished by the power of Commodore Perry’s warships when they arrived in the capital city in 1853. Their reaction suggests that the Japanese had not had significant contact with the West for a long time. And second, they noted that China is an enormous country, while Japan is a relatively small island nation.

Step Three: Describe A Mechanism That Shows How The Change Or Difference Works

The next step in the Question Three thinking process is to explain how the change or difference you’ve identified actually works to produce the outcome you’re curious about. What’s the connection between the underlying factor(s) and the explicandum? The photo below shows my students’ answers to that question for size and contact with the West. They posited that China’s history of contact with the West might have bred a complacent sense of superiority that was difficult to overcome, even when Western powers demonstrated their military prowess. By contrast, a sudden introduction to Western gunboats might have impressed Japanese leaders with a sense of inferiority that made them more open to change. And they hypothesized that the size of China might have also contributed to an unwarranted feeling of power among the leadership: after all, the country would obviously be difficult to conquer. By contrast, Japan’s small size may have led its leadership to feel vulnerable.

In talking through these two differences my students noticed a third difference: Japan had the example of China to learn from. When Japanese leaders visited China in the late 1800s they were shocked to see the once-dominant regional power weakened and exploited by foreigners. Perhaps this example of what not to do helped to inspire support for the Japanese revolutionaries who urged their countrymen to embrace Westernization.

Process, Not Answers

I emphasized to my students, and I now emphasize to readers, that I don’t really know the answer to this Question Three. The answers provided by my students seem plausible to me (although a quick internet search while I was writing this post turned up at least one article that suggests the “more contact / less contact” difference is entirely incorrect, and the mechanism exactly backwards!). I especially like the “example of China” explanation, and I have some other ideas about contrasting social structures in China and Japan and the importance of the Samurai Class, but I don’t know enough about this history to have a settled opinion. I’m blogging about this lesson because it was a great example of tenth graders demonstrating Question Three thinking, not because I’m sure they’re right about their answers. (If readers have ideas on this, I’d love to hear them; email us at info@4qmteaching.net.)

Question Three is challenging. But with practice, and with clear coaching on the three steps in thinking described above, even high school students can think like social scientists!

J.B.

In my first or second year of high school teaching — my memory is hazy on timing — I had an exceptional sophomore named Anna. Anna was a political radical, or so she said. She was an articulate critic and, for an unskilled teacher, kind of a pain. She wasn’t loud or disruptive, but she was better read than all of my other students, and talked past most of them. I was a lousy translator.

I did better with her one on one. Anna was keenly interested in Latin America. She told me that she wanted to write her research paper on the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Anna was going to explain why the Cubans revolted, she said. I asked her what her hunch was, her working hypothesis. She said that the Cubans revolted because they were poor and oppressed.

I didn’t know much about managing a heterogeneous group of 10th graders, but I’d just spent close to two decades working alongside political scientists. I’d absorbed from them a very unhealthy skepticism about narrative and storytelling, and a remarkably salutary skepticism about argument. Anna’s was a classic bad argument.

So I asked Anna, what proportion of Latin Americans, in her estimation, were poor and oppressed? Quite a few, she thought. And how many of those poor-and-oppressed Latin Americans actually staged revolutions? Anna got her thinking face on. She sat for a minute, and then said she’d work on it.

During my next one-on-one meeting with Anna, she reported that she’d changed her focus. She was now going to explain why Costa Rica had the best functioning democracy in Central America. She had gotten to this topic by reading more about Cuba, trying to figure out what made Cuba in the ‘50s different from other Latin American countries. Over and over, the sources she was reading kept telling her that Costa Rica was also an outlier. Now that she was on the trail of what, many years later, Jon and I would call Question Three, she wanted to pursue it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Anna was bright and diligent, but more important, she had an intellectual conscience. She discovered something that upset her, and pursued that discovery anyway. Costa Rica, she informed me, was the most ethnically homogeneous country in Central America. It had a vanishingly small indigenous population, unusual for the region. Costa Rica’s indigenous population had been exterminated or driven out. The result, Anna reluctantly concluded, was that it was easier to establish stable electoral institutions.

She was more diligent than I am. I never read enough to know whether her findings were robust or original. The paper was terrific, as I recall, though I no longer have a copy. At any rate, I did learn a ton from Anna. I learned, among other things, that the logic of comparative explanation — Question Three — is neither intuitive nor obvious, even to the very brightest students, or teachers.

Question Three Has No Verbs

You’ll notice that our current Question Three has the oddest syntax of all four questions. It’s the only one of the four that lacks a verb. The original and now-obsolete version of Question Three was, “Why did that happen?,” followed briefly by, “Why did that really happen?” Neither version gave adequate guidance. For people new to thinking like social scientists, the bland “Why did that happen?” didn’t remind them to avoid the trap that Anna first fell into. They thought that describing what people were thinking — that they were being treated unjustly, in the Cubans’ case — was the same as explaining what they did.

The current version of the question, Why then and there? — a brilliant suggestion from a colleague who once heard us muddle through a Question Three workshop — focuses attention on what your brain has to do when it wrestles with a puzzle about the conditions that make the patterns of events around us move and change. It’s worth sacrificing a verb to be reminded that, without comparison, you’re just not explaining things. We’ve even got our own mnemonic now, a chorus worth repeating whenever you ask Question Three: “Explain a change with a change and a difference with a difference.” And, for good measure: “Factors, not actors!”

Now that I know that I have to teach Question Three explicitly, and now that I’ve got some techniques for doing so, I don’t have to rely upon geniuses like Anna showing up in my classes in order to get good results. In my current US History class, I 4QM the whole research process. Students tell stories first. They share answers to Question One about their topic with their classmates. Then I encourage them to find a Question Two puzzle to dig into. Pick an important or curious decision made by a person or group in their story. Then find the resources that would help them to say, convincingly, what they were thinking.

My more ambitious and capable students can pursue Question Three puzzles, but they know in advance that those are more challenging. Question Three requires disciplined thinking and comparative case studies (or a trove of quantitative data, if you can find it). And when I get an Anna, as I did last year, the results are now quite remarkable.

Rebecca was interested in Native America politics. Her research narrative was about the Navajo. She was impressed, during her initial research, by how comparatively well developed Navajo political institutions were. She wondered why. So she found out. Along the way, she learned a ton about the history of government relations with Native tribes and about the ecology and economics of reservations — including a surprising amount about sheep herding! The final paper laid out the factors that distinguished the paths of political development of the Navajo and Lakota Sioux, with frequent references to other tribes. The result explained, with impressive clarity and persuasiveness, why Navajo political institutions are so much more robust than those of other tribes.

With my encouragement, Rebecca sent the essay to one of the scholars whose work informed her own. He wrote back — five single-spaced pages — praising her work and engaging her in scholarly conversation about it.

That experience meant something to Rebecca. Next year, she is heading off to Oxford University to study with their Human Sciences faculty. In a note she wrote me to thank me for my letter of support, she mentioned her “passion for social science.” Anna had that passion, too. But I wasn’t clear enough at the time in my own practice to make that way of speaking available to her. Rebecca, on the other hand, knows how to describe her intellectual curiosity, and to pursue it systematically.

We sometimes say, about students like Anna and Rebecca, that they could learn under a rock. In some sense, that’s true. Both of them are way smarter than I am, for sure. It’s possible that most of the classes they attended in high school, mine included, could have been replaced by independent reading time and they’d have been no worse off. But if you’re willing to impose discipline and clarity on your classroom questioning — the difference, for me, between the Anna Era and the Rebecca Era — you might fight that even your smarty-pants students will learn to think with greater discipline and clarity about the human world. As I’m confident Rebecca will prove in the years to come, that’s good for all of us.

G.S.

In a recent post in this blog, I wrote about how curriculum planning is a team sport. Developing the Four Question Method has been the ultimate curriculum planning project, and it is certainly a team sport. Gary and I argue constantly about how to teach history to young people, and our arguments are a key part of what had led us to these Four Questions and the method we’re still building around them. The other key parts are actually teaching and observing teachers (we like to say that we didn’t invent this idea, we observed it). Teaching and observing provide real-world data and keep us grounded, and the arguments make our ideas better and more clear.

A few weeks ago Gary wrote a blog post about the two types of stories we tell when we teach history, and after it was up on the web we argued about it. He called the two story types “cause-and-effect stories” and “continuity and change stories.” I didn’t like those names. I argued that every story we tell in history class contains cause and effect and describes continuity and change, so these labels don’t help us to distinguish stories from each other. By the end of the argument (about an hour of conversation, spread out over several days), we had come up with names that we think better describe these two story types, and a working hypothesis about what makes them different.

Sequential Narratives

Instead of “cause-and-effect-stories” we’re now calling them “sequential narratives.” Sequential narratives are chains of events that have clear cause-and-effect relationships, and culminate in something new and notable in the world. Let’s take the American Revolution as an example. In 1763, the thirteen American colonies were happy and loyal members of the British Empire. In 1776 the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, and seven years after that Britain acknowledged that independence in the Treaty of Paris. The story of how we got from colonies to independent nation reads like a break-up narrative that our students might tell: “So first he he said, and then she said, and then that made him even madder, so he goes…” If you’ve been to one of our workshops you know that we start the unit planning process by making a six-box storyboard that forces us to select the key elements of the story and put them into “chapters,” one chapter per box. In sequential narratives those chapters are almost always strictly chronological: the events of each box directly precede the events of the next one. The boxes don’t need to cover the same period of time — for example, in this American Revolution storyboard the Stamp Act crisis gets a box all to itself — but the boxes go in order and the relationships between them are causal. As Gary noted in his original post, these kinds of stories are conceptually easy to tell. The challenge for teachers is to “prune the story down to its core essentials” so that students can access it without being overwhelmed with facts and details.

Episodic Narratives

We’re now calling the other type of stories “episodic narratives.” Episodic narratives are different from sequential narratives. They are broader, in both time and space, and describe large overall changes, rather and recounting a strictly causal narrative. As Gary noted, these stories are less focused on describing precisely how something changed; instead they describe broad and significant changes over time, illustrating how much something has changed. The Industrial Revolution unit I’ve taught for the last few years is a good example of an episodic narrative.The narrative covers a nearly two hundred year period, from 1700 to 1890. Box number two focuses on the textile industry in Great Britain, but box number three is a general description of the spread of industrialization. Both those boxes have wide date ranges: “1700s” and “1800s.” Chronology is violated directly in box number four, “Responses” [to industrialization], since Adam Smith’s work actually preceded the industrial revolution. Smith’s ideas were used by nineteenth century thinkers to justify laissez-faire policies, but he was not in fact responding to industrialization. This box title is more accurately applied to Karl Marx, who was, but the fact that we’re putting both these authors in the same box is an indication that we’re telling a different kind of story than the one we told with the American Revolution. Box number five is broad is both time and space, describing reforms carried out by different means (labor unions, legislation) and in different places (Britain and the European continent). The causal links between these six boxes are not nearly so tight and clear as in a sequential narrative, and in some cases may not exist at all. It would be a stretch to say that Smith and Marx caused Parliament to pass the factory acts, for example.

Planning with both types of narratives requires teachers to select the key elements in the story and to leave lots of things out. But with episodic narratives the challenge is somewhat different, because there are so many possible specific cases that illustrate the changes we’re studying that it can be harder to decide what to leave out. Some readers might notice that although my industrial revolution storyboard ends in 1890, it makes no mention of the “second industrial revolution.” And I mostly ignore industrialization outside of Britain, except for a brief mention of German state socialism in box number five. The storyboard is an especially helpful limiting tool for episodic narratives, because it forces us to choose our episodes thoughtfully, and helps us to avoid forcing an episodic story to become an overcrowded and inaccurate sequential one. If we know we’re writing an episodic narrative, the pressure to include anything and everything that might be relevant to the story falls away.

Fifty Years?

Having argued our way to new names for the two kinds of stories, Gary and I are now arguing about a working hypothesis about what might indicate to teachers that they are best served by explicitly choosing one or the other. I’ve suggested that a fifty year span between the setting and outcome may be the breakpoint between sequential and episodic stories. Shorter than that and you’re probably teaching a sequential narrative: think about units on the world wars, or the new deal. Fifty years or longer and you’re probably teaching an episodic narrative: think about units on the rise of modern China, or the spread of Islam.

Of course there may be a spatial variable as well, and maybe the fifty years idea is just wrong and there’s some better way to distinguish between these story types. Since this post was drafted, Gary and I have had even more productive argument about it — watch this space for further developments!

J.B.

History teaching is hard to do well. But it’s relatively easy to describe: teach your students to tell true stories and make reasonable arguments about the human world. You can do that by teaching them to ask and answer the Four Questions. Teach them this method, and how to recognize when others are doing so. Do that, and they’ll get smarter.

Jon and I didn’t make this up. We observed it. We saw that successful teachers and classes posed clear and interesting questions that students were equipped to answer. We witnessed the results: students engaged in telling stories and making arguments about things that mattered. Classes built around no particular questions or around boring or ambiguous ones left no residue other than confusion. We gathered up and sorted the questions that worked and named and numbered them. That’s about it.

Of course, if teaching and learning were as simple as describing a method, all of our students would become proficient scientists and mathematicians by age 14. Thinking techniques aren’t algorithms. On the contrary: mechanical application of a technique is an efficient way to avoid thinking rather than practice it. If you’ve ever given instructions for an essay, you know exactly how this works. Our writing instructions to our students can be super clear, and our students’ writing will still turn out muddled. It’s the same with any complex thinking task. Proficiency in thinking takes disciplined practice, and a lot of it. There is no royal road to geometry, or any other subject mastery.

This warning applies to professionals, too. We’ve described bad questions in this blog space repeatedly. The College Board and SHEG ask ambiguous questions all the time. Most essential questions aren’t essential, and some aren’t even questions. Jon and I pose lousy questions or give lousy answers all the time. Thinking well is hard work. Our brains were designed for quick thinking, not for rigorous consistency.

So beyond learning to recognize, ask, and answer the Four Questions that animate our field, we and our students have one more important task: to develop the habit of taking our questions seriously. That’s the only way we’ll ever get good at answering them.

We have to go first. If teachers are not taking their questions seriously, it’s highly unlikely their students will. If you have your students practice answering bad questions or answering questions badly, you’re training them to be bad thinkers. Shooting at the basket and missing every time is practice for losing.

Build Lessons Around Good Questions

So what should you do to develop the habit of taking your questions seriously? For starters, build every lesson around a clear and explicit question. Ditch the SWBAT and get right to the point: what question(s) will your lesson equip students to answer? And what kind of question(s) is it (or are they): narrative, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative? At the end of every day, take stock. Your lesson question is your exit ticket. That’s the question we were working on. How did we do?

Framing every lesson with questions makes every day an opportunity for disciplined practice. Assessments should be aligned with your questions, too. That’s what shows your students that you want them to take your questions seriously. If you’ve done our introductory unit planning workshop, you know that our student-facing unit guides always contain unit questions, sorted by type. Those questions are our guides for planning, and our students’ guide to assessment. They’ll have mastered the unit when they can answer those questions well. Don’t wait till the summative assessment to practice, either. Formative assessment is another form of disciplined practice.

Answer Your Own Questions

In addition to framing lessons and assessments with questions, it’s crucial that teachers answer their own questions. I confess: I’ve assigned essays to students that I haven’t attempted to write myself. That often ends badly. The point isn’t that you should give students your answer, or expect yours and none other in response to your essay prompt. The point is that we teachers need to know what our students need to know to answer our questions. We can’t be prepared to help students with a task we’ve never tried. And, fundamentally, asking questions you haven’t grappled with is how you end up asking bad ones. Take your questions seriously by answering them yourself.

One more recommendation, though it has nothing (obvious) to do with teaching. I’ve been doing mindfulness meditation on and off for the past ten years. (I can hear the chastising words of an imaginary blog post in my head: “Take Meditation Seriously”…) Even my somewhat haphazard practice has yielded benefits. I can slow myself down and increase my awareness just by breathing and paying attention to my thoughts, rather than getting swept up in them. The vast majority of the time, I’m swept up. But it’s nice to know there’s an alternative.

A classic mindfulness meditation technique is to bring awareness to the breath. As you sit and your mind wanders, draw it gently back to what’s always there, just outside of consciousness: your breathing. It occurred to me several months ago that, by asking myself two simple questions, I could enter that condition of awareness I found by drawing my attention back to my breath in sitting meditation. But this this alternative technique only worked if I took those two questions seriously. Here they are:

• Where are you?
• What are you doing?

These are ridiculously simple and obvious questions. (Just like, say, What happened…?) That’s the point. Asking and answering, Where are you?, required me to return to my body and take stock of, well, where I was. Right now, for example, I’m sitting at a desk in my study, facing my computer screen, a window to my left and another behind me. I’m bathed in sunlight, and the glow of the screen. What am I doing? I’m typing, writing, thinking. Communicating, I hope.

These are good questions for increasing awareness, just as the Four Questions are good for thinking about history. Taking these questions seriously, asking and answering them regularly and with discipline, is good practice. Where are you? What are you doing? Take those seriously, and you’ll know where you are and what you’re doing. And you’ll realize how unusual it is to be aware of such simple things. That, in turn, may make you wonder where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing all this time. In the classroom, ask and answer these questions: What happened? What were they thinking? Why then and there? What do we think about that? Take them seriously, and you’ll start to wonder what you were teaching before you started asking then.

G.S.

This year Gary and I have been working with the history lesson planners for the Uncommon Schools network, a charter network that operates over fifty schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. We’ve introduced them to the Four Question Method, and we’re helping them to revise courses, units, and lessons so that they are organized around clear stories and good questions. On our most recent visit to their home office in New Jersey we worked mostly with middle school teachers, reorganizing several different grade level courses to reflect new content mandates. As we were walking back to Newark’s Penn Station (which is a beautiful McKim, Mead & White art deco building, by the way) at the end of the day, we noticed something that may seem obvious, but is worth emphasizing: the teachers who collaborated with colleagues on their curriculum plans were much more effective and efficient than those who were working alone. Curriculum planning is a team sport.

4QM Thinking Is Hard!

This is true in large part because 4QM thinking is hard. This is not always immediately apparent, because the questions themselves are so straightforward. But if you take the questions seriously, answering any one of them is actually quite challenging. Consider the first step in 4QM curriculum planning: establishing your answer to Question One (“What Happened?”). What people, events, and ideas are you going to include in your course or in your unit? What are you going to leave out? What order do the story elements go in? Why? What story are you going to teach this year? These are hard questions to answer well.

One of the most powerful things we did with the Uncommon Schools crew was to work with fifth grade teachers to storyboard a new world history course. There were four of us talking through the story of the course. We started with the outcome box on the course storyboard: when would the course end? We considered several different options before settling on 1490 CE. The course had to begin with the neolithic revolution, so that became our setting box (box number one), but what would come next? We thought maybe China, but then bumped that to box number three, deciding to do the story of Egypt and Judaism before China. Hammurabi’s Code was in, then out, then in again. We talked a lot about where we wanted to put India. For about fifteen minutes it too was out (!), before we decided it should become part of an “India and China” section of the course.

Every one of these decisions was thoughtfully made, because the conversation made everyone articulate out loud why they wanted to include or exclude given content, and why they thought a particular sequence made sense or not. Ideas were floated, rejected, revived, considered, and reconsidered. In the end we all knew what the course would look like and why.

By contrast, there was one teacher working on her own on a seventh grade American history course. Without the feedback generated by talking through the course and its units with other teachers, this solo thinker had trouble sharpening her unit stories and unit questions. Of course Gary and I were happy to help, and during a ten minute conversation about the military history of the Revolutionary War the three of us were able to hone a Question One, create a clear Question Two, and decide to abandon a badly worded Question Three and an incorrectly placed Question Four. Collaboration made the unit better.

“Sparring”

The Uncommon Schools folks have a name for this kind of conversation: they call it “sparring.” For those of you unfamiliar with pugilism, “sparring” is the training boxers do when they practice fighting in the ring. It’s like a real boxing match, only safer: the fighters wear padded headgear, and anyone can stop the fight any time. At Uncommon, sparring is when teachers argue about a plan for teaching and learning, or perhaps an individual assignment, pushing each other with honest feedback and serious questions. During our course planning conversation with the fifth grade teachers, for example, one of them suggested that the story of the course could be about the changing relationship between religion and culture. The group was enthusiastic and seemed about to move on when one member said, “I see why the idea is attractive, but I’m not sure it’s right.” We then discussed the relationship between religion and culture for a few minutes before deciding that the original suggestion did in fact make sense as an organizing theme. The conversation was lively and energetic: knowledgeable people who care about history were arguing about how best to teach it. Sparring makes boxers better because it’s practice for the real fight. Sparring makes curriculum planners better for the same reason: being pushed to think through, defend, and explain our curriculum decisions is practice for when we’re going to push our students to think through that same curriculum.

Make Planning A Team Sport

If you’re lucky enough to have a community of curriculum planning colleagues where you work, take advantage of them by sparring whenever you can. If you can create a professional culture in which people are open to feedback and willing to hear questions as critique and not criticism, everyone’s students will benefit. If you don’t have such a community in your real world, perhaps a virtual community can help — you only need one or two other people to hear your ideas and give honest feedback. You can always email Gary and me at info@4qmteaching.net  or tweet at us @4qmteaching — we love talking about teaching history. Good boxers need sparring partners. So do good teachers.

J.B.

Some stories are easy to tell. An identifiable person or group of people does something overt and instigating, which triggers other people to react. One manifest action leads to another, and before you know it, something New and Notable has happened in the world. King Louis XVI called the Estates General. Before you know it, Napoleon is conquering Europe!

Our core curriculum is full of stories like that. They’re the easiest for us to teach our students. The challenge for teachers is pruning the story down to its core essentials. We at 4QM use storyboards to coach teachers in planning clear, concise narratives of this sort. We use storyboards with students, too, to help them sift through details and identify major turning points in the narrative.

Classic, “Cause-and-Effect” Stories

Let’s call these cause-and-effect stories, since that’s what most historical thinking skills documents seem to mean by this category: a story in which people interact, and in which that interaction culminates in a new and notable state of affairs.

No matter what we narrate in history class, we’re interested in some kind of change over time. In other words, narratives are always answers to Question One, What happened? And there are always humans involved, of course. The classic cause-and-effect story glosses Question One as asking, in effect, How did that happen? It seeks to satisfy our curiosity-craving for an account of how one thing led to another that led to… Napoleon!

A Different Type of Story

Some of the stories we want our students to learn, however, take a different shape. Some of our answers to “What happened?” focus not on how something happened, but on how much. For example, our 8th-grade team teaches a unit on the long Civil Rights movement. Their storyboard has boxes for Abolitionism and the Civil War, for Reconstruction and Jim Crow, and for the Civil Rights movement. They tell a story about each episode, but make no attempt to narrate the actions that led from one episode to another. That’s not the point. The point is to show, in each case, how Americans struggled over race and equality, and to compare and contrast the results over time. Continuity and change, not cause and effect.

Likewise, we now have American Studies courses at our high school in both Social Studies and English. Student must take both conjointly, and the teachers plan together. Not only do they tell the same stories in both courses, but “the stories we tell ourselves as Americans” is the explicit theme of the course. Like the 8th-grade team, the Social Studies Am. Stud. teacher tells episodic stories on themes like migration, money, and race and identity. The goal is to reveal how Americans’ thinking about these topics changed over time. What happened? Some ideas changed — in some cases dramatically. Others remained remarkably consistent. Continuity and change.

Many of our unit stories, even the classical cause-and-effect ones, contain ellipses. We skip connecting tissue in a linear narrative sometimes because, after all, we’re more interested in the outcome than in every step of how we got there. In other words, the classical story and the thematic one — the one that narrates linear cause and effect and the one that reveals changes and continuity over time — are ideal types. Some units, like the typical industrialization unit, seem to split right down the middle. We narrate in linear fashion from invention to entrepreneurship to factories and cities. Then we contrast ideas and politics at discrete periods, from the beginning and end of the process, say. We post-hole Adam Smith at the beginning and end with socialism and the origins of the welfare state. The point is simply to show how deeply industrialization transformed politics and ideas, not to describe how it did so. (That is, in any case, a Question Three enterprise.)

Thematic “Story First!”

Although some of our stories are hybrids, distinguishing between these two types of narrative is still crucial, for several reasons. First and most obvious, we tell both types, and should know what we’re doing, especially if we’re going to teach our students to do so, too. Second, schools that offer thematic courses in history often struggle to organize their units in a way that makes sense to their students. We have repeatedly heard from teachers of such thematic courses that their students express frustration and confusion. Without a story as an anchor, both students and teachers struggle to keep track of what they’re learning.

The answer, as always, is Story first! In this case, teachers need to tell a clear thematic story. They need to select episodes for their unit storyboard that reveal change over time, typically in ideas. The point of the “theme” is to identify the ideas in question, the ones we want our story to reveal and illuminate. That means that the heavy lifting in constructing such a narrative is getting clear about what each episode reveals. Contrast that with the heavy lifting intrinsic to classical cause-and-effect: telling the leanest version of action and reaction that gets us from onset to outcome.

This distinction between classic and thematic, or between cause-and-effect and continuity-and-change storytelling, also helps us to see what the received wisdom about historical thinking skills is really about, and how to use that wisdom, improbably, in actual classrooms. Cause-and-effect and continuity-and-change are the names of two kinds of narrative. If you adopt our strategy of putting the story first in planning and teaching, you can then teach students both, in an organic way that generates genuine curiosity.

Finally, teaching thematic stories well gives us another way to foreground ideas in our teaching. We’re building a new 9th-grade course around themes of power, status, community, and identity. Our units will have base narratives, of course. Stories are how we learn and remember, and even Big Ideas have human histories. Moreover, by allowing ourselves to focus on how much ideas changed, rather than tying ourselves to the mast of how they changed, we’re better able to compare our own. Ideas and judgment are always a part of 4QM teaching, and all good History teaching, 4QM or otherwise. Thematic stories — narratives of continuity and change — are great ways to highlight them.

G.S.