Category: 4QM Teaching

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.

If you’ve been teaching secondary school history for a while you’ve probably encountered students who tell you that “every primary source is biased.” Some kids really like this phrase, and the idea it represents, because they think it makes them seem sophisticated. As in, “When I was in grade school I believed everything I read. But now I’m older and I know that I should be suspicious of everything I read.” But far from making our students into sophisticates, I believe this idea is profoundly misleading, and actually inhibits them from thinking well about Question Two. In this post I’ll try to explain why I think we should retire the phrase “every primary source is biased,” and I’ll suggest an alternative that I think is much more helpful to our teaching goals.

Question Two: “What Were They Thinking?”

When we teach with the Four Question Method, we start by answering Question One (“What Happened?), and establishing a historical story that we want our students to understand more deeply. Of course that story is full of interesting people, and our curiosity about them cues our students to work on Question Two. We pick a few of the key people in the story and dive into their heads, trying  to figure out, “What were they thinking?” In answering Question Two we try to build “historical empathy:” we try to understand the people of the past on their own terms, and see the world as they saw it. It is important to note that historical empathy is not the same thing as sympathy: we often don’t agree with the people in the past who we attempt to understand. But answering Question Two responsibly requires us to enter into the minds of people who think very differently than we do. We have to set aside our current notions about how the world works, what we value and condemn, and try to understand everything differently. That’s why we say that historical empathy is the opposite of presentism.

And most of the time we use primary source documents to explore Question Two. In order to understand what people in the past were thinking, we look at what they wrote or said, and practice the thinking skill of interpretation. There’s a lot to be said about how to do that; some has been said by Gary in a previous blog post, some has been said by Doug Lemov and his co-authors in the excellent book Reading Reconsidered, and some of it is said by Gary and me at our 4QM workshops. And there are, of course, many other teachers and thinkers with good resources and ideas on using primary source documents in the classroom. But in this post I’m less interested in technique, and more interested in the attitudes that students bring to their work with primary sources.

Students As Cynics

The problem with teaching students that “every primary source is biased” is that it turns them all into cynics, and short-circuits their ability to build historical empathy. It turns them into cynics by teaching them that no document can be taken sincerely, at face value, as an honest record of someone’s thoughts. Columbus had to please the King and Queen who funded his voyage, so he must have exaggerated the richness of the Caribbean islands: his letter to the Spanish monarchs is “biased.” George Fitzhugh and John C. Calhoun were slave owners, so their their lengthy treatises arguing that slavery was in fact good for enslaved people are “biased.” The signers of the Declaration of Independence were writing to justify their revolution, so their description of the conflict between the colonies and the crown is “biased.” And once students have discovered or declared the “bias” in a primary source, they feel entitled to dismiss it or feel smugly superior to it. At its worst, this cynical search for bias in all sources can lead students to give up on the idea of understanding the past at all, deciding that since every source is biased there’s no way to determine what happened, what people were thinking, or why things happened as they did.

Of course there’s a kernel of truth at the bottom of this idea of pervasive bias. Marx was right that most of the time where we stand on political issues is correlated with where we sit in the social structure, and of course people sometimes lie in documents. But the problem with making these observations into universals is that it relieves students of the hard work of understanding people who think differently from themselves. As Bruce Lesh has noted in his book about teaching historical thinking skills, “students equate ‘bias’ with either lying or ignorance” (123). The vast majority of the documents we read in history class are not lies, and the vast majority of their authors were not ignorant. What makes people like Columbus, Calhoun, and the signers of the Declaration interesting is precisely that they were smart, engaged people who were sincere in their beliefs. How could that be? What were they thinking?

Assume Sincerity

The first step in answering that question responsibly is to approach our primary sources with an attitude compatible with learning: Assume sincerity. Absent specific evidence to the contrary, we should assume that the authors of the primary documents we study were sincere when they wrote them. When we approach these documents we have to start fresh. We have to set aside anything we think we know about the people we’re studying, set aside our present-day assumptions about them and the society they inhabited, and give them the intellectual courtesy of assuming that they meant what they said.

Actually doing this can be a revelation. At a recent 4QM workshop Gary and I were working with a small group of teachers reading a short excerpt from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. (We picked it deliberately because it’s extremely challenging, and we wanted these adult teachers to feel like our young students typically do when we assign them to read primary documents.) There was a teacher in our group who assumed that because he wrote in the seventeenth century Hobbes would describe a religious basis for political authority, and another who assumed that because he was on the side of the Royalists in the English Civil War Hobbes was in favor of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy. But when we actually did a close reading of the source, everyone was able to see that neither assumption is actually supported in the text, and in fact, both assumptions are wrong. (Hobbes was a social contract theorist, not an advocate of a divine political order, and he had no particular preference for heredity as a system of selecting a head of state.) Actually understanding Hobbes required us to assume his sincerity, then to read him under that assumption, and then to interpret his words. We should teach our students the same approach to primary sources.

“Every Source Has A Point Of View”

In the introduction to this post I said I’d suggest an alternative to “every source is biased,” and here it is. Try teaching your students that “every source has a point of view.” Here’s an analogy that you might use to distinguish the difference. Imagine a basketball game between the Boston Celtics and the Golden State Warriors. The game is in Boston, and there’s a team of three refs on the floor calling the game. Two refs are calling the game honestly, as they see it. They will both miss some calls, because they can’t see everything all the time. Depending on where they are on the floor and what’s happening in front of them they might not see one of the Celtics players commit a foul, and the game will go on with no call. The Warriors might then feel aggrieved: they deserved that foul call and they didn’t get it. But those two refs aren’t biased. They just couldn’t see the foul from their point of view. They might also have honest points of view about the style of play or the tempo of the game, but their opinions on those matters would not constitute bias, even though they might disagree with each other and/or with other observers of the same game. The third ref is actually biased. He wants the Celtics to win, and he calls fouls on the Warriors for things that he also sees Boston players do, but chooses not to call. He calls the Warriors coach for a technical for coming onto the floor, but deliberately ignores it when the Celtics coach does the same thing.

Now I can already hear the psychology teachers and postmodern theorists sharpening their pens to tell me that the third ref is likely to believe himself to be honest, and that his lack of awareness doesn’t make him any less biased. That’s an argument for another day. My point here is that most of the people we read in history class are like the first two refs. Most of our primary sources are not deliberately written to deceive anyone, and achieving true understanding of their authors is only possible if we take them at their word. This is much harder than taking the cynical approach that “every source is biased.” But if we are to truly teach our students to truly grapple with hard ideas that they disagree with, we have to invest in understanding them first.

J.B.

I argued in this space, back on 1/21/19, that our students will read better if we teach them what question (or questions) they’re trying to answer when they read. That’s the right way, it seems to me, for us to think about “purpose” in reading. In History class, we read to scratch an itch called curiosity. Name the question that captures the curiosity, find sources that address the question, and then start reading for the purpose of answering that question.

That advice is radically insufficient, of course. The debate about whether or not Social Studies teachers are responsible for literacy instruction is, fortunately, over and done. We teach reading. The debate about how we should teach reading, on the other hand, is in full swing. Jon has been busy recommending Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered to anyone who will listen, and rightly so. Meanwhile, the go-to source on reading advice for people who teach middle and high school history is Sam Wineburg’s Stanford History Education Group.

For those of you who haven’t seen or used the SHEG site, its centerpiece is its “Reading Like a Historian” section, and the centerpiece of that section is its articulation of four Historical Reading Skills associated with reading and interpreting documents: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. For each of those skills, SHEG provides questions for students designed to illustrate the skill and to prompt students to exercise it. (The site also has history lessons and assessments and now a section on civics and media literacy. You have to create an account to access materials, but it’s free.)

SHEG Aims at Question One

The problem is that SHEG has lots to say about how to read, but too little about why. If these are the rules for reading like a historian, what question or questions does the historian hope to answer, exactly? You know our questions: they’re what we’re all about at 4QM. Our purpose, when we read, is to answer some content-specific versions of our Four Questions. So what exactly does SHEG aim at?

If you look carefully at SHEG’s reading categories and questions, you’ll see that the majority of the sub-questions, and the entire “corroboration” category, are about using documents to establish a reliable account of some historical event. In other words, the implicit question drives SHEG reading skills is our Question One: What happened? SHEG’s early blockbuster lesson sample, on establishing what actually happened at Lexington Green in April 1775, corroborates (!) my hunch that “doing” primary history — establishing a reliable account of what happened — is what SHEG takes as the purpose of reading in history class.

That’s fair enough, if you’re training researchers or journalists. But in elementary and secondary school, most of our learning about what happened, both for teachers and students, comes from tertiary and, less often, secondary sources. There are good reading strategies for tackling those texts, but they don’t look much like what SHEG recommends. In any case, though it can be a cool one-off activity to show students how History Professors do their work, that’s hardly the main point of what we do. It’s downright weird to presume that the purpose of reading in schools is to train kids for work in the archives. (What we do is way more important that what professional researchers do, though I’ll reserve judgment about professional journalists.)

SHEG wants our students to read primary sources. Fair enough; so do we. But since SHEG’s reading protocols are so driven by Question One — establishing what happened — they often amount to an exercise in what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion. They want kids to be wary of getting duped by tendentious testimony or ideology. The result is palpable in classrooms that hew closely to the SHEG model. The upshot of most SHEG reading lessons is that authors have perspectives and biases. Yes, they do. In fact, we don’t even need to read to know that. Heck, if that were the main point I got from the reading in a class I were taking, I’d save myself the trouble.

Read Primary Sources For Question Two

Here’s another, better possibility: we read primary sources in order to answer Question Two: What were they thinking? We do that not because we’re at pains to get an accurate account of an event, but precisely because we want to see the world from someone else’s point of view.

In our classes, and in the vast majority of the many history classes we’ve observed in our own and other schools, that’s in fact what teachers and students are doing. We use documents to try to figure out what actors from other times and places had in mind when they expressed themselves in ways we can retrieve and curate for students. We read to meet other minds.

Jon and I have developed our own framework for reading primary sources. Ours is designed explicitly for the purpose of answering Question Two. For what it’s worth, we think that it suits what real teachers and their students do with texts much better than the SHEG framework does. First, locate the document in the narrative of the unit and lesson. Story first! We’re reading Lincoln speeches because we’re learning the story of the Civil War. In the course of learning that story, Lincoln’s choices, in action and in speech, gave us an itch we need to scratch. We’re reading anti-immigrant speeches by union leaders in California because we’re learning the story of immigration in the Gilded Age, and we want to know the minds of the children of immigrants who saw other immigrants as a threat. So, step one is to put the document in the context that allows us to define our purpose in reading it. (On our document analysis sheet, we call this step Identify and Contextualize. Consistent terminology is good for students. The idea is more important: story first!).

Second, paraphrase or summarize the text, or describe the artifact. You can’t interpret a document you haven’t read carefully. This technique is uncontroversial in principle, but not always honored in practice. If you want to have a discussion about general ideas, you can do that without a text. If you want to meet another mind, read something carefully first. And before you try to interpret it, check to make sure you know what it says. Story first; second, pay attention! By the way, SHEG “close reading” questions are good about calling attention to structural and rhetorical features of texts.

Third, we interpret. There are many ways to generate inferences from text to author, but no algorithm or mechanism for guaranteeing good results. There is no royal road to geometry or interpretive insight. There are, however, questions that will remind us as readers to attend to various features of an author’s expression. We routinely model and then ask our students to answer these questions:

• What is the author’s purpose or goal?
• What is their motivation for pursuing that purpose or goal?
• What notable assumptions must the author be making for them to harbor these goals and motivations?

Again, interpretation is a thinking skill, not a mechanical habit. Students (and teachers) will need to practice it a lot to get good at it.

Reading for the purpose of meeting other minds — of answering Question Two — affects not just the advice we give our student about how to read, but what we choose for them to read in the first place. My advice: read complex and interesting ones. A few rich documents by complicated and thoughtful people are better than lots of indifferent artifacts. Match your documents to the interpretive puzzles in your story. Give your students a chance to think with another person, to see a situation, as best they can, from the inside. Meeting another mind is a good way to exercise your own.

G.S.

My “expanded second edition” of Understanding by Design, the classic guide to unit and lesson planning by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe, is copyrighted 2005. Today the major premise of the book, that teachers should decide what learning goals we want students to achieve, design assessments to determine student mastery of those goals, and then plan learning activities “backwards” from there, has become so widely known and accepted that it is often described with the insider’s shorthand “UbD.” As in, “My district administrators are totally into UbD.”

It’s hard to argue with the common sense of the UbD approach. But there’s another key idea from the book that has not translated so well into the real world of teaching and learning, at least in history classes: essential questions. It’s not that Wiggins and McTighe’s gospel of “essential questions” has been ignored — quite the contrary. In our work with schools and districts Gary and I see lots of curriculum documents that have “essential questions” – they’re pretty much ubiquitous, and when teachers and administrators talk with us about their history courses they are often quick to reassure us, “We have essential questions!” But when we actually look at specific questions in the documents and ask people how they shape teaching and learning, we usually get confessions like, “We don’t really use that one.” Or, “We kinda just added those on, and no one really asks kids to answer them.” So the dirty little secret about most of the “essential questions” in history curriculum documents is this: they’re pretty much the exact opposite of “essential.” Most teachers and students ignore them — they make no difference at all to classroom teaching and learning.

“EX POST FACTO” ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

So why don’t history teachers use their “essential questions” in teaching their units and lesson? There’s a much longer article to be written here about epistemology and the teaching and learning of history, but for the purposes of this blog post I’m going to suggest that most history teachers don’t use their essential questions because they are not actually written to guide instruction. According to the doctrine of UbD, teachers are supposed to use “overarching” essential questions to guide planning on the course level. We are then supposed to plan units and lessons that connect directly to those overarching questions and their “enduring understandings.” But the essential questions that are found in most curriculum documents are not guides to planning or instruction — They’re window dressing added into the documents because someone thinks it’s important to have them. They were almost certainly written after the content of the courses and units were decided.

Some of these “ex post facto” essential questions reveal their nature in their huge and general scope. Consider these three examples, the first from an American Revolution unit, and the other two from a unit on the Constitution:

“How can ideas change the world?”

“How should a government deal with conflicting interests?”

“How are governments created, structured, maintained, and changed?”

These sorts of questions can’t serve as guides to planning or instruction because a reasonable answer always amounts to, “in lots of different ways” or “it depends.” Once the question is shorn away from its specific topic it loses focus, and becomes useless. No wonder teachers ignore them.

There’s another common type of ex post facto essential question that would appear to be the result of curriculum planners getting a bit too cute, or trying to sound especially profound. Consider:

“Can nations truly coexist?”

“Can words lead to war?”

“Can peace lead to war?”

Again, shorn of topical context, the questions cease to be meaningful. Correct answers here amount to “Yes,” “Yes,” and “Yes.” So it’s not surprising that history teachers would choose to ignore “essential” questions like these.

FOUR QUESTIONS, and STORY FIRST!

The big insight of the Four Question Method is that there are really only four essential questions in history/social studies. In every unit 4QM teachers ask what happened, what the key people involved in the story were thinking, what underlying factors explain why the story of the unit turned out as it did, and what we think about it. And we help our students to explore those four questions most effectively when we give them a specific story to work with. The questions I presented above are problematic because they are entirely disconnected from the stories that inspired them in the first place. If we reanimate these questions with a specific story, they become useful and engaging:

How did new ideas about “natural rights” contribute to the American Revolution?

The Versailles Treaty was designed to prevent a second world war. Why did it fail to do so?

YOUR DISTRICT ADMINISTRATOR

So if your district administrator is “totally into UbD” and insists that your curriculum documents need “overarching essential questions,” by all means go ahead and write them. But when it’s time for you to write questions that will actually guide your teaching and your students’ learning, we think you’ll find that specific versions of the Four Questions, connected directly to the story of the unit, will be much more useful.

J.B.

We’re entering research season at my high school. Every student in every one of our required classes will write a research essay in the next couple of months. With various degrees of independence, each student will choose a topic, find and read relevant and reliable sources, formulate and defend a thesis, and produce an essay that conforms to scholarly standards for communication and citation. And then we’ll all collapse in a heap.

Writing an independent research essay is the hardest thing you can ask a History student to do. That’s why we require it. The research essay is the common assessment that matters most. If our students can do that successfully, they’re ready to ask and answer questions on their own. They’ll know what it takes to pull off a project that requires stamina and planning. They know how to harness their curiosity and test their presumptions. They’ll be ready to participate in grown-up conversations as philosopher-citizens.

The research essay is hard for teachers, too. Liking writing the essay for students, preparation is everything. Students need plenty of time to practice all the skills involved. That requires teachers to plan well. If students are just learning to find good sources when they start the essay, it’ll be hard to get them much beyond that. The same for citation, note taking, paragraph writing, and so on. The research essay requires students to use a whole range of skills we need to be teaching them continually and repeatedly. If you want your students to get beyond the mechanical and actually think about what they’re writing, you’ll need a scope and sequence for skill development.

“Story First” Is For Research Papers, Too!

About a decade ago, a team of teachers working on the research scope and sequence for my department made an important discovery in the laboratory of their own classes. Students who wrote research reports first, before attempting an argumentative research essay, did better than students who plunged right in and began arguing a thesis. The fact is, many of the latter ended up writing reports anyway, inadvertently. At worst, students who skipped the report stage got paralyzed by the weight of decision. They just couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to prove.

The Number One problem in student research is that the student-author doesn’t know their topic well enough to write about it. When professionals do research, they read and learn a ton before they start to write. They become experts in the topic before they argue about it. Our students need to do the same, on a smaller scale. Requiring students to do a topic report as a preliminary step in the research enterprise makes it much more likely that they’ll develop the expertise they need to ask and answer a reasonable, interesting question.

If you’ve been following our blog or have attended our workshops, this should sound familiar: Story first! We’ve found that what works for students writing research essays is the same advice that works for teachers planning units, and for good reason. You can’t identify the interesting, organic questions until you know something about a topic. The best test of knowledge we’ve discovered is the ability to tell a coherent and convincing story about that topic. The research topic report is that story. It’s an essential step in the research process.

Oral Storytelling Helps Clarify Things

In my last blog post, I recommended that students tell stories orally. That’s a particularly good idea for the research topic report. Some of the teachers in my department have designed a small-group activity in which students narrate to peers, usually with the help of images in a slide presentation. The student auditors then give the narrator feedback about what’s confusing, puzzling, or interesting to them. Together, they generate a list of questions. One of those questions will typically become the Thesis Question, the one whose answer will frame the argument of the essay.

A successful research essay — no surprise — will reflect the thinking process that generated it. The introduction will frame the puzzle or question that the essay will resolve or answer. That requires a short version of the story from which the puzzle or question derives. Story first! The thesis, which resolves the puzzle or answers the question, will typically be an answer to either Question Two or Question Three — an interpretation or an explanation, respectively. Younger, less experienced students have much greater success interpreting than explaining. I now direct such students to Question Two — that is, to defend a claim about what some interesting person or group in their story was thinking. Question Three (Why then and there?) typically requires more knowledge and keener analytical chops than a beginner can muster. Either way, the thesis for the research essay will, in the vast majority of cases, be an answer to one of these two questions. Then, once the argument is made, the student-scholar can conclude by telling us what we learn from these findings — Question Four.

Every year, at the beginning of June, we host an awards ceremony for the winners of our departmental prizes for excellence in writing historical research essays. We select a winner at each grade and level. The winning students bring their parents and siblings and sometimes grandparents. Their teachers give testimonials, and we all celebrate the achievement of our student-scholars — our future philosopher-citizens — with sparkling cider and cookies. It’s my favorite event of the year. Right after that — that’s when we collapse into a heap.

G.S.

One huge benefit of the Four Question Method is the clarity it provides to teachers and students about what intellectual task is on the table at any given time. When teachers plan and teach with the 4QM, everyone in the classroom knows whether they are narrating, interpreting, explaining, or judging. Recently I’ve been experimenting with designing my summative essay questions explicitly around the Four Questions as well. Writing my essay questions this way means breaking them down into sections and identifying clearly which  of the Four Questions is being asked in each section. Here’s an example: a sophomore essay question about the Versailles Treaty. I’ve learned to letter the parts of the assignment, not number them, in order to avoid confusion with the question numbers. Part A is a Question One, part B is a Question Two, and part C is a Question Four:

THE VERSAILLES TREATY
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

As you know, the Versailles Treaty which ended The Great War (WWI) was very controversial. For this essay you will be asked to describe some key elements of the treaty, consider what the leaders of the major signatories to the treaty were thinking when they signed it, and then to make your own judgment about the treaty.

Write an essay in which you do the following:

A. Describe the main provisions of the Versailles Treaty related to Germany: the “war guilt clause,” the loss of territory, reparations payments, and limits on the German military. [Q1]

B. Say what the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany thought about these provisions at the time the treaty was signed.  [Q2]

C. Say if you think these provisions of the treaty were fair or not, and explain the reasoning behind your judgment with specific reference to events we have studied in this unit. [Q4]

Benefits Of This Question Format

Breaking the essay question down this way has a number of benefits. First of all, it helps me to avoid writing ambiguous questions (here’s a recent blog post about that challenge). Since I know I’ll have multiple sections of the prompt, I don’t get caught up in writing one big question that tries to do too much. And since I know each part of the prompt has to be only one of the Four Questions, I’m much more clear in my own thinking about what I want students to do.

This format is also a huge help to students who struggle with organization. I sometimes coach these students to think of the assignment as three separate essays — with one student this year I actually had him make three separate files on his computer, one for each part of the question — so that they can concentrate on one thing at a time. When they’ve answered parts A, B, and C separately we stack them together and write an introduction and conclusion for the whole stack — voila! A finished essay!

This format also makes it easier for me to provide feedback and coaching to students who need it. When  the prompt is written in this fashion it’s easy to see who has problems of organization (they’re putting their judgment of the treaty in part A, for example), who has problems of substance (they’re not providing specifics to support their judgment in part C, for example), and who has both. Students’ clarity or confusion is often evident in their topic sentences, since each topic sentence should answer one part of the prompt. Consider these strong examples, one from part A and one from part C of two different student papers:

“The main provisions of the Versailles treaty took back German territory, weakened German military forces, created a demilitarized zone, and demanded that Germany pay all reparations for the cost of the war.”

“The treaty of Versailles was unfair to Germany because they did not cause the war by themselves.”

Is It Too Easy?

Some readers might think that writing essay questions like this does too much for students, and that by giving them such an explicit structure for their essays we’re making their task too easy. I can see that argument, especially for advanced students. But as teachers we need to consider what it is we want our students to focus their intellectual energy on. Do we want them to think about their answers to the history questions we’re asking? Or do we want them to have to figure out which history questions we’re asking, and then think about their answers to those questions? Clear questions mean that students’ energies go into actually doing history, and my energy goes into coaching them on the skills required to do history well. Most of the time that’s where I want our energies spent.

So try pulling your next essay question apart, and revising it 4QM-style, and let us know how it goes. I invite readers to email us some sample questions at info@4qmteaching.net, and we’ll make them the subject of an upcoming blog post.

J.B.

Our mantra at 4QM Teaching is Story First! Students who rush off to make arguments about things they can’t yet narrate make a mess of things. If you want your students’ oral arguments and written essays to make sense and represent real thinking, first things first: make them answer Question One, What Happened?

Stories Take Time

Teaching students to tell good, true stories takes classroom time — time that’s well worth the investment. I’ve heard teachers worry that spending class time training students to “just” get the story down will undermine their attempts to teach students to think and write rigorously. If you apply high expectations to storytelling, you’ll actually see that narration requires rigor as well. And if your students learn to narrate well, their arguments are much more likely to be real and persuasive.

Telling a good, true story starts with reading, listening, or both. And what we read and hear must be recorded accurately in order for our thoughtful narration to remain non-fiction. Reading, listening, note taking — they’re all part of the skillful package that make answering Question One possible. The same is true, for that matter, for selecting reliable sources.

At any rate, once you know what you’re talking about, a well-crafted response to “What happened?” then requires the use of a variety of skillful storytelling techniques. Students should master them, which means that we should teach them.

Storytelling Instructions

Once my students have read and listened and taken accurate, durable, and hierarchical notes — raw lists not permitted! — then they’re ready to follow my storytelling instructions, the same ones I use myself when I plan my units and narrative lectures:

• Frame your story by describing the main contrast or difference between the beginning and end of the story. Something important changed over time. Start by saying what changed, and if the change was surprising, say why. Build suspense: how did that happen?!?

• Name the protagonists in the story and locate them in time and space. Describe who did what, and when and where they did it. Use active verbs!

• Name and locate the events. Define events selectively and chunk them evenly. Include only actions that directly contribute to the main change over time you’re narrating.

• Connect the actions of people in your story to the actions of other people in your story, or to the overall change your story is about. Do that by supplying an account of each actor’s motivations.

• Conclude your story. You’ve just narrated an important historical change. Remind the reader or listener what you just taught them: what happened!

In our planning workshops and in our classes, Jon and I use storyboards to facilitate narrative planning, as he described in his recent blogpost, “The Power of Pictures.” Our six-panel storyboards act as limiting devices, forcing story planners to make efficient choices about which events to include and exclude. A storyboard provides a clear and logical way to record event names and locations, and makes the change over time we’re narrating explicit and visual. (By the way, facility in taking good, two-column narrative notes will make storyboarding much easier.)

Give your students some version of these storytelling instructions and a blank storyboard and see what they can do. Once they’ve drafted a narrative, I recommend having them practice their story by speaking it aloud. Speaking is an excellent test of fluency and mastery, an excellent memory device, and almost impossible to plagiarize. If public speaking is not a routine in your class, you’ll need to keep the stakes low while students practice.

Stories, Not Lists

One of the first things you’ll notice about students who are new to this exercise is that they have a strong compulsion to list events rather than to tell a story. I joke with students that every time I hear them say “And then Event X happened,” I lose another clump of hair from my head. (They know that I have none to spare.) They also know full well that, when narrating events in their own lives, some actual person did whatever thing they’re recounting, and that it didn’t just “happen.” Their real world has human agency; their History world, not yet.

I wonder sometimes if History teachers have mis-trained students to spout lists rather than to narrate actions. Traditional study props like ID sheets and Quizlet too often encourage students to practice recalling brute facts shorn of their narrative, human context. An “event,” after all, is just a handy label we give to an interaction between and among real people doing things with and to each other. Our students don’t intuitively grasp that, at least not in History classes. Teaching them to tell true stories can help (or force) them to see that what’s true in their lives is true in life in general: people do things to and with each other. That’s one of the things we mean by “history.”

So insist that students lead with WHO did WHAT to WHOM. And I hope it’s now clear that doing so is emphatically not a mechanical skill. On the contrary: it represents the beginning of awareness that “events” don’t “happen”; rather, people do things. Likewise, listening to students try to connect events, to say how someone’s actions led to someone else’s, will reveal for both of you what they understand and what remains opaque for them. In other words, it’s an awesome formative assessment.

Stories Raise Questions

Most important, a well-told story always raises questions for whoever is really listening. As our students narrate, they will be called upon to answer questions on the fly that we can highlight, extract from the story, and turn into inquiry questions. In fact, all Four Questions are typically embedded in a coherent narration of new and notable events in the human world. When the protagonists in your students’ stories do things, they will be doing them for reasons, provisionally supplied by your student narrators. Seven Southern states declared secession. Lincoln decided that he would not allow the Union to be destroyed, and so he fought to keep them in the United States.

What was he thinking? Why was that his choice? If that question doesn’t give you pause and make you wonder, then you’re not really listening to the story, and so will have a hard time taking this classic Question Two seriously. Storytelling is in fact the beginning of historical thinking. Inquiry projects are almost always attempts to take apart a story and then put it back together at a higher level of transparency and thoughtfulness.

When my students write their independent research essays, they start with a story they learn and narrate themselves. Then they identify the question-begging elements, and then begin their inquiry. When we frame unit questions with teachers in our workshops, we use exactly the same procedure: make your storyboard and tell your story, and then we’ll figure out which questions we need to answer in order to satisfy genuine curiosity and skepticism.

So storytelling is a form of historical thinking in its own right, and the gateway to all the other forms we rightly want our students to grapple with. Teachers, like students, need to practice not getting ahead of themselves. Start with Question One, and watch (and listen to) what happens…

G.S.

We history teachers often ask bad questions, and this blog post is about a particular type of bad question that is very common in our field — I used to ask them myself with alarming frequency. Here’s an example:

“Were the causes of the American Revolution primarily political or primarily economic?”

Questions like this are bad for two reasons. First of all, they’re ambiguous. Are we asking what most supporters of the American Revolution were thinking? Then we’re asking Question Two (“What were they thinking?”), and we should say so: “Were most revolutionaries motivated primarily by a political defense of their natural rights, or an economic desire to preserve their wealth?”

Or are we asking what underlying political and economic conditions made the revolution more likely in that time and place? In that case we’re asking Question Three (“Why then and there?”), and we should say so: “What political and economic conditions in the thirteen colonies made revolution more likely by the 1770s?”

The second reason why these types of questions are bad is because they’re impossible to answer honestly. Gary has a great analogy that illustrates this problem. “Were the causes of the American Revolution primarily political or primarily economic?” is like asking, “Is the primary biological system in the body the respiratory system or the circulatory system?” Of course both the respiratory system and the circulatory system work together to keep you alive; neither one is “primary.” Complex historical events are similar: the American Revolution had political and economic motivations and causes that worked together, and pretending that students can separate them and declare one of them “primary” is silly. Students can interpret documents and events to determine what some revolutionaries were thinking, and students can build social science models that include different explanatory factors. Teaching them to do both of those things is the heart of our mission.

So take a look at the essay questions you have asked your students so far this year. If you’re like me you’ve probably got at least one or two that fit this type. Do yourself and your students a favor and revise them so that they’re both clear and honest. They’ll appreciate your efforts to engage them in an intellectual task they can both comprehend and complete, and you’ll appreciate how much easier it is to evaluate their work. Both results will be primarily great.

J. B.

Up until last Friday, the rhythm of my units worked like this: opening days are for Question One: What happened? Story first! Then, maybe a couple of days in, when we get to an interesting interpretive puzzle, we dig in and answer Question Two: What were they thinking? Then, after some close reading, back to the story. And so we go, toggling back and forth between narration and interpretation. Near the end of the unit, typically after a couple of weeks, we step back and answer Questions Three (Why then and there?) and Four (What do *we* think about that?). Then, a summative assessment — plenty of formative assessment along the way, of course — and that’s a unit.

That’s a great structure if you want your year chunked into three or four-week segments. But there are other ways to teach 4QM-style. A veteran teacher in my department likes a two-day model. He gives his 9th graders a daily lesson and a homework assignment with guided reading. On Day Two, he puts them in groups and tells them: “4QM the Crusades.” And they do! They use the Four Questions to make sense of what they’ve read and learned. Groups write answers to all four questions and compare the results.

A Meeting of Minds

What I learned last Friday was that the midrange between the three or four-week unit and the two-day activity might be the best of all: the Killer Week of 4QM History Lessons.

Jon and I went to Newark, NJ, to work with a team of middle and high school curriculum writers for the Uncommon Schools charter network. These are some serious folks. Most of them are full-time classroom teachers who, in addition to driving hard every day with their students, sit down every week and plan lessons for their colleagues. Besides working hard, they’re ridiculously well educated and thoughtful about what they teach.

The Uncommon folks plan units, naturally. But they define cycles within units. They want their students to practice a range of literacy and historical thinking skills regularly and frequently. So they plan cycles that work students through a sequence of lesson types that exercise those skills. A unit could last a few weeks. A cycle is about one week, four to six lessons.

Uncommon planners think that students need to know some history before they can think productively or skillfully about it. They’re “Story First!” people, too. What they call a Build Knowledge lesson, which is always Day One of an Uncommon cycle, is for us a day dedicated to Question One. But they want their students working on documents early and often. So what follows a Build Knowledge lesson for them is a short series of inquiry and skills lessons.

We had a productive meeting of the minds. Our storyboards? A perfect template for the Build Knowledge lesson. A framing lecture needs narrative structure. The storyboard forces you to make that explicit, in a way that’s easy to share with students. Then, the questions we 4QM types generate from our stories — the interpretive, explanatory, and judgment puzzles that drive our other questions — become the prompts for inquiry in the succeeding lessons of the cycle.

My Killer Week

Our conversation got me thinking about my own teaching. My students could use more inquiry and skills practice, too. And shorter, front-loaded stories might be easier for them to track. I’ll have to funnel and spiral a lot — help them to connect earlier parts of the story to later ones — but that’s always the case anyway.

So I came home and planned this, my Killer Week of 4QM Lessons:

Day One:In 1850, Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas brokered a legislative compromise over slavery, the latest in a series dating back to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. By 1860, a candidate from a new political party, dedicated to exclusion of slavery from all western territories, won the Presidential Election, and seven Southern states had seceded by his Inauguration. What happened? My “Road to Civil War” storyboard is my lecture template. I tell a lean story, with images to mark each major event. Homework readings before and after anticipate and reinforce.

Day Two: What were they thinking? There are lots of puzzling actors and decisions in this cycle, but I definitely want politicians on center stage: Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Both are complicated, in good ways. Stephen Douglas claimed that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would ease tensions over slavery. What was he thinking!?! And Lincoln is susceptible to mythologizing. Students need to hear his voice, in all its ambiguity. We’ll read excerpts from the Lincoln-Douglas debates and from Lincoln’s speech to the Republican Convention (the “house divided” section), with a brief introductory lecture on context. For homework, students will write from their markups and responses to text questions.

Day Three: 1787, 1820, and 1850: three times the US negotiated political compromises over slavery. And if you add the VA and KY Resolutions and the Nullification Crisis, the early republic managed to survive the threat of permanent rupture repeatedly until 1860. Why then and there? What was different about the US by 1860? I’ll give students data on economic and demographic changes: production charts by sector and immigration and population statistics. Maps will show territorial changes over time, including the inexorably diminishing political prospects for slave states. (After California enters as a free state in 1850, it looks pretty clear that, without more of Mexico or Cuba, the Southern “slave-ocracy” will become a permanent minority in the Senate.) This is a DBQ day. For homework, we read about the Election of 1860.

Day Four: Regional parties. A polarized electorate. What do we think about that? I’ll operationalize Question Four by asking my students to justify a vote in the 1860 Election. The choice: Do you vote for Lincoln or not? My students will fancy themselves Abolitionists, naturally. But the choice in 1860 is both about the morality of slavery — not an interesting question for us — and the fate of the union — a very interesting one, indeed. Douglas represents the tradition of compromise over slavery — sidestepping the issue for the sake of stable politics. The Republicans are something new: a party that puts slavery, or at least its extension, at the center of its platform. We’ll debate, vote, debrief, and then write.

This cycle generates some mark-ups and writing samples, and I could probably squeeze in a multiple choice quiz, too. Or maybe I’ll wait and test after one more cycle. In any case, this quick series of lessons feels like a complete thought. Next cycle, we’ll practice these skills again. Repetition at close range will let students act on feedback and watch their own progress.

When we first talked to the Uncommon planners about their cycles, I was concerned that the story would go by too quickly for my students. But in addition to daily retrieval practice to start each lesson, I think that the 4QM version of inquiry lessons will reinforce the story effectively. Each day’s inquiry question will force students back to the story and require them to use it in a new way. For the practicum in judgment at the end, they’ll use the story as a resource to justify a choice. That should bring the story home for them and make it personal. And at pace, my weekly stories will link and resonate, so long as I build them right.

At any rate, I now see a new, modular way to plan using 4QM, one that I can’t wait to try. I think it will be killer.

G.S.

People who study memory know that drawing a picture is one of the best ways to remember something. But how often do history teachers use this powerful memory tool with their students? Most of us don’t do it often enough. An intentional use of student-generated images can help students to remember important historical events much more effectively than more common techniques, such as study guides, review sheets, or organizers that list “key terms” or “identifications.” Drawing pictures can also be a lot of fun for teachers and students.

A recent New York Times article about memory explained that “the three-act technique of picturing something in your mind, putting pen to paper to draw it, then looking at your drawing is a powerful memory trick that outperforms other ‘strong’ mnemonic strategies.” In an earlier blog post I wrote about the website “Sketchy Medical,” which uses funny cartoon mnemonics to help medical students learn and remember the information they’ll need to pass their licensing exams. Clearly, a lot of smart people have discovered that drawing pictures helps us to remember important things.

History teachers and students can make use of this insight by combining pictures with another ancient and effective memory technique: story-telling. If you’ve ever attended one of our 4QM workshops, or if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that we believe that good history teaching and learning starts with a story. We lay out our unit-level stories on a six-box storyboard when we’re planning, and we often use four-box storyboards for formative assessments with students. Here’s how it works. After the kids have learned what happened in an important event, you ask them to make an illustrated storyboard of it. You can give them the start and end dates or make them pick their own, and tell students that each box of their storyboard has to have a title, a date range, and a picture that effectively symbolizes that portion of the story. (Reassure your students that the artistic merit of their illustration is irrelevant to its power as a learning tool and memory aide.) I typically have students work in small groups on this; the group talks together about the titles and date ranges, striving for consensus. Then everyone makes their own storyboard and draws their own pictures. You can take it one step further and have a few students use their storyboards to tell the story of the event to the class in brief oral presentations.

Here are a couple of recent storyboards of World War One from my tenth grade modern world history class. (You may have to increase the size of your browser window to see them well – I apologize for not knowing how to make them the right size, or how to crop the blue seat out of the picture on the right. Sigh.)

Notice how these students made different choices about how to chapterize the story, and included different specific facts in each box. In addition to assessing student understanding of the narrative, storyboards can also be springboards into discussion of these kind of historian’s decisions. Why did the second student decide to include trench warfare in the box number one, while the first student included it as one example of “industrial warfare” in box number two? Why did the second student include Russia’s collapse, but the first student omitted it? Storyboards enable conversation about what how and why different narrators choose to tell the story differently.

We live in the twenty-first century, so of course there’s an online storyboarding tool that allows you to make digital storyboards; here’s a link to their homepage: StoryboardThat. I doubt that making a digital storyboard is as good an aide to learning and memory as drawing your own pictures, but some students might find the online version more engaging than working with a pencil.

Drawing pictures is a powerful memory tool that’s fun and easy to use. History teachers and students should use it regularly to leverage the power of pictures.

J.B.