Category: 4QM Teaching

You can also find this blog post on our Substack. 

I was 39 when I started teaching high school social studies. Before that, I had lectured and conducted seminar discussions in a university setting for over a decade. So, assume that I knew almost nothing about teaching. 

When I started, my department chair – now my 4QM partner – assigned me two courses, premodern world history and modern world history. It was a typical assignment, and came with the usual provisions: a textbook for each course, a department library containing some volumes of primary sources and reference materials, a set of atlases, and a mentor. Curriculum? Not exactly. My colleagues were lovely, and the ones who taught the same courses shared materials generously. 

That first year I did two jobs, though it took me twenty years to realize it. First, I taught students, which, as it turns out, was mostly new to me. That happened every day in the classroom, during reflections and observation debriefings, and as I read, graded, and commented on student work. Second, I planned, which meant writing lessons, units, and assessments. That mostly happened in the evenings and weekends. 

Am I crazy, or is this crazy? 

Here’s the alternative: I’m 39 and basically new to teaching. My department chair tells me I’m going to teach premodern and modern world history. Then he gives me a curriculum for each course and a mentor who has taught this curriculum before. My mentor shows me how to interpret and adapt the curriculum for my students. My planning consists of reading the curriculum in advance and doing the exercises I’m about to assign to students so that I’m prepared to coach and correct them. Most of my energy, at least for those first few daunting years, is spent learning how to be a teacher rather than a curriculum writer.

This now seems obvious to me, and the alternative cruel and counterproduction: schools and districts must provide every teacher with a high-quality curriculum for every course they teach. That curriculum should include daily lesson plans and all the materials teachers will need to teach and students will need to learn, including assessments and answer keys. The curriculum should align with what we know about how children and other humans learn and with the academic standards appropriate to the subject. It should be clear and simple to use, with predictable format and structure, and leave space for teachers to adapt, accommodate and scaffold as necessary for their students.

Teachers should demand to receive such a curriculum when they are hired to teach students. 

But: shouldn’t curriculum be written by teachers, people who understand the classroom and have taught real students? Yes. But not by all teachers as a condition of employment. And, for sure, not by new teachers as a condition of employment. 

Teachers already have a job: teaching. They work all day, in the classroom, providing and guiding instruction, giving feedback, managing behavior and social interactions. In order to do all that, they need to prepare for class the next day, grade and comment on student work, and communicate with families and other educational professionals. By loading “write your own curriculum” into “prepare for class,” we’ve made the teaching job absurdly demanding. 

And, by gratuitously lumping curriculum writing in with teaching, we’ve also denigrated the former. Curriculum writing is a skillful activity distinct from classroom teaching. Skillful curriculum writing requires research, planning, and, well, writing. It requires the ability to design coherent lessons that fit together into meaningful units and units that fit together into a coherent course. Content knowledge needs to be chunked, spiraled and assessed. Skillful practice needs to be integrated into content lessons and scaffolded and sequenced in a way that makes sense for the way human brains work at whatever grade level you’re writing curriculum for. Assessments, formative and summative, need to be integrated and paced for maximum impact on student learning. All of this is demanding and time-consuming work.

It stands to reason that some teachers will, over time, as they master their teaching job, develop the capacity to write high-quality curriculum. The ones that do, should, just as the ones who master classroom techniques should teach them to others. Teaching should have a career ladder, like all professions. 

After a couple of decades in the classroom, I’m now writing curriculum full time. It’s extremely demanding. It’s taken three of us, each with decades of classroom experience and obsessive reading habits, more than a year to write one complete year of curriculum. It’s far better than anything I wrote myself as I was muddling through my other full-time job. It’s exactly the kind of support I needed back then. 

I have no doubt now that I’d have become a much better classroom teacher if I’d devoted all of the time I spent trying to write premodern and modern world history courses early in my career, more or less from scratch, to interpreting a curriculum for my students, paying attention to how they responded, and assiduously giving them frequent, actionable feedback on their work. 

I can’t start over, but new teachers can start right. If you’re new to teaching, know that your late nights and chronic anxiety are not your fault – and that even if the world were better structured for new content teachers, you’d still have plenty of work and anxiety. But it would be clearer that the school that hired you wanted you to succeed if they gave you all the tools you needed to teach well, including a complete curriculum for every course you teach. We should all demand it. 

G.S.

Most social studies teachers and curriculum writers think it’s very important that students work with primary sources, and we agree, with some key caveats. We’ve seen a lot of primary source based lessons that don’t go very well. Our work this year with teachers at an urban charter school in the northeast and with district schools in Texas provided us with recent examples of a common problem: teachers assign primary source excerpts that are too long for students to read effectively. If we want students to actually comprehend the documents we put in front of them, we need to keep the readings short enough for students to read them carefully. 

Invest in Establishing Plain Meaning

The problem is usually not that the students can’t decode the words in the documents teachers give them; most students in fourth grade and above can match the letters on the page to the sounds they represent. It’s that they can’t initially understand what all the words mean, especially when they are grouped in long and sophisticated sentences. Just understanding the plain meaning of difficult text takes time and effort. (Think about the last time you read instructions on how to file your taxes—you probably had to slow down and read them at least twice.) And when a document is too long for the time available, everyone in the room, teacher and students alike, has an incentive to rush through this crucial step in student learning and thinking. After all, we want to get to the fun part: the “advanced thinking” of “document analysis!”

But rushing the intellectual task of establishing the plain meaning of the document is a mistake. In their landmark text on literacy instruction, “Reading Reconsidered,” authors Lemov, Driggs, and Woolway emphasize that if we want students to think deeply about a text, they first have to understand it. This means reading closely and carefully, not just getting the gist. That requires investment from both teachers and students.

An Example

Imagine a lesson on the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution. Teachers might be tempted to give the students the text of all ten—none is especially lengthy, and they would all fit on about a page and a half. But students will need considerable time and effort to understand each one. Here’s the full text of the First Amendment: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This is a single sentence, but what a sentence! Look at the language: “respecting,” “establishment,” “exercise” (as a verb), “abridging,” “petition” (as a verb), “redress” — this is hard stuff! If we’re reading a lot of amendments in one lesson, the teacher’s temptation will be to ask students to summarize each one briefly, or even worse, to summarize it for them: “The first amendment protects freedom of speech!” Accepting or providing a summary or “gist” reading of a document means missing important opportunities for student learning.

Three Steps to Interpret a Document

When 4QM students interpret a document, they follow the same three steps every time: contextualize it, establish its plain meaning, and only then interpret the author’s purpose and assumptions. 4QM teachers tell us that “establish plain meaning” is both the most time consuming and most valuable step. It forces everyone to slow down their reading and their thinking, so they actually learn new vocabulary and how complex texts are structured. And it lays the foundation for truly rich classroom discussion about the authors’ purposes and assumptions. 

Why did the authors of the first amendment follow the establishment clause with the free exercise clause? Why did they use the verb “abridging,” instead of another word? What did they assume about the national government? Students can’t offer or argue over answers to questions like these if they don’t know what the words in the amendment mean. And they can’t learn what the words mean if they have too much text to interpret in a given lesson. 

We were classroom teachers for decades, and we know that establishing the plain meaning of primary sources is hard work. And at first it feels like a lower-level intellectual task than interpretation (or “analysis”). But anyone who claims to interpret a text they haven’t actually understood is fooling themselves, and maybe their social studies teacher too. Kids like learning new words, and they especially like doing the kind of real interpretive thinking that their new vocabulary makes possible. And if your students have any kind of assessment that uses primary sources  (as do AP tests and many state exams), they need regular practice in closely reading such texts. 

Shortening primary source excerpts to focus on key passages is hard work for teachers, and truly reading them for understanding is hard work for students. We think the payoff in student learning is well worth the effort.

JB

Drew Perkins runs ThoughtStretchers, an organization committed to improving instruction on all grade levels. His url is “wegrowteachers,” which pretty much says it all! Drew’s latest podcast features Gary and Jon in conversation about knowledge and inquiry in social studies. Check it out!

The ThoughtStretchers Podcast: Knowledge-Rich Inquiry With 4QM Teaching

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

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

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

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

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

Novices, not experts

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

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

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

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

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

Building content knowledge and interpretation skills

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

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

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

Giving history the time it needs

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

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

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

J.B. & G.S.

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

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

We Finally Wrote A Curriculum

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

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

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

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

We Learned A Ton

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

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

Teachers Shouldn’t Have To Write Curriculum

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

J.B.

If you’re interested in learning more about our curriculum, Contact Us by filling out the form at the bottom of our home page

One of the members of the 4QM Board of Advisors is Barbara Davidson, President of StandardsWork and Executive Director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. These organizations are dedicated to improving student learning outcomes nationwide by advocating for knowledge building literacy curricula. In this blog post, Barbara and  StandardsWork’s Chief Program Officer Kristen McQuillan describe some lessons from their experience with the high quality literacy curriculum movement that could (and should) apply to social studies. We couldn’t agree more — which is why we’re working on our own 4QM curriculum right now. Happy reading!

We recently heard from an elementary teacher who admitted to skimping on social studies instruction in her classroom. She explained that she knows it’s important, but “I just don’t know how to do it.” 

This is a common problem. Elementary teachers have lots of ideas and models for teaching math and reading. That’s not surprising, since these subjects get the lion’s share of teaching time, and are what most states test. There are lots of elementary math curricula, and most teachers have an image in their minds of what a math lesson looks like. We demonstrate addition, and have students practice addition problems. Throw in some manipulatives, write some funny word problems, voila – math lesson. The recent push for science-aligned reading instruction (which we strongly support) has certainly made it clear that there is also a wealth of resources and ideas available for elementary reading instruction. 

But social studies in the early grades? Not so much. Elementary schools don’t devote a lot of time to social studies, and there are fewer resources available. But this teacher’s lament goes well beyond a lack of available resources. She’s complaining about her lack of understanding of the discipline itself. She has a planning problem because she doesn’t really know how the discipline of social studies works. 

ACTIVITY PLANNING

When this teacher said she doesn’t “know how to do” social studies, she was talking about learning activities. What sorts of things make up a good social studies lesson? What do the students actually do? What’s the equivalent of manipulatives and addition practice in social studies? 

Anyone who’s ever been a teacher has felt this kind of anxiety. And because we conceive of the planning problem in this way (“what are we going to do?”) we often make the error of conceiving of the solution in terms of activities. How am I going to fill my social studies block tomorrow? I’ll show a BrainPop video on Martin Luther King Junior! I’ll have the students make stovepipe hats like the one Abraham Lincoln wore, or make their own flags!

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of these activities. But patching a twenty-five minute hole in your week with an activity isn’t really teaching social studies, and collecting a lot of activities doesn’t actually answer the important question that this teacher is really asking: What intellectual tasks make up good social studies instruction?

4QM PLANNING

The Four Question Method answers that question simply and directly. There are four intellectual tasks in our field: narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment. We do these things in response to the four questions that define inquiry in our field: What happened? What were they thinking? Why then and there? What do we think about that?

In our book we explain various ways to structure lessons and learning activities so that students of all ages can engage deeply in answering these Four Questions. It turns out that narration, giving a true and accurate answer to Question One (what happened?), is a challenging skill — and one that students really enjoy mastering. Once students know a historical story, they can dive into the minds of the people involved, and use artifacts, images, or the story itself to answer Question Two (what were they thinking?). Question Three (why then and there?) helps young students to begin to understand the myriad ways in which the past differs from the present. And judgment questions (Question Four, what do we think about that?) loom large in the elementary classroom, where student conversation about right and wrong is such an important part of instruction.

THE “SWISS ARMY KNIFE”

We once worked with a fifth grade teacher who called the Four Question Method “the Swiss Army knife of history teaching: it gives me four tools, each with multiple uses. It cuts through all the red tape I have in my head about planning, and gives me and my students a clear and smart way to think about what we’re learning.” 

He meant that by focusing social studies teaching and learning clearly on specific and accessible questions, the Four Question Method solves the social studies planning problem. It gives teachers a clear intellectual schema that guides their thinking, and allows them to define clear learning tasks for students. With 4QM training, both students and teachers can know how to do social studies.

J.B.

Happy New Year to all our readers! We wish you all the best for 2024. In this post we are looking back to one of our highlights for 2023: a visit to a fifth grade classroom that was using 4QM curriculum. In this post I’ll describe what we saw there and explain how the curriculum made it possible. We’ll be writing even more curriculum in 2024, and it will all follow the same basic structure that made this fifth grade classroom successful.

The visit took place during the 2023 national social studies conference, which was in Nashville in early December. We had a great time at the conference; we saw some old friends and made new ones, we met people who’ve read our book (thank you!), we gave a presentation, we went to presentations — it was two full days of history teaching nerds hanging out and talking all things social studies. Next year’s event will be in our hometown of Boston, and we hope to see you there.

As it happens, Nashville is home to Nashville Classical Charter School, a K-8 charter network that has been working with us to adapt their social studies curriculum to the Four Question Method. On the Friday afternoon of the conference we took a group of social studies leaders from Texas, along with journalist and 4QM Teaching advisor Natalie Wexler, to observe a fifth grade classroom that was using a 4QM unit on Native Americans. 

A Question Four Lesson

The lesson we saw came towards the end of the unit. Students had learned about Native Americans and their history of conflict with settlers, and about the Indian wars of the late 1800s. On the day we visited, students were focusing on Chief Joseph, the leader of the Nez Perce tribe. After a series of battles against U.S. military forces, the Nez Perce were ordered to remove themselves to a reservation. They resisted at first, fighting and trying to flee to Canada. But eventually, when military victory or freedom in Canada seemed impossible, Chief Joseph made the decision to surrender to the U.S. army. Students had read his surrender statement, and were now making their own judgments: did Chief Joseph do the right thing?

In 4QM terms, this lesson is a Question Four: “What do we think about that?” The classroom discussion was robust. Most students thought that surrender was the right decision, since it would almost certainly save lives. But two thought that fighting on would have been a better choice, since surrender might mean the end of Nez Perce culture, and there is honor in sacrifice. One student compared Chief Joseph to his grandfather, who had fought in Bosnia in the late 20th century. All the students wrote full sentences explaining the reasoning behind their judgments, and student engagement was high throughout the class period.

In our post conference with the teachers of the class, they credited the 4QM unit with improving their classroom culture. This was the first 4QM unit the class had used, and teachers reported that their students were noticeably more focused and productive than they had been in earlier history units. The discussion that we saw was a high point for them, and they were definitely looking forward to upcoming 4QM units on ancient Greece and Rome. (One teacher actually got a bit teary as she described the progress this group had made in their ability to learn together.)

Why Did It Work?

What was it about the 4QM unit that made it so effective? We think there are three things. First, we always start a unit by teaching real historical content (regular readers know our unofficial slogan: “Story First!”). Every unit opens with a contrast between the setting, the unit’s start date, and the outcome, the unit’s end date. In this case, the setting was 1492: 100% of the population of North America was Native American. And the outcome was today: 3% of the population of North America is Native or partly Native American. How did that happen? The contrast between the beginning and end of the story piques student curiosity, and motivates them to learn the story that unfolds between those dates. Students need to learn the story before they can be asked to think effectively about it. By the time the students we observed were judging Chief Joseph, they knew a lot about the changes that had happened in North America since 1492.

Second, we ask real questions about the story. Every 4QM unit is based around story-specific versions of the Four Questions that define thinking in history/social studies. First students need to answer Question One, “What happened?” for each part of the unit story as they learn it. We then ask Question Two, “What were they thinking?” about key people in the story. We ask Question Three, “Why then and there?” about an interesting outcome of the story. (The Question Three for this unit is “What three advantages allowed the settlers to finally defeat the Native Americans?”) And we choose an important decision point in the story to ask Question Four, “What do we think about that?” 

When we say these are “real questions” we mean that they define serious intellectual tasks that scholars in our field engage with. One way we know this is that when we do unit preparation with teachers, we are able to discuss all the unit questions seriously as adults. When we prepped the Native Americans unit with two fifth grade teachers at Nashville Classical, they had a deep disagreement about Chief Joseph’s decision. This surprised them both, and illustrated why it was a real Question Four: serious and responsible people can and do answer it differently. 

And finally, the Four Question Method teaches students real thinking skills. In our book we provide rubrics for answering each question, and in our preparation work with teachers we practice the thinking skills associated with each: narration, interpretation, explanation, and judgment. Because we have defined these skills clearly and provided a clear structure for teaching and learning them, a wide range of students can access them effectively. This means that discussions like the one we witnessed about Chief Joseph happen with more depth and engagement than they would without the method, because the whole class can participate meaningfully and responsibly.

We were proud and happy to see our curriculum working so well with students, and we were gratified to see the teachers’ enthusiasm for the Four Question Method. You can check out the Native Americans unit guide here, and the unit storyboard here. Looking ahead to 2024 we are planning to write more curriculum units, and we will be building a curriculum section of our website to make them available to anyone with an internet connection. Here’s to a great new year for all of us!

J.B.