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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
When I was a brand new high school teacher — at age 39 — a colleague gave me some excellent survival advice. It had two parts. First, kids love moral dilemmas. Whenever you get a chance to introduce one into a lesson, do it. Second, the textbook is your friend. When you’re not sure what… Read more »
We coach history teachers who use the Four Question Method for unit planning to start by defining the “story of the unit:” decide what actual content you will include in the unit, and in what order. (If the 4QM were reduced to a bumper sticker it would say, “Story First!”) But this imperative poses a… Read more »
My school is creating a 9th-grade Academy, of necessity. We’re shipping our freshmen to an annex next year while we do construction on our main building. We’ve decided to think of this as a crisis-opportunity: the annex is old and musty, and we’re already complaining about going there, but we also know that this is… Read more »
“Ridin’ in a Stutz Bearcat, Jim Those were different times” -“Sweet Jane” by Lou Reed The public reaction to the death of President George Herbert Walker Bush two weeks ago got me thinking about the phrase, “those were different times.” Bush 41 was the last of his generation to serve as president. He was a… Read more »
We all know the story, and many of us teach it. Hitler, a failed Austrian art student and Great War veteran rose to power in the land of Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven. He and his Nazi Party dismantled German democracy and instigated the Second World War. Under the cover of war, Hitler’s Germany orchestrated the… Read more »
Earlier this year I committed a very common history teacher error: I overstuffed a lesson. I was teaching my French Revolution unit, and I had assigned students to look for evidence of Locke and Rousseau’s ideas in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. I figured I’d just “go over it quickly”… Read more »