This year Gary and I have been working with the history lesson planners for the Uncommon Schools network, a charter network that operates over fifty schools in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. We’ve introduced them to the Four Question Method, and we’re helping them to revise courses, units, and lessons so that they are… Read more »
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,… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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 »