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.