History is a discipline, not a content. In my professional life, I might say this phrase more than any other. It’s a discipline rooted in inquiry. Historians ask good questions and then use their toolbelt of historical thinking skills to uncover those answers. At Thinking Nation, we advocate that the new minimum for every history classroom should be allowing students to engage in this process.
When we launched our New Minimum Standard campaign at NCSS last month, I wanted to be clear: so many amazing teachers are constantly raising the ceiling of possibilities for our students. Such rich work is being done and I don’t want to discount that. Still, as a field we have a long way to go to garner even a portion of the respect that English Language Arts and Mathematics have. At Thinking Nation, we believe that our field must collectively “make thinking the minimum” in our classrooms and at our schools if we want to be taken seriously as a subject area.
With a unified vision in mind, we are setting out to collect signatures from educators, administrators, nonprofit leaders, legislators, and other stakeholders who believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and that a new minimum standard is necessary for history courses. If you have not yet signed the pledge, I’d covet your support!
Why Inquiry Matters
The first part of the pledge says “I commit to uphold a history education that is INQUIRY-DRIVEN: Curiosity and questions drive students’ engagement with history.” As I wrote above, our discipline requires inquiry.
Without inquiry, we may have the past, but we don’t have history. Leading with questions and then following where the evidence leads us is the role of a historian. But often, students are only presented with the final product of that inquiry. We have our students read other historian’s conclusions, or the consensus of a group of historians. Maybe our students just engage with chronology and miss out on all of the scholarly context that enabled a historical picture to be painted with clarity. If that’s the case (and frankly, most high stakes assessments reward us for making that the case), we are robbing our students of the discipline we fell in love with. We may be teaching them about the practice, but we are not cultivating practitioners.
Ensuring that history education is inquiry-driven changes that. By rooting our classes in inquiry, we empower our students with a simple, yet transformational ability—to ask good questions. This isn’t just about being true to our discipline, it’s about cultivating necessary civic dispositions. You see, at the core, asking questions is an act of humility. Whenever we ask a question, we are being humble enough to acknowledge that we don’t yet have the answer. That there is still more to learn. Inquiry gives students the agency and confidence to explore deep issues, but also models the humility our constitutional democracy craves. Inquiry needs to be the new minimum.
Equipping Students with the Depth of Knowledge Framework
I’ll end this blog with an immediately practical way to center inquiry in classrooms (and a free resource). Many of us are familiar with Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK). Essentially there are four “levels” of questioning that range from recall (level 1) to extensive (level 4). As teachers, we may often think about the questions we ask our students in these terms. We want to ensure that our assessments reflect the depth of our discipline so while we ask students recall questions about what they learned, we also ask higher order questions to see how they think.
At Thinking Nation, we also believe that students can benefit greatly from categorizing their questions in such terms. In fact, in many activities within our comprehensive curriculums, students are tasked with asking questions at all four levels, often not even being required to answer them. We want students to think with an inquiry mindset. DOK provides a framework to do this well.
If you are struggling with getting your students to ask meaningful questions about the historical content you teach, perhaps give them the DOK framework as a sort of protocol and language to do it well. DOK as a questioning framework for students makes the implicit art of questioning explicit for students. This helps internalize questioning techniques, making them replicable in contexts within and beyond our classrooms. It centers an inquiry mindset for our classrooms and our students. It enables a new minimum standard.
Try out this free resource that introduces students to asking questions with a DOK framework as well as introduces them to historical epistemology! Of course, if you want to learn more about partnering with Thinking Nation to bring the new minimum standard to your school or district, we’d love to chat.