Those who are familiar with our curriculum know how much emphasis we place on writing in the history classroom. It is the backbone of our curriculum. We believe that writing helps students think better, empowering them with a skill that can apply to so much beyond the history classroom. University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Adam Grant, puts it so well:
Writing is more than a vehicle for communicating ideas. It's a tool for crystallizing ideas.
Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge and logic. It pushes you to articulate assumptions and consider counterarguments.
One of the best paths to sharper thinking is frequent writing.
When we write, we are not merely communicating to our readers. We are working through our own ideas. When we slow down our thinking to write it down, we think better. Unfortunately, too many history classrooms are not built on writing. As a result, students may be able to remember the past, but they are not equipped to think about the past. This of course, as we’ve stated time and again, is not history. History is the study of the past. One of the best ways to equip students to study the past is by empowering students to be strong writers.
Of course, this takes practice. It takes effort. It takes targeted professional development so that teachers feel capable to push their students to write. After all, history teachers are literacy teachers, too. This is where Thinking Nation can help. We want to provide schools and teachers with innovative data-driven history curriculum and professional development to empower students to become thinking citizens. In fact, that is our mission.
If you are looking to empower the students at your school to think deeply about the things they read and the narratives they learn, the history classroom is the perfect place. As the department head at one of our partner schools put it, “Thinking Nation’s curriculum and their follow up PD has encouraged my students to think much deeper about significant historical topics.” We’d love to partner with you too. Let’s talk.
I recently had the opportunity to teach a guest lesson in a 6th grade classroom. The students had engaged with the context and historical documents surrounding the historical topic at hand and I came in to guide them through outlining an evidenced-based essay. Their task was to answer this prompt: Compare and Contrast TWO of the following Hindu teachings: dharma, karma, samsara, and moksha. Whereas many 6th grade classrooms teach about Hinduism and its ancient roots, this task asked students to make evidence-based comparisons between two core Hindu ideas in an effort to better understand their relationship to one another.
Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I entered the room. To start, I asked students to define each term. To my surprise, almost a dozen hands went up with each solicited definition and every time a student answered, they were spot on. Of course, this is a testament to their teacher who more than adequately prepared them for this task in historical thinking.
Once we defined each term, we decided that we wanted to focus on dharma and karma in our essay. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these terms, dharma means the “right way of living,” or duty for all living things. Karma means “action.” It is the Hindu principle that every action has a consequence, both positive and negative. Students were to analyze several documents ranging from excerpts from TheBhagavad Gita, The Ramayana, and The Brihadâranyaka Upanishad. Each is a core text to the Hindu religion.
To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure if students were going to be able to identify both similarities and differences between the two concepts. But once again, I was pleasantly surprised. One student quickly noted that both ideas deal with people’s actions–a similarity. We quickly wrote this similarity down. Students continued to talk through their own thinking about the concepts in order to make comparisons. It was an empowering sight to see. Here, 10-11 year olds thought through concepts foreign to their own life experience in order to better understand their relationship to each other.
An illustration depicting Karma.
When we moved to differences, students had quite a bit of conversation under their belt. One student excitedly raised her hand to share a difference she noticed between the two. While dharma is something people choose to do (after all, we all neglect our duties sometimes), karma is something that happens to people no matter what choice they made. For example, she went on, people can avoid their dharma but they cannot avoid the resulting karma. Whether good or bad, karma will come. Dissertations are made of this type of simple but nuanced distinction. It demands further analysis (which the students then did with the primary sources) and, in the end, facilitates a deeper understanding of the topic at hand.
In this classroom, students were not merely recalling information about a religion. They were diving deeper. They were incorporating evidence from documents that were thousands of years old in order to make subtle distinctions between complex concepts.
This was not a university level world religions course. These were 6th graders. Many have not even hit puberty yet!
At Thinking Nation, we know that students are capable of deep thought. We want to equip teachers to facilitate such learning experiences for students because we know that students walk away from such experiences feeling empowered. Historical thinking empowers.
As expressed in previous blogs, at Thinking Nation we prioritize supporting teachers as they work to teach their students how to think historically. One way we do this is by offering to do guest lessons for teachers at our partner schools. This week, I had the opportunity to do a guest lesson on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program in an 11th grade classroom. The opportunity had me reflecting on just how important teaching the past through primary sources can be.
In this lesson, students work to write an essay answering the prompt: “Evaluate the extent to which FDR’s New Deal improved the lives of African Americans.” Since history is complex, we wanted students to wrestle with the complexity of this era of massive legislation and that legislation’s impact on a particular group of Americans. Some of the documents analyzed point out how much progress for all Americans (including Black Americans) came as a result of New Deal policies. Others show the implicit (and sometimes explicit) discrimination toward Black Americans that was a real problem with New Deal legislation.
Rather than being mere passive receivers of a story regarding this era of American history, students were engaging with arguments about the past, modeling the very type of thinking historians employ in their own research.
A 1935 advertisement from the Social Security Board.
After reading a testimony from Charles Houston (a representative of the NAACP) to the House Ways and Means Committee, where he pointed out the systemic inequality that occurred in the Social Security Act, we looked at how this document fits within the prompt of improving the lives of African Americans. Houston pointed out that since Agriculture and Domestic Service were two industries dominated by Black Americans (and those industries were excluded from Social Security benefits), Black Americans received no support from the federal government’s program even though statistically they had the most to benefit from it.
The content of his testimony is mostly an example of how The New Deal did not improve the lives of African Americans. But one girl raised her hand. “Can’t this be seen as a positive example of Black progress?” she asked. Her classmates looked confused as if they were thinking “Oh no, she really isn’t paying attention.” She continued, “In this case, a Black man is testifying to Congress and they are listening. So even though he is pointing out negative aspects of the New Deal, the very fact that he is in that room shows progress toward more racial equality.” We were all impressed. In all honesty, I had not even seen that argument before.
In that instance, a student recognized the nuances of the past. She became an active participant in historical study. She was not just a learner of the past, but a doer of history. The complexities of the prompt at hand, and perhaps history more generally, came alive. Seeing that lightbulb shine was not just a powerful moment as an educator, it was an empowering moment for the student. She had an evidence-based perspective that shined light on history’s complexity. This is the type of (historical) thinking that we want. It’s the type of moment in the classroom that cultivates thinking citizens.
Teachers are tired. This school year has been hard. For decades, schools have been becoming more and more of a one stop shop (and attempted solution) for social, economic, and systemic issues that, let’s face it, schools were never designed to do. Teachers cannot be all things at once. A sustainable work schedule simply does not allow it. Teachers should be able focus on student academic growth and feel supported by those outside their classroom for the many other facets of growing children into strong adults.
Teachers are tired. Let’s support them.
One way that Thinking Nation hopes to alleviate teacher burdens while maintaining our commitment to drive student learning forward is through grading student essays. When Thinking Nation first began, we knew we wanted to build an online platform where teachers could assign robust historical essays, students could submit those essays, and then we would grade them, providing teachers with critical data to push the learners in their class forward. It remains one of our primary services for schools.
We believe that part of cultivating thinking citizens through the teaching of historical thinking is providing teachers with the tools and time to do so. As a department head, I noticed that one of the biggest obstacles for getting students to complete robust tasks that required deep thinking, analysis, and writing, was the grading that resulted for the teacher. Simply, when we ask more from our students, we are asking more of ourselves. As necessary as it is, it is exhausting. On average, for every DBQ I administered to my 130-150 students, I spent 12+ hours of my weekends grading. But teachers have hundreds of daily responsibilities, and many of those have to wait till after the school day. By grading student essays, teachers can redeem that time.
We want to cultivate thinking citizens. Time constraints and the need for data and vertical alignment creates a difficult puzzle. But, having outside graders assess student work on a uniform rubric can truly elevate student work and empower them to be deep, historical thinkers. For this reason, at Thinking Nation, we have expert teacher-graders to provide clear and helpful feedback for both teachers and students on student writing. Teachers are tired. Let’s support them.
About a year ago, our blog was titled – A Needed Teaching Revolution: The Importance of a Skills-Based Curriculum. This week, we’re going to repost the blog as sort of an annual reminder. Historians are defined not by what they know, but by how they approach the past. May we cultivate those same skills in our students. May they be historical thinkers.
From last year’s blog:
Teaching history in schools needs a revolution. For years, the primary way to teach history, and measure student learning of history, has been content, content, content.
“Do you remember this event from the past? No?! Then you don’t know history!” This attitude toward history needs to change and is one of the primary reasons we began Thinking Nation.
Why a content-driven history classroom should not be our goal.
As you’ll recall from previous posts, history is not merely the past, it is the study of the past. History is a discipline. It is a process, not an outcome. It changes over time, it necessitates multiple perspectives, and it takes time.
Often times, ensuring that students know a particular topic is the primary aim of the history teacher. While there are noble reasons for this, it should not be our primary aim. If our students know about many important people, dates, and events, but do not know how to think about those things, they may be walking encyclopedias, but they are not historians. To be historical thinkers, students must be able to contextualize those people, dates, and events. They must be able to identify patterns, make comparisons, and understand causation. Of course, this does not mean that the content of history should be neglected. After all, if historians have nothing to think about, they cannot be historical thinkers. Still, the content of history should be our means to the end, not the end in and of itself.
At the heart of our curriculum is the idea that when students think historically, they are better citizens. They can think critically about their own time and place in the same way they think critically about the past. They have the skills and dispositions to navigate the present moment in an analytical way. This is why our skills-based curriculum goes deeply into specific areas of history rather than providing a cursory view of a broader range of topics. By doing this, students are empowered to analyze the past and draw their own evidence-based conclusions, not merely absorb the narrative that their teacher or textbook tells them. History becomes a dialogue, not a lecture. History becomes active. Historical thinkers are cultivated.
To do all of this, though, we have to re-think our teaching of history. We need to be willing to a spend large amount of class time on a small amount of topics. We need to prioritize depth over breadth. We may not be able to cover all of the things we used to, but our students will be equipped to better remember what we do cover and be equipped to think – the ultimate tool we can give our students.
Join us in this revolution to teach historical thinking. May we cultivate thinking citizens and build up a thinking nation.
This week, I had the opportunity to be in a lot of classrooms. In fact, by the end of the week I had worked in at least one classroom at every grade level, grades 6-12. To be able to witness the teaching of historical thinking at such diverse age ranges in such a short period of time is a gift.
I will probably reflect on the many great experiences in the coming weeks, but today I want to focus on one particular 9th grade class. In this class, students were exploring what life was like for Jewish people under Nazi Germany. They were engaging with one of our DBQs, guided by the prompt: “In what ways did the Nazis slowly change life for the Jewish people in Germany and German occupied land?”
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Spring 1943.
Students learned in the previous class period that the Holocaust was not inevitable. They worked under the historical concept of contingency in order to recognize the specific actions of individuals and governments that slowly restricted Jewish life and allowed for their persecution, discrimination, and eventually, execution. When students recognize that the past is contingent on the people who lived it, it can bring hope. After all, if atrocities were not inevitable before, perhaps we can apply a keener eye to our present injustices in order to prevent them snowballing into something worse.
While I was there, we were able to go through various primary and secondary source documents that helped illuminate some answers to the prompt. Students began to make connections to how Nazi’s restricted Jewish life socially, economically, and politically.
Wiesbaden Synagogue Burning on Kristallnacht
Students read the work of historians Saul Friedländer and Marion Kaplan. They analyzed a public announcement and a journalist’s picture that documented the social isolation Jews experienced early on when they were banned from public pools for “fear of contamination.” They wrestled with Joseph Goebbel’s diary entry where he applauded the atrocities of Kristallnacht. They empathized with a young girl who may have escaped the ghetto but did not escape the widespread persecution that awaited her outside the walls that consumed her sister. Students both analyzed and empathized in order to create their own argument about this time period. In short, they were asked to be historians.
At the end of class, the teacher and I thumbed through the exit slips, where the students could reflect on their learnings of the day. One of the questions was, “What surprised you in this lesson.” About half way through the stack of answers, I stopped and read one student’s response a second time. Then a third. Simply, she wrote, “I almost cried.”
In that moment, this student experienced the empathy that marks a good historian’s work. History was not merely “the past.” It came alive. This student engaged with the past in such a way where the past actors came to life. The statistics of atrocity bore a name, a story.
When we take the time to analyze the past and not merely remember it, it comes alive. Practicing these skills of historical thinking won’t just make us better students, but better people.
One of our recent assessments explores the experiences of women during the 2nd wave of feminism. While feminist women from the 1960s-80s shared many common goals, they were by no means uniform. Students analyze several primary source accounts from this era in order to compare and contrast the experiences of Black, Latina, and white women during this time. One of the sources they engage with is a book by bell hooks, a prominent Black feminist, activist, and English professor who recently passed away in December.
For our last blog post during Black History Month, we’ll look a little more at bell hooks’ ideas and perspective during the 2nd wave of feminism. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks became her pen name to honor her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. She insisted on not capitalizing her name because she wanted people to focus on the substance of her ideas, not her as a person.
While hooks went on to be a prominent scholar and activist, the book that gave her initial notoriety was her 1981 publication Aint I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. In this book she contextualized the Black experience within the larger mainstream feminist movement. At some points, she offered analysis that surely rattled some feminists: “That as the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in sympathy.” Of course this quote is in a larger context, where she merely wants to point out that simply because men and women may be different, neither is superior or inferior. At the core of her aims was to bring about equality. An equality often not seen within the feminist movement itself.
[THIS WEEK, PLEASE DOWNLOAD THIS FREE RESOURCE FOR STUDENTS TO ENGAGE WITH HOOKS’ WRITING]
Writing about Black feminist relations to their white counterparts, hooks lamented the clear disconnect. Black feminists “were disappointed and disillusioned when we discovered that white women in the movement had little knowledge of or concern for the problems of lower class and poor women or the particular problems of non-white women from all classes.” Women of color and poor women had real hurdles to jump that white women did not experience, but it did not seem that the white women cared.
hooks pushed her white counterparts to recognize their own willful ignorance and even racism. She pointed out “the appropriation of feminist ideology by elitist, racist white women” and then provided an example: “We could not even get a hearing at women’s groups because they were organized and controlled by white women… White women liberationists saw feminism as ‘their’ movement and resisted any efforts by non-white women to critique, challenge, or change its direction…”
bell hooks pursued gender and racial equality for the rest of her life, establishing the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Kentucky in 2004. She challenged illogical hierarchies and even in the simple action of her name, asked people to engage with ideas first. Her legacy will live on as an agent of change.
In January 1900, Ida B. Wells confronted a Chicago audience of the horrors of lynching. Armed with gruesome statistics, she had documented an average of two hundred lynchings every year in the United States. Now that slavery was abolished, Wells acknowledged that lynching was the country’s “national crime.” Today’s blog will explore this landmark January speech, “Lynch Law in America.”
Ida B. Wells was the first person to use the power of statistics to highlight the horror of lynching. In many ways she established modern fact-finding journalism. Speaking in Chicago, a city that at least in theory would support the ending of this racist atrocity, she hoped to equip future supporters of racial equality in order to inspire government action against mob murder.
Calling out her country, Wells maintained that it was time the United States acknowledged “herself a failure at self-government.” “The reign of national law,” she lamented, “was short-lived and illusionary.” By strategically pronouncing its guilt in the death of thousands of Black Americans, she hoped to ensure a confession by the government. Of course, the fact that Jim Crow lasted sixty more years meant that her call to action was ignored.
Although direct legislative change did not result from this and other speeches from Ida B. Wells (Congress did not pass an anti-lynching bill until 2018), her voice was no less important for America at the turn of the 20th century. Not only did Wells’ voice provide a woman’s perspective into what was often a male-dominated culture, but she demonstrated that racism could be countered with data. While her claims exhibited a pathos that was often found in the speeches of the 19th century’s most famous African American, Frederick Douglass, she grounded her appeals in fact.
Ida B. Wells paved the way for documenting racism, something that we see in today’s social media. Forcing her audience to deal with the fact that many lynchings were grounded in hearsay and not evidence, she was able to force those who might be apathetic to the plight of many Black Americans in the South to see that in many cases, “men have been put to death whose innocence was afterward established.” In a world where a black man could be murdered with nothing but rumors supporting his guilt, Wells refused to operate her own claims off similar errors. She rose above.
Ida B. Wells became a voice for African American justice at the turn of the 20th century. The implication of her speech’s title—that lynching had become America’s law—would surely have caused her audience to pause, and the entirety of her speech provided the facts necessary for them to reflect upon. Today, we should take time to pause again. Let’s remember Wells and what she stood for and stand up for justice too.
1850 marked a turning point for many African Americans living in the United States. White America had double-downed on its quest for superiority through the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. This act not only affirmed the language of the 1793 version, making it the duty of those in authority of one state to arrest a runaway slave in order for him or her to be returned, but now expected all white Americans to do the same. In this context, prominent Black thinkers Augustus Washington and Martin R. Delany began to advocate a new solution for Black Americans to rise up above these circumstances: emigration.
Whereas immigration is entering into a country, emigration is the exit from a county. In a sense, these Black Americans were advocating for a modern day exodus out of the land that enslaved them. Calls for emigration were complex. Many Black Americans favored a mass exit, many opposed it, only knowing America, for all its flaws, as their home. Still, it is important to look into these calls for emigration in an effort to better understand this important chapter in Black history.
Augustus Washington (fun fact: Washington was an American photographer and daguerreotypist and yet we don’t have a picture of him), writing in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune in 1851, argued that it was time for African Americans to go somewhere “where they may secure an equality of rights and liberty with a mind unfettered and space to rise.” The United States could not be the place for African Americans to secure these things.
Martin R. Delany
Likewise, Martin R. Delany did not see hope for African Americans staying in the United States. Delany appealed to his readers to look to South America as a future home, “To remain here in North America, and be crushed to the earth in vassalage and degradation, we never will.” Both authors saw hope for African Americans’ success in the U.S.
Despite the country being built on a foundation of equality, white Americans saw themselves as superior to black Americans, and as Delany wrote, “to assume superiority, is to deny the equality of others.” Believing that the circumstances of the United States were the primary factor deterring African American success, emigration was the solution. Black Americans needed to break from the constraints of the United States’ law and attitude in order to flourish.
To Delany, who looked to South America as a future home, going to Africa, Liberia specifically, would not work for geographic and political reasons. Washington, on the other hand, did see Liberia as the best future home for “the African race.” He saw Liberia as a place for African Americans to achieve the same “cultivated intellect” as the “long-civilized and Christian Saxons” had been able to in North America. Seeing the Liberians as uneducated and uncultivated, Washington argued that African Americans could colonize Liberia, “and impart civilization and the arts and sciences to its heathen inhabitants.” American triumphalism may have worn off on African Americans such as Washington more than they recognized.
The thoughts of Augustus Washington and Martin R. Delany on African American emigration serve as a unique glimpse into how some believed Black Americans could break free into success. For them, it could not happen in America.
Today’s post will be the inaugural post of a new series on the blog: Stories from the Classroom. In this series, I will highlight different experiences I have when I go into classrooms to work with students and teachers as they engage in historical thinking.
I recently observed a 6th grade classroom, where the teacher was having the students engage in one of the Thinking Nation DBQs. Students were reading some historical context and analyzing four historical sources in order to answer the prompt: “How did the development of agriculture shape early civilizations?” Their teacher introduced me as “the person who created this assignment we’ve been working on this week.” Instantly, I was booed.
“What?! Why would you do this to us?” “Do you enjoy torturing kids??” “You’re who made us go through all of this??” “Why do we have to write so much?”
Those were just some of the instant responses the class full of budding eleven year olds made sure I heard. Still, I remained in the class for another 30 minutes or so working with different students who were revising their final essay before turning it in. Toward the end of my time, one student asked if I could read her introduction paragraph. I did, and unfortunately I responded back to her that it did not make much sense. It felt both unclear and repetitive. Frustrated, she asked me what it needed to say.
A Student’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the sweet spot of growth in their learning. “A Productive Struggle.”
Rather than tell her, I asked her what the most interesting thing she learned during this assignment was. She told me that it was interesting how people raised sheep, goats, and pigs thousands of years ago in the Levant (The Fertile Crescent/ Ancient Mesopotamia). I said, “Great, let’s build off of that to capture your audience’s attention!”
As we slowly worked through turning her thoughts into writing, she constantly told me how exhausting the process was. She even said, looking at her peer sitting next to her, “You’re making us think too much!”
I paused.
I asked her, “Before this week, have you had to think about the past and how things are affected in the past this much?” She answered as I expected: “No.” I then reminded her of how cool it is that she is drawing her own conclusions about the effects of a world changing event: the Agricultural Revolution. She isn’t just listening to a teacher or reading a textbook for a claim on the consequences of such an important event. Rather, she engaged in analysis and historical thinking in order to come up with her own evidence-based claims (I’m sure I said this more simply in the moment, ha!).
As I stopped talking, she let out a big “Ohhhhh, woah, that’s cool.” Her smile went from ear to ear. In this moment, this young girl was an empowered learner. She had the confidence to be a historical thinker and use the tools at her disposal to read, analyze, and make meaning of the past.
Moments like these are why we exist at Thinking Nation. We want to cultivate thinking citizens by empowering students to think historically. This simple interaction allowed the light bulb to go off for one student, where learning wasn’t necessarily “fun” but it felt good. It was edifying.
On Monday we celebrate one of the greatest Americans history has known, Martin Luther King, Jr. When racial segregation was the rule and not the exception, King powerfully stood against injustice. While by no means the only voice of the Civil Rights Movement, King was integral to its success, both politically and culturally. After all, the entire country pauses life in his honor. Today, we are going to focus on a single phrase from his famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” King commanded from his podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial:
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
Today, many ridicule America’s founders and in many ways, they are right to. But in this line, consistent in much of King’s writing, he acknowledges the power in the documents those extremely flawed men constructed and signed.
King follows the above sentence, his voice reverberating through the packed Washington Mall, with “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned… America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” Here, King was able to sift the wheat, that is the words of America’s founding documents, from the chaff, the actions of those documents’ writers.
Martin Luther King, Jr. believed in the American experiment. He believed that flawed people could build wise foundations. To be American is not to throw away the founding creeds, but it is to hold one’s fellow citizens to those creeds.
As citizens, as human beings, we fail to hold to those creeds daily. When flawed humans fail at those creeds, they also build and fortify institutions that fail at those creeds. There is nothing illogical or unpatriotic about acknowledging systemic injustice within America. The government can be both built on the “promissory note” of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and fall short and deviate from that foundation.
As America witnessed during the Civil War, a foundation built on both liberty and slavery will crumble. But that foundation was still partly built on liberty and Abraham Lincoln did not throw that part away in order to work to save the republic. No, he purged the injustice of slavery from the Constitution. He extracted the cancer without killing the patient.
100 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other voices for Black liberation recognized that the cancer still lingered. Remission wasn’t complete. They worked together in another surgery of that lingering cancerous injustice. They successfully pushed Congress to pass several pieces of Civil Rights legislation.
Today, many people are exhausted with the cancer that still lingers. Police brutality is real. Racial inequality is real. Xenophobia, even in the halls of Congress, is real. But these are cancers to the Constitutional body. They are not the Constitutional body. We must not throw away the Constitution because of the cancers we’ve allowed to grow within it just like we would not kill a person if cancer remained.
King reminds us that the founding documents are promissory notes to all Americans. All people deserve equal rights outlined in the Bill of Rights. All people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Let’s honor King and pursue this reality. It may be a never ending cause for justice in our own lifetime, but the arc of history is long.
Picture at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 from Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0
A year ago today, on January 6, 2021, our democracy was attacked in the most visceral way since perhaps the Civil War. Armed insurrectionists stormed our Capitol, the seat of our federal government, in an effort to force the government to overturn a fair election. Thankfully, they failed.
Still, the air has not been cleared. While many have been brought to justice, prosecuted for their crimes, many have not. Many Americans still believe that the events of that day were inconsequential to democracy, or at least not as consequential as their enemies make it out to be. “It was wrong, but let’s move on,” they say. But for democracy to flourish and not flounder, this is not an option. If we want repentance and forgiveness to occur between the American public, justice must first be served. If many believe that there was not injustice committed, how can forgiveness and unity happen?
Picture at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 from Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0
At Thinking Nation, we believe that by teaching students to think historically, we can better equip them to preserve our democracy. Regardless of where they fall politically, they will take great pride in America’s greatest achievement: The Constitution. They will know how to navigate the past in order to learn from the past, both its successes and failures. Students who can think historically can better parse out fact from fiction, making the temptation of an insurrection or a coup fall by the wayside. Historical thinkers are critical thinkers. Historical thinkers are empathetic listeners. Historical thinkers are engaged and informed citizens.
Picture at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 from Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0
As we reflect on the dark day of January 6, 2021, let’s prioritize teaching historical thinking to our students. Teachers, feel free to use this free resource (teacher version), a DBQ on the January 6th insurrection (student version). Through it, students don’t merely engage with the events of the day, they navigate and analyze information, so that they can do the work of historians. They can make meaning of the past, even the most recent past.
George Santayana was a Professor of Philosophy at Harvard from 1889–1912.
It’s not uncommon for someone to reflect on a tumultuous moment in our present and respond: “A wise man once said, ‘Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it’.” This comes from philosopher George Santayana, who actually said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In some senses there is wisdom in this phrase. However, today we are going to address why it is problematic.
First, an underlying assumption in this perspective is the other famous aphorism, “history repeats itself.” As we looked at in a past blog post, there are issues with this phrase since history is in many ways the study of change over time. While there are continuities, there are numerous differences between our present and the past. Especially when considering the context that informs our opinions and actions. Today, though, let’s look at the embedded arrogance and pessimism in Santayana’s phrase.
It was this book where C.S. Lewis first coined “Chronological snobbery”
When we say that not learning history makes us “condemned to repeat it,” we are committing the crime of “chronological snobbery,” as 20th century British academic C.S. Lewis put it. Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate of our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that count discredited.” In other words, history is in a clear state of progress. There is little we can learn from the past other than to not commit their mistakes. (The idea that history is a story of dark to light is known as “whig history” and is discredited by almost all historians today even though we tend to hold to this belief when we cling to phrases like Santayana’s).
Of course, we can learn a lot more than mistakes from the past. We see heroic action that saves lives and inspires us. We learn of wise leadership that stabilizes whole people groups or regions. Or, we encounter courageous acts of resistance to injustice that inspire our current goals today. With these in mind, maybe the phrase should be “those who don’t learn history are doomed not to repeat it.”
We have to be willing to humbly learn from the past. Not merely warning signs for what not to do, but real inspiration for how we should conduct our own lives. Sometimes even, we can humble ourselves enough to try to understand the motives and actions of past actors that we thought we disagreed with only to find real wisdom in how they lived. The past can transform us. Studying the past can make us better people.
The discipline of history is an endeavor in empathy. Historians seek to understand, not condemn. This also encourages humility, not chronological snobbery. Sure, at times we want to learn from past mistakes so as not to be “doomed to repeat it.” But perhaps more often than we give credit, we should aspire to repeat perspectives and actions of the past. We can learn wisdom, humility, heroism, courage, contemplation, even love from our ancestors. Let’s listen to them and learn.
As teachers get into a rhythm this year, Thinking Nation’s curriculum is being woven into more and more teacher’s classrooms. We’ve had the privilege to work with teachers from grades 6 to 12 in professional developments and guest lessons in their classrooms. One thing that continues to come up in conversations is the time it takes to do our historical thinking curriculum. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I recently spent 70 minutes on 7 sentences from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Historical thinking is slow thinking.
Until we can shift our paradigm of history education, the time consuming nature of historical thinking will feel like a burden. When the needed shift takes place, however, it should feel liberating; an opportunity for deep learning. In this new light, we must recognize that historical thinking is slow thinking.
With various demands from state guidelines, school administrators, standardized tests, and our own historical interests, I have never met a history teacher who did not say that it was hard to cover “everything.” This is why we must root ourselves in the definition of history that is “the study of the past.” Not merely the past. We can never expect to cover everything, nor should we. Knowing a lot of history isn’t what makes a good historian. Knowing how to navigate historical information is. The skills embedded into historical thinking are the skills we need to cultivate thinking citizens. We must not only equip history teachers to teach such skills. We also need to help the gatekeepers (state standards and administrators) recognize how essential these skills are for the formation of our students.
At the heart of Thinking Nation is to cultivate thinking citizens. But in order to do this, we have to rethink the way we teach history. We have to slow down thinking. We have to cover less material. We have to be ok with not getting to it all. Given the constraints of education, we cannot successfully teach historical thinking until we get rid of the notion that content coverage is the goal of the history classroom. Once we do this, we can embed historical thinking into our classes, equip students as citizens, and better secure a democratic future.
Just over a year ago on our blog, we addressed how the historical thinking skill of continuity and change over time is not only a thinking skill helpful for navigating the past. But, it is also a skill that helps cultivate empathy in those that practice it. Since it has been a year, and some things are meant for reviewing, today’s blog is going to address this idea again. How can we cultivate empathetic citizens?
The opening line for L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between
Empathetic people are great listeners. They seek to understand before they draw conclusions, make judgements, or take action. The study of history enables us to practice this skill daily. When we look to the past, we recognize, as novelist L.P Hartley put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Just like we wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) enter a foreign country today and immediately decry their customs, mores, and societal structure without first understanding those things, we can’t simply make proclamations about the past without first understanding it.
The main job of a historian is to understand the past. This takes a lot of restraint in refusing to project our own visions of how things should be on past actors. It doesn’t mean we can’t hold tight to our modern convictions. But, it does mean we can’t assume that the context of the past is the same as our present. There are specific reasons that we hold to the convictions we have today. We were mentored by someone, we read certain news, we grew up within a particular tradition, or we are surrounded by people who think a certain way. Historians must lay aside our own context, at least for a little while, as we seek to understand the context of the past—that foreign country.
When we do this, we practice empathy. When we teach this, we cultivate empathetic citizens. At Thinking Nation, we want to instill empathy into our students. We want to empower them with the tools needed to listen to the past. To do this, we provide a rich primary source-based curriculum to do this. We give students ample practice in asking historical questions of these sources. These are empathetic questions around historical context, intended audience, and historical significance. After all, we are not here to cultivate walking encyclopedias, able to recite historical facts on demand. Rather, we want to cultivate thinking citizens who are equipped to preserve our democracy. The skill of empathy practiced in the discipline of history helps us do just that.
When I lead professional developments for teachers, I don’t shy away from the difficulty of teaching students to think historically. It’s rigorous, time consuming, and at times, frustrating. When we ask students to think historically, merely restating historical facts is no longer sufficient. Students need to interrogate past documents and perspectives in order to make evidence-based statements and draw conclusions for themselves. It’s hard. Still, I remind teachers that just because teaching historical thinking is difficult, does not mean it can’t be simple. Sometimes, simple is best.
At Thinking Nation, we are not trying to develop the next best educational buzzword. We aren’t trying to fill our curriculum with abundant strategies, games, interactives, or whatever the latest trend in education has become. Rather, we are looking to cultivate thinking citizens with targeted approaches to teaching historical thinking. What does this look like?
Well, to start, we want to introduce students to the practice of reading, interpreting, and synthesizing primary sources. These rich documents of the past are filled with so much insight to whatever moment in time they hail from that it is key that we don’t simply read them to remember what they said. Instead, we need to read them, ask questions of them, interrogate their authors, seek to understand their premise and historical context, and connect them to a larger vision of the past. Reading historical documents is not merely reading for knowledge. It is reading for understanding.
Our simple yet effective approach to teaching students this skill comes in the form of a graphic organizer. When students read a primary (and sometimes secondary) source within our materials, they use our “THINKS” graphic organizer to guide their own reading of the document. (Download a sample!) THINKS is a simple acronym that helps students think more deeply about the text.
Last week, I had the privilege of conducting a guest lesson at a large LA high school. We read a 7 sentence excerpt of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations where he highlights the benefits of his theory of Division of Labor. I began the class with a simple breakdown of the term using Frayer’s Model, and then dedicated the next 70 minutes to those 7 sentences. All the students had in hand was the source and their THINKS graphic organizer.
TIME FLEW. We interrogated the text using the prompting questions from the organizer. We dug deep in order to understand the context, purpose, and significance of Smith’s claim. We asked questions to challenge his claim. We identified new vocabulary. We did so much.
Of course, the process must be refined more for students so they can internalize this approach to reading the past, but it was an incredibly successful start. The students were engaged and boring Adam Smith came alive. The historical thinking we engaged in was rigorous and difficult, but the process was simple. Students had a simple tool to help guide them on their road to historical thinking.
This week I had the opportunity to do a two-part guest lesson with a group of seniors in their government class. Our essential question was “Why is America so polarized?” We looked at four different sources to answer this question: a Pew Research Study, a conservative’s OpEd, a liberal’s OpEd, and a podcast interview. I’ll be honest, the students did not love digging deeply into those four sources. It was mentally rigorous and at times, exhausting. But I knew that they needed that information for day 2’s agenda: a socratic seminar.
When the time came for the seminar, students were ready to speak. They shared their own personal vision for America, they supported what they believed to be the biggest contributing factor to political polarization with evidence from our readings, and they debated the best way to move forward to diminish the crippling polarization we see daily. The vast majority of students, even the shyest, participated in the discussion, bouncing ideas off of each other and challenging others’ conceptions with the evidence they drew from the articles. It was really a joy to just sit back in a student’s chair during this time and listen to these seniors, who will be voting in the next election, debate real ideas with real consequences. Socratic Seminars provide a great platform to do this.
In Socratic Seminars, students usually sit in a circle and discuss deeper questions that then lead to a bigger, essential question, which encapsulates the whole learning event. Teachers often stay back, letting students start the conversation (perhaps with some questions on the board), engage with one another, cite evidence from previously-read sources, and draw conclusions together. Socratic Seminars put the onus of learning on the students and allows them to explore different answers to complex questions in the safety of their classroom.
When I lead professional developments for schools who use the Thinking Nation curriculum, I often encourage teachers to incorporate socratic seminars into their use of our materials. While Socratic Seminars may seem intimidating at first, they are excellent ways to have students engage with complex ideas and empower them to think critically about the content they are studying. To successfully engage in a Socratic Seminar, students need to have read or looked at relevant sources to the topic at hand. They must have a broad essential question to frame their thinking about those materials and they need smaller open-ended questions that can guide their thinking throughout the discussion process. We’ve designed our curricular materials, especially our DBQs, to include all of these things so that teachers can effectively attach a Socratic Seminar to that learning process.
At Thinking Nation, we believe in empowers students to think historically. We aren’t satisfied with them being mere passive receivers of a historical narrative; rather, we want them to actively engage with the past. We want students to wrestle with historical sources and draw evidence-based conclusions as they navigate the sea of the past. Implementing Socratic Seminars gives students such opportunities in their learning process.
As Hispanic Heritage Month comes to a close, we will look at origins in this blog post. Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off each year on September 16th because September 16th is celebrated as Mexican Independence Day. On September 16th, 1810, Priest Miguel Hidalgo called for Mexican independence from its colonial ruler, Spain. However, the next 100 years were filled with instability in Mexico, leading to a revolution beginning in 1910.
One of our DBQs focuses on this Mexican Revolution, which lasted from 1910-1920. In it, students are asked to respond to the question: “Was the Mexican Revolution successful?” They explore the historical context of the revolution, key documents from the revolutionaries themselves, as well as some reflective pieces from the years after in order to draw their own evidence-based conclusions. While we won’t seek to answer this question in today’s post (after all, that is for the students to decide!), we will highlight some aspects of the revolution so we can have a better understanding.
First, some historical context. In the first 55 years in Mexico’s history after its independence from Spain, the country’s leadership changed 75 times. Power was unstable and during this time, the United States took over half of Mexico’s land in the US-Mexican War (1846-1848). (It’s worthwhile noting that many Americans completely disavowed the U.S. Government’s actions in taking Mexico’s land seeing it as a clear infringement on Mexico’s sovereignty. For example, see Frederick Douglass’s editorial). Then, in 1876 Mexican general Porfirio Díaz became president of Mexico. While he did bring stability, Mexico had to endure his dictatorial regime for 35 years. It was in this context that the Mexican people stood against oppression, beginning the revolution.
A portion of Diego Rivera’s famous mural, “The History of Mexico,” at the National Palace in Mexico City.
Different factions within the revolutionaries arose. Some, like Venustiano Carranza, pushed for political rights. Others like Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa fought for labor rights and economic equality. “Tierra y Libertad” (Land and Liberty) was their motto. Zapata and Villa’s contributions were unquestionable (it is they, not Carranza, who are better known today). Still, it was Carranza’s vision that won in the end. In 1917, Mexico drafter a new Constitution. While it did have some concessions to the goals of Zapata and Villa, it was largely a political document as Carranza and his allies pushed for.
Despite Hispanic Heritage Month being based on Mexico’s 1810 independence from Spain, the revolution that occurred 100 years later is perhaps even more influential for the modern country. We hope that students who engage with this part of our historical thinking curriculum don’t just become better historical thinkers. We want them to become better aware of the history of our southern neighbor, Mexico.
September 15th kicked off Hispanic Heritage Month! To celebrate this month, today’s blog post will focus on some pictures and other magazine clips from El Malcriado, a Chicano labor newspaper from 1964-1976, established by Cesar Chavez. Chavez was a core leader in the United Farm Worker’s Movement of the 60s and 70s that advocated for farmworker rights and fair wages.
In preparing for one of our DBQs on the Delano Grape Strike, we relied heavily on El Malcriado as it is full of rich documentation of the farmworker’s movement. Here is a brief summary of the strike, excerpted from our DBQ:
In 1965, after a successful strike in Coachella Valley, Larry Itliong led the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to Delano to fight for farm worker rights during the grape harvest. Having gained a $1.40/hour wage for farm workers in Coachella, he prepared workers to go on strike in Delano when growers refused to pay more than $1.20/hour. However, while the Filipino workers under Itliong readily joined the strike, Mexican workers were willing to accept $1.20/hour and work in the strikers’ place.
Recognizing that unless they banded together, no one would win, Itliong approached and convinced Cesar Chavez and his union, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), to join the strike. AWOC strikers began on September 8, 1965 and the NFWA joined the strike on September 16. For the next five years, the strike persisted into a global movement of labor strikes and consumer boycotts to fight for fair wages for farmworkers.
In March 1966, Cesar Chavez led a 300 mile march from Delano to Sacramento to pressure the state to answer farm worker demands. Then, after almost a year of striking together, the two unions merged together as the United Farm Workers (UFW) in August 1966. Chavez, Itliong, and Dolores Huerta were its top leaders.
Below are some clips from the Magazine:
Dolores Huerta holding “HUELGA” sign in issue 21 of El Malcriado. ‘Huelga’ means ‘strike.’More protesters holding “HUELGA” signs from issue 21 of El Malcriado.A powerful essay on unity in the strike from issue 23 of El Malcriado.The cover from issue 26 of El Malcriado.Scenes of farmworkers from the August 22, 1966 issue of El Malcriado.
Unfortunately, the 21st century was ushered in by a tragic terrorist attack that shook the nation. The last 18 months have felt like its own decade in itself that we can sometimes forget just how much has happened in the 21st century. But as we approach the 20th anniversary of the horrific attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001, we would do good to remember and reflect.
When I was teaching, I would dedicate class every year on 9/11 to just that. Often, especially the last few years, my students were not born yet and so the day fit right in with the many “history lessons” of the school year. But this day was different.
I remember my neighbor knocking on our door at 6:30 am, telling us to turn on our TV. By then, two planes had already struck the World Trade Center and minutes later, a third struck the Pentagon. I was shocked. The remainder of the tragic day played out in real time. I saw the first tower collapse on live television. Then the second. Then I heard about Flight 93. Sorrow filled our hearts and minds that day.
My first year teaching I showed the History Channel’s breakdown of the day alongside my own personal story. The History Channel does a fantastic job explaining the timeline, but at the end of it, I felt something was still missing. The students didn’t feel what I felt.
My second year, I decided to do something different. I showed a clip of that day’s news. Not thinking, I didn’t bother to watch it beforehand. As it played, I sobbed. The news took me back to that morning. I told my students I needed some time. I forgot how much the events of that day affected me.
I had a similar moment earlier this week. I read the Washington Post’s excellent story that highlighted 4 young adults that were still in the womb the day their father’s died in the attacks (The Post’s “9/11 20 years later” thread of articles is moving journalism). Now in college or the military, they grew up their whole lives hearing stories or watching home videos of the dads they never knew. Again, I sobbed. They each lost someone, before they even knew he was theirs. 9/11 took their dads from them.
As we reflect on 9/11, twenty years later, may we never forget the tragic day. May we remember the lives lost, the families directly impacted, and the country’s trajectory over the last two decades. It’s good for us to remember, even when it’s hard.
