Well, I am on the tail end of that civic whirlwind that was the subject of the last blog. Since that blog, I got to spend the day with California educators at the California Council for Social Studies in Garden Grove, CA, another day with our partners Loudoun County Public Schools in Ashburn, VA, and then a virtual afternoon with our partners at Highland School District in Highland AR.
Some quick highlights:
This week ends with Spenser, Annie, and I convening on Montgomery, AL for the National Council for History Education’s annual conference. Annie has an amazing session planned on migration and quantitative analysis and I am very excited to see colleagues from around the country and share more about our work at Thinking Nation with attendees.
Will you be there? Come visit us in the Exhibit Hall and say hi!
The New Minimum Standard is Literacy Rich
Now, on to the topic of today: literacy. I honestly feel like I operate between two poles of misunderstanding when I talk about literacy. On one end, I talk with teachers who are sick of being told they are literacy teachers. “I wasn’t trained to teach reading and writing,” I hear. On the other hand, I talk with administrators who don’t see the value in funding social studies because it is not the tested subject of English. In the same breath that they tell the social studies department that they need to support literacy instruction, they deny the funding of materials that could support that being done well. It’s a funny world.
Now, Thinking Nation administrators (yes, I know some of you are reading this and saying “Zach! That’s not me!”) are different. They see the value in funding teacher capacity and have been great partners in supporting the notion that we’ve always held to: that history teachers are literacy teachers too.
It is in this truth that I want to dwell for the remainder of this blog. When we first launched “Make Thinking the Minimum: A New Minimum Standard for History Education,” we knew we had to emphasize the inherent literacy demands of our discipline. Good historians are literacy professionals. It is for this reason that we advocate that the minimum for a history classroom is that it is literacy-rich.
We’ve seen the studies that show that social studies is the single greatest determining factor in literacy gains. We’ve advocated for the consistent use of primary sources in history classrooms (and won a grant to further their impact!). We know that students who engage with the discipline of history walk out of our classrooms as stronger readers, writers, and analysts. Doing history well is literacy.
But I want to go a bit further. We live in a moment of “literacies.” “Kids need digital literacy!” “No! We must ensure they have media literacy!” “AI is coming for us and we better be ready! We must fund “AI literacy!” In fact, we can just add literacy to our favorite hot topic and badaboom, we have a new fundable initiative to be passionate about.
As I wrote in The Fulcrum a few months back,
“This is problematic. In an education culture where people champion “digital literacy, “media literacy,” or now, “AI literacy,” millions of dollars are spent to better prepare students for this continuously moving goalpost of literacy. As it often does, education is playing catch-up to a fast-moving culture. But what if the solution has been under our noses all along? What if preparing students to be engaged citizens, equipped to both sustain our democracy and thrive in this ever-changing world, lies in the discipline of history?”
Our New Minimum Standard takes this vision seriously. Ensuring that our classrooms are literacy-rich ensures that students have the tools to better understand the world around them, whether the world is defined by their neighbor, a book, artificial intelligence, or the news.
I tried to put this another way in a recent conversation I had with my colleague Mason Pashia of Getting Smart:
“To be literate is to have this flexible thinking, this flexible mindset to approach information with curiosity and then have a pathway toward satisfying that curiosity. And I think we, in the wave of education reform and pushes, focused on curiosity at younger levels and then not at older levels, which is problematic. But even when we focus on it at younger levels, we focus on curiosity without a pathway toward satisfying it. For me, good literacy—and good historical thinking—where they cross over is having the tools and those dispositions necessary to engage. It goes back to the old proverb: “Give a man a fish to feed him for a day, and teach a man to fish to feed him for life.”
To me, that’s what historical thinking should do—equip students to engage with their interests, passions, and curiosities. It’s a robust tool to understand the world. Historical thinking is foundational. The chief job of a historian is to understand people from a time and place not like our own. And when that is my goal as a historian, and then I apply that to the present, and we talk about civic formation, my chief job as a citizen is to understand other citizens who come from contexts or live in experiences that I don’t share. It’s a fulfillment of this e pluribus unum mantra of our country. And yet we don’t take it seriously. They’re absolutely necessary to combine. I do think the way we define literacy as a collective now falls short.”
When our classrooms are literacy-rich, our students are better off. They will do better on the state assessments, sure, and in the near term that is important. But what about the long term? How do we cultivate the types of citizens our democracy demands? Fortunately, in classrooms adhering to the New Minimum Standard, we also meet that aim. We prepare students for a test, but also for life. That’s why this campaign and pledge matter.
A Free Resource that Centers Literacy
If you’ve made it this far, I hope this little reward is worthwhile. Every component of our pledge is only as useful as it is practical. The good thing is that when we call the New Minimum Standard “radically practical,” we mean it! If you’re looking for ways for students to engage with the discipline of history and practice literacy skills, check out this lesson that takes various “fallacies” from one of my favorite books, Historians' Fallacies by David Hackett Fischer. (Free PDF of the book here!).
In the lesson, students will read about different fallacies that can support their own historical literacy, while using the Reduce It! strategy to process the information and the CER writing strategy to synthesize their learning. Give it a try!
As always, if you’re looking for a partner to make thinking the minimum at your school, we’d love to work with you. Fill out the get in contact form and we will find a time to talk more about how we support schools like yours. Of course, if you haven’t signed the pledge yet, today is the day!