At Thinking Nation, we are passionate about advancing reading and information literacy. Our mission is to equip educators and students with the tools they need to succeed in today’s complex learning landscape. To achieve this, we design resources that not only foster literacy development but also align seamlessly with key strands of the Common Core standards.
We recognize the hurdles students face when engaging with complex texts. That’s why we provide access to diverse and thought-provoking primary and secondary sources. These materials are intentionally challenging, encouraging critical thinking and deeper engagement with the past. However, as our Director of Curriculum, Annie Jensen, recalls from her own teaching experience, success with these texts requires more than exposure. She vividly remembers handing her students a primary source and simply instructing them to “analyze.” The blank stares and confusion made it clear—they needed explicit tools and guidance to navigate the complexities of the material.
In response, Thinking Nation developed scaffolded graphic organizers (THINKS) and other resources designed to make these complex texts more accessible. These tools empower students to break down challenging materials while honing essential historical thinking skills. By connecting these resources to literacy development, we help educators inspire a love of reading, an appreciation for history, and the analytical skills students need to thrive in any discipline.
Historical Thinking Skills with Definitions
This week, we’re excited to share something special. As advocates for lifelong learning and literacy, we asked our Thinking Nation staff to share their top book recommendations for 2025. But we didn’t stop there—we’ve tied each recommendation to one of the ten historical thinking skills embedded in all our resources. These skills go beyond history; they are universal, applicable across disciplines, and essential for developing informed, critical thinkers.
We hope you’ll enjoy this curated list of books and see how the power of reading can inspire a deeper connection to history, literacy, and beyond. Let’s continue fostering a love for learning and a passion for the stories that shape our world.
Thinking Nation’s Staff Book Recommendations for 2025
(Click any of the below pictures to buy the book!)
We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs.
We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs.
In recent years, “empathy” has generated buzz‒and not always in a good way. As some, such as Paul Bloom make a case “Against Empathy,” historical empathy has gotten lumped in with the subsequent criticism.
At Thinking Nation, we see historical empathy is an essential tool in the historian’s toolbelt. But what do we actually mean by “historical empathy?”
Our Definition
Historical Empathy – Thinking historically means seeking to understand the past on its own terms by considering the context and perspectives of the era. It also means being aware of our own point of view to avoid presentism in our evaluation of the past.
In essence, historical empathy is a skill, not a feeling. It is about using context and evidence to understand the motivations and the actions of the people of the past.
However, getting students to engage in this work can be challenging. And, historical fiction can be a powerful tool to make this task easier.
The Role of Historical Fiction
According to a new NCSS publication, Inquiry by the Book: Teaching Historical Fiction With the Inquiry Design Model, by Kristy A. Brugar and Annie McMahon Whitlock, “Historical fiction situates context, content, and perspective taking or point of view in narrative form. But equally‒if not more importantly as social studies educators‒historical fiction often serves as a source for students to interrogate as they seek to understand the past.”
SAMPLE LESSON
Let’s consider a Middle School U.S. History class studying the American Revolution. You have introduced students to the Winter at Valley Forge and you want them to dive into the sources‒but the 18th-century language feels daunting.
Imagine if you started with a dense primary source , like the one written by Alexander Hamilton about the conditions at Valley Forge. It begins with: “By injudicious changes and arrangements in the Commissary’s department, in the middle of a campaign, they have exposed the army frequently to temporary want, and to the danger of a dissolution, from absolute famine.”
I bet I can guess how well that will go with your students…
Now imagine, that instead you begin class by grounding students in the skill. Hand out the Historical Empathy Graphic Organizer to help them frame the topic and consider questions that activate their prior knowledge.
Next, divide students into three groups. One group will focus on the conditions at Valley Forge, another on ideas about freedom, and the last on the role of Baron von Steuben. Each group will read an excerpt from Forge by Laurie Halse Anderson.
One group’s excerpt describes “the snores and farts” of the soldiers and expresses that an absent soldier, who was thought to be dead, was “not permitted to be dead!”
Now, you’ve got your students hooked!
Then, you have students work together to analyze the primary sources and fill out a “Notice, Wonder, Think” chart. Afterward, students can mingle with classmates to share what they learned.
Complete the lesson with a “Triangle, Square, Circle Exit Ticket.” Now, students who may have struggled to engage with primary sources are attempting and grappling with them. They likely still struggled, but just maybe, they didn’t give up.
The Power of Historical Fiction
This lesson demonstrates the impact that historical fiction can have. Students are more likely to participate in the critical thinking that historians practice. Students develop a curiosity about the people and events of the past. Students are drawn into the stories and can more accurately understand the context for life in a historical period and appropriately empathize.
Fostering historical empathy and incorporating historical fiction into the classroom is a passion of mine. I’d love to hear what you think of this lesson plan or what other ways you do this with your students! Let me know by emailing me at annie.jenson@thinkingnation.org or adding a comment!
*For more book recommendations, join me on Instagram and Goodreads where I host The American History Teacher Book Club.
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During the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal, a psychologist, and Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal in California, set out to explore the effect of an educator’s expectations on student learning and instruction. In their study, elementary school teachers were told that certain students in their class were “academic bloomers” and that these students were expected to show significant academic growth during the school year. The study noted that, once told about the “academic bloomers,” teachers began to pay more attention to these students, began offering more feedback on their work, and took more time to provide challenging learning experiences. As a result of the teacher’s high expectations, these students, who were randomly selected and were not necessarily “academic bloomers,” showed increases in their IQ compared to the other students in the class.
While the Pygmalion Effect Study, as it has come to be known, helps forward the idea that high teacher expectations can lead to higher educational outcomes for students, we know that many teachers continue to have a cycle of low expectations for students and their learning. Low expectations for student learning are influenced by many variables, including the teacher’s own personality, past experiences, the socioeconomic background of students, and the racial makeup of the school. We, as teachers, need to believe that all students can learn and that we can provide learning experiences that are challenging and doable. We need to break the cycle of low expectations. It takes work, but it can be done!
The Pygmalion effect, for its part, is often viewed as a chicken and egg problem (expectations can influence performance but performance can also influence expectations, making it difficult to know which comes first). What is clear is that teachers make instructional decisions based on their perceptions of what their students can achieve and can often avoid exposing students to rigorous learning material because they have become convinced that it is out of the range of what their students can do.
At Thinking Nation, we believe that teachers should have high expectations for their students and for their learning. We challenge teachers to raise their expectations! Our resources provide ample opportunities for students to engage in critical thinking, evidence gathering, and argumentation. These skills, while difficult to teach, can make learning more relevant and more engaging for students. As a result, when students feel more engaged in their learning, they are more likely to challenge themselves and to grow academically. High expectations directly influence the learning materials the teacher selects or does not select. Our resources are built with the unyielding belief that all students can learn and that students can do hard things!
Anyone who has ever watched a student playing video games can understand what determination to learn looks like. There is always a point in the game when a challenge is so demanding that the student “gives up.” Later, they return to the task and try again, and often fail to succeed even after a second try. Undeterred, the student continues to try over and over until they “get it.” While we are not arguing that a curated research paper (CRP) or a formative assessment is as innately engaging as a video game, we are arguing that students will challenge themselves and persevere when they feel the task is worthwhile. So let’s set high expectations for our students and design learning experiences that reflect those expectations. Onward!
Watch our video discussing the need for high expectations in social studies education.
[Looking to Register for our Socratic Seminar Webinar on October 17th? Click here.]
Recently, I was explaining a lesson plan that I love to a non-educator. In the lesson, students encounter the contents of a wallet that has been left behind and draw conclusions about who the owner could be. Through this investigation, students are introduced to the task of using evidence from the past to make a claim.
I love this lesson because it prompts students to think critically about how historical narratives are constructed, encouraging them to question and carefully examine what we accept as truth. The person who was listening to my story, however, was disturbed by the lesson‒stating, “But, we do know what happened in the past. We have it written down.”
While there is some truth to that statement, it really comes down to understanding the difference between “history” and “the past.” While these two words seem very similar, they aren’t the same thing and the distinction between them is important.
“The past” refers to everything that has ever happened since the beginning of time. However, much of the lives and actions of the majority of people, along with the objects they used, have been lost to time‒often because they were never recorded or were intentionally erased. This means that much of the past is truly unknowable.
“History” is the study of the past. When we are engaging in the study of the past, we are engaging in the study of the ‘knowable’ past‒ the parts that have been recorded and preserved.
“Revisionist history”
This explains why history is sometimes “revised” or “reinterpreted.” While the past itself remains unchanged, history evolves as evidence is uncovered or reexamined, at times enriching and other times disagreeing with our previous understandings.
When a historical event or development is dealt with in a new light, the author can sometimes be disparaged‒labeled “a revisionist.” These reinterpretations are often criticized not based on their merits, but simply because they challenge the established view or narrative.
Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker, capitalizes on this controversy in his podcast, “Revisionist History.” By asking about the origins of the understanding about something from the past, he asks “whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.”
It is interesting, though not surprising, that challenging the historical narrative sparks controversy, particularly among those who purport to value objective truth.
As historian James M. Banner, Jr. writes in The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History, “… it is troubling to encounter people who dismiss substantiated historical evidence, plausible historical perspectives, and strongly-argued, evidence-based interpretations of the past simply because those versions of the past differ from their own, from what they think is proven and safe from challenge, or from what they dream the past ought to have been even if it never was as they imagine it.”
In the classroom
For educators, this negative attitude toward “revisionist history” creates one more challenge to teaching social studies in our current climate. The fear over and opposition to considering new evidence and arguments directly contradicts the attitude and role of historians. As we strive to empower students to think historically, we can find ourselves stuck between a rock and hard place.
Practically speaking, the role of the educator is to guide students through the process of analyzing and questioning historical narratives, equipping them with the tools to critically assess the evidence available to us at this particular moment in time. We want our students to recognize that while the past doesn’t change, history is not static, but a dynamic field that thrives on inquiry, debate, and revision when necessary.
This requires use to encourage our students to ask tough questions:
For what purpose was the historical narrative constructed?
Whose voices have been left out?
What historical and personal contexts may have shaped the recording of the past?
Our job is not to simply teach facts and get students to regurgitate that information. Our classes become significantly more interesting when we teach them to study the complexity and nuance of the past.
In this way, we enable students to critically examine what they hear and learn not just within the walls of our classrooms, but in our fragile democracy as well. As Orwell’s quote reminds us, the ones who control the narrative of the past, hold power over both the present and future. As educators, we can equip our students with the skills and mindset to critically evaluate who has that power and hold them accountable for how they influence the stories we tell about the past and the lessons we take into the future.
In this week’s newsletter, we want to highlight the major platform updates we underwent over summer to ensure that our teachers have the best tools at their disposal. We are excited to share the latest updates, all aimed at simplifying the teaching workflow and enhancing students’ learning experience. Let’s dive into the key changes and improvements! (Also, if you want a video overview of the updates, go here!)
1. Resources Organized by Topic for Easy Navigation
We’ve reorganized the platform’s resources by topic. This change is aimed at making it easier for teachers to find and navigate through the platform. Now, everything you need is more accessible, helping you spend less time searching and more time teaching.
2. Select the Resources You Want to Assign
Our new filter option allows teachers to select exactly what they need. The filter ensures that teachers only see what they are looking for, making the assignment process faster and more tailored to the classroom’s needs.
3. A Unit Overview to Streamline Your Planning
We’ve added a Unit Overview feature that serves two essential purposes. First, it provides a quick and easy view of all available resources for a specific topic. This feature helps maintain consistency in how resources are used, allowing teachers to see what’s available at a glance. Second, it demonstrates clear alignment to various educational standards. The Unit Overviews show alignment to Common Core, California, Texas, EAD, or C3 standards.
4. AI-Enhanced Formative Assessments
We’ve integrated AI-powered formative assessments to assist in grading short answers automatically. This new feature will grade responses based on our rubrics criterias, providing immediate feedback to teachers and students. Teachers still have full control over the assignments as they can edit scores and feedback at any point before releasing grades to students. The “edit feedback/score” button is at the bottom right corner of the page when viewing the AI-given feedback and score.
We hope these platform updates will improve teachers’ experience with the platform and help them kick off the 2024-25 school year with confidence and efficiency. (and check out this video summary of the updates)
The Thinking Nation team has been hard at work over summer so that we can best support all of the wonderful teachers we work with! In next week’s blog, we will look at some of the platform updates that took place recently, offering teachers and students a more streamlined way to engage with the disciplinary nature of our classes. This week, though, we want to highlight our new posters and podcasts that may be of particular help at the beginning of the school year.
First, you asked, and we listened! We created a few different posters that are available free for you to print out and hang in your rooms. We hope that these posters further cement the language of historical thinking and analysis in your classrooms as students begin to internalize that “unnatural act” of historical thinking (click on the poster image to download the file).
New Podcasts
We’ve had several new podcasts/youtube videos published in the last month. Head over to the Thinking Historically About series on our Youtube Channel to find the video versions of most of the conversations. All of the conversations are published as podcasts. Head over to Apple Podcasts or Buzzsprout to listen! Here are the episodes:
Thinking Historically About the Relationship between American Indians and Europeans with Dr. James Merrell, Vassar College (July 30)
Thinking Historically with Dr. Catherine O’Donnell, Arizona State University – Why Should We Think Historically? (August 5)
Thinking Historically About LGBTQ Protest with Dr. J.B. Mayo, University of Minnesota (August 13)
Thinking Historically About Japanese Incarceration during World War II with Dr. Lily Anne Welty Tamai, California State University, Channel Islands (August 27)
Thinking Historically About the Labor Movement with Dr. Dylan Shearer, University of Illinois, Chicago (September 5)
In each episode, the scholar explores the same essential question that guides our units. We hope these are helpful resources for you and your students as they engage in the work of the historian.
As you kick off the 2024-25 school year, we hope that these posters and podcasts better serve you as you aim to shift the paradigm of what social studies can be for your students.
There has been much talk in the media this week about historical moments. While we are certainly experiencing a very momentous time in our nation’s history at present, I went back into the past to consider a rather significant event that occurred on July 21, 1969. That was the day a man first walked on the Moon.
The United States space program was a capstone to a period of exploration and scientific discoveries. The 1960s were also a time of educational innovation. In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched this period of change with the issuance of Proclamation 3363, designating “the period from November 6 through November 12, 1960, as American Education Week; (urging) citizens throughout the Nation to participate actively the observance of that week in their schools and communities.” The proclamation also encouraged that Americans “study the programs of our schools and demonstrate our support for the work of our dedicated teachers. (And) take every opportunity to strengthen our educational system so that our young people can be prepared to meet the challenge imposed on our Nation by this competitive century.” And over the course of the decade the Federal Government became increasingly education-oriented. There was an increase in federal aid and more programs were created to support education.
On the national level, the most significant changes to education affected students who were disadvantaged economically or educationally, with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Bilingual education increased. And as scholars and theorists voiced criticism of the manner in which Americans were educated, across the country schools and teachers gained the freedom to try creative ideas in an effort to improve education. For social studies education specifically (because this is after all a social studies blog) students began studying old subjects in new ways. One of product of the civil rights movement was a change in the approach to teaching American history. Courses exploring the founding of the United States began emphasizing diversity. The struggles of black Americans for equality were added to course material, as were the experiences of Native Americans. Education experts pushed for teachers to be empowered to develop their students’ minds and encourage their intellectual curiosity, rather than merely stressing learning by rote memorization.
Fueling the transformation of social studies education were numerous grant funded projects, many notably led by historians Edwin Fenton and Richard Brown. They and others created instructional materials, provided professional development to teachers, and entered into agreements with publishers, to transform traditional content focused history taught through lectures and use of a textbook, into new frameworks characterized by engaging materials where teachers used methods of inquiry to get students thinking, seeing, and writing about the past. The goal Brown wrote was to commit “to the idea that ‘history’ is primarily a way of learning and secondarily a body of knowledge…. To be sure, we (agree) that history as a body of knowledge is also important—the more that one knows of the past the better one’s ability to ask good questions of it—but nonetheless, we (view) the body of knowledge as essentially a treasure trove to be used rather than ‘mastered’ as an end in itself….”
This echoes the mission and vision of Thinking Nation today. So, what happened decades ago to unravel the progress made by these and other visionaries? Their reforms in teaching were overshadowed by controversies associated with the diversity of the subject matter. “Academic freedom struggles emerged in cities and towns across the nation as the “new social studies” went on trial. (Fenton), called it a “national conspiracy” led by a small and interconnected group of extremists. And so, it was “back to the basics” along with a revival of traditional history defined largely as the acquisition of historical “facts.” Among those contributing to the backlash of the “new social studies” were critics of progressive education, including “The Council on Basic Education, business groups, religious fundamentalists, textbook critics Mel and Norma Gabler, neoconservative educators Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, and backed by conservative funders with deep pockets such as the Heritage Foundation.” (Evans, R. W. (2011). The Tragedy of American School Reform: How Curriculum Politics and Entrenched Dilemmas Have Diverted Us from Democracy. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.)
What followed also included a growing concern about failing schools, a focus on standards, and eventually, the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 , promising to “combat the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in public education through a set of nationwide standards and federally enforced accountability.” Standardized tests focused on reading and math followed, and the era of teaching to the test began. And then of course, in early 2000s the United States began an intense focus on and funding of STEM courses. Social Studies was pushed to the side, as is covered in our white paper “A Second Class Subject? Why Social Studies Gets Short Shrift in U.S. Middle and High Schools,” published last November by the Education Week Research Center. Now we find ourselves once again needing to transform social studies education—or perhaps “re-form” it back to what the innovators of the 1960s infused into the discipline.
Thinking Nation also believes in sharing the “undertold” stories of historical figures not featured in most textbooks. Our units cover “Women and the American Revolution” and “Women and the Civil War,” “The Jewish Experience in Nazi Germany,” “WWI and Minorities,” “Japanese Incarceration,” “El Salvadoran Migration,” “The Chicano Movement,” and more. There are Civics-Centered Topics which focus on “Protecting Civil Liberties,”The Citizen’s Role,” “Presidential Power,” “Social Media and Democracy,” and many more.
Please join Thinking Nation for: Empowering Students as Historical Thinkers: Transforming Social Studies Classrooms
Unlock the power of historical thinking in your classroom! Join us on Wednesday, August 7, 2024, from 3-4:30 PM CST for an exclusive webinar designed to provide you with methods to shift historical thinking from the teacher to the student. Gain practical strategies you can implement from day one, and receive free resources just for signing up, with even more available during the webinar. All registrants will additionally receive a recording of the webinar and a professional development certificate. Don’t miss this chance to equip yourself with everything you need for a classroom centered around historical thinking!
What can we collectively do to empower every learner? Dozens of government officials, education leaders, and teachers convened at the Ronald Reagan Institute in Washington, D.C. to think about the best way to answer that question. This past May 23nd marked the 7th annual Reagan Institute Summit on Education, RISE.
Zach and Liz at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education
The sheer location of the Reagan Institute, with the White House in sight, presents a sort of urgency to the event. In my job at Thinking Nation, I live in this state of urgency to pursue a better education for our students. Our organization seeks to shift the paradigm of social studies education by equipping teachers to empower their students in disciplinary thinking. We know that when students engage with the past they study, rather than merely remember it, they are empowered to flourish in both civic and economic life. I was anxious to hear how others’ areas of focus overlapped with ours.
Many of the panels throughout the summit offered provoking ideas and plans of action. However, it was the first panel that I believe set the tone for needed conversations on how we can empower students. Three state leaders in education discussed accountability in schools as they answered the question “Have we reached the low watermark for accountability in schools?” Virginian State Secretary of Education, Aimee Guidera, Maryland State Superintendent of Schools, Carrie Wright, and North Dakota State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Kirsten Baesler each offered their state’s approach to cementing high standards and corresponding accountability in their schools.
Wright previously served in this role for the state of Mississippi. During her tenure, the state exponentially increased reading scores as evidenced by 4th graders in the state going from 50th to 21st in the nation on the NAEP reading scores. Now in her home state of Maryland, she offered up key aspects of that success. Data was at the core of it.
Data has to drive instruction, and teachers need to know how to leverage the data effectively. If they don’t? “Build professional learning,” she noted. Building teacher capacity is critical to empowering students. This clear connection between accountability standards, corresponding data to measure those standards, and teacher capacity to use that data, was echoed by the other two leaders as well.
Guidera acknowledged that we, as the adults, need to hold ourselves accountable to helping students meet high expectations. In fact, Baesler took it further, stating, “There is education malpractice if we don’t believe our students can achieve high expectations.” But, as all three noted, with No Child Left Behind, the high standards were not coupled with building teacher capacity. This key component, professional learning for teachers, is key to the success of an accountability model embodied by high expectations.
Thinking Nation prioritizes data at the center of all that we do with schools. In fact, we’ve leveraged generative AI to make that data instant and easily digestible by teachers in order to facilitate student growth effectively without overburdening teachers. Discernable data can better equip teachers, align whole departments, increase interdisciplinary collaboration, and most importantly, lead to empowered students.
To be transparent, as a former middle school history teacher, I questioned the need for data in the classroom. I felt that it just encouraged teachers to teach to a test and weakened the art of teaching. But I was missing the bigger picture.
Without data, I didn’t have a common language of success to use with my colleagues. As a department head, I struggled to break down the silos of our classroom walls. Collaboration without a shared focus and a way to measure that focus was always well intentioned but difficult to implement. Data has changed that.
The shared focus exists by rooting social studies in the discipline, rather than the myriad contents contained within. Then, teachers can have a common language to measure success. They can engage in high level conversations about student success by leveraging resulting data from assessments on disciplinary thinking. When built into the accountability models of schools, we’ve found this to be transformative. It gives meaning to the classroom for students and empowers them as thinkers ready to shape the future.
As the state leaders on the panel noted, we need high expectations in our schools. But building teacher capacity to help students meet those expectations is critical. In many ways, we’ve failed our teachers. We’ve continued to burden them with demands without giving them the tools to meet those demands. I hope that as other leaders and policy makers at RISE reflected on those insights, we can collectively work to enact real and systemic change to give teachers what they need to empower our students. Those students, our communities, and our country deserve it.
If you are like me, you are hoping to find that elusive balance of relaxation and professional development. After a busy year in the classroom, I always look forward to these weeks to recharge and revitalize some parts of the curriculum that didn’t quite hit the mark last year.
Both Thinking Nation’s Executive Director, Zach Coté, and I completed our MA in American History through the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (HIGHLY RECOMMEND!). Deepening our content knowledge had a massive impact on our ability to create engaging learning experiences and ignite our students’ curiosity toward studying the past.
That’s why the Thinking Nation Team put together a curated list of our top recommendations for your summer professional development. Use this list to find some reads to get you inspired to take your teaching to the next level!
Pedagogy
Keeping the Wonder: An Educator’s Guide to Magical, Engaging, and Joyful Learning by Jenna Copper, Ashley Bible, Abby Gross, and Staci Lamb
Reading Like a Historian: Teaching Literacy in Middle and High School History Classrooms by Samuel Wineburg
We Got This: Equity, Access and the Quest to be Who Our Students Need Us to Be by Cornelius Minor
Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer: Teaching Historical Thinking in Grades 7-12 by Bruce Lesh
Nonfiction
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy
The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore
A Queer History of the United States by Michael Bronski
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
Historical Fiction
We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Four Winds by Kristen Hannah
We hope you find this list of recommendations as valuable as we have. Summer is the perfect time to invest in yourself and your teaching practice. By diving into these impactful books, you’ll not only deepen your own understanding but also bring fresh, engaging content into your classroom next year.
Take this time to relax, recharge, and get reinspired to enter your classroom with newfound knowledge, diverse perspectives, and enthusiasm for studying the past.
Happy reading and enjoy your well-deserved break!
Annie
*For more book recommendations, join me on Instagram and Goodreads where I host The American History Teacher Book Club.
I had the privilege of attending class in Mr. Martinez’s 8th grade class again last Friday. If you haven’t read about Abraham’s class, I’d encourage you to here or here! He’s such a stellar teacher and I appreciate every opportunity I have to attend his class.
Abraham and I will be presenting together next Saturday at the California Council for Social Studies, where our session is titled “Cultivating Community through Socratic Seminars.” At Thinking Nation, we’ve been quietly building Socratic Seminars for all of our units and Abraham has been generous enough to pilot them and reflect on his experience during our CCSS session.
On Friday, I walked into his classroom in the middle of a seminar (sorry kids! Also, c’mon meetings…) and was instantly excited by what I walked into. The students had just finished engaging in one of our Curated Research Papers on Slave Resistance and were participating in the Socratic Seminar as the final piece before they wrote their essays. The inquiry question for that unit is “How did enslaved people resist their enslavement and why is this historically significant?” As I listened to the students, I heard them answering complex questions, referring to primary sources, and citing evidence from those sources to defend their answers. In fact, one of my favorite sounds during the 1.5 hours I was there was the 15 pages turning at once when a student spoke up and said something like, “As shown in Document B.” To hear the pages flipping in unity was a joy to historian ears.
A student preparing to engage in the discussion.
While I recorded many insightful moments provided by the young scholars in the room, I’ll share just a couple of them here.
The first example demonstrated a student’s commitment to methodology. Multiple students in the inner seminar circle were bringing up the point that running away was the greatest form of resistance. After hearing this multiple times, one student chimed in, “Wait, I’d like to ask a question. What are you guys referencing when you are saying that running away was the most common way to resist?”
This may not seem like much on the surface, but in this moment, the student wanted to source the claims she was hearing. She followed good historical thinking practice and asked a question of sourcing to the students. This high standard for evaluating claims is the type of disposition our democracy requires (Fortunately, the students were able to point her to the section of their materials that made that claim).
The second came when the students were discussing the significance of runaway slave advertisements. In a seemingly simple observation, a student said, “I’d like to add that running away was so common because they put it in the newspaper and it had its own section.” He went on to expand that it wasn’t just the language of the advertisement that revealed significance, but it was the existence of the ad. To him, the fact that newspapers would dedicate copy space to this regularly demonstrated just how prevalent of an event it was. This was great contextualization at work!
I was so impressed by what I heard in the class that day, and I hope that if you are planning to go to CCSS that you come to our session on socratic seminars or at least stop by the Thinking Nation booth (401) and say hi!
Thinking Historically About Podcast
Today we released episode 5 of our mini podcast series “Thinking Historically About the State of Social Studies Education.” As the other episodes have been for me, this was another great conversation with a insightful leader in the education space. My guest was Dr. Janet Tran, the Director of The Center for Civics, Education, and Opportunity for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. If you read the blog a couple weeks ago, Janet was the mind behind the incredibly thought-provoking roundtable at the Reagan Library. Her deep and layered thinking only further shined in my conversation with her on the podcast. Please listen!
It’s been a busy week but also incredibly fulfilling. If you plan to attend the National Council for History Education’s conference in Cleveland please come say hi on Friday. And for my fellow Californians, I’ll see you Saturday in Garden Grove for CCSS!
Back in September, we announced our new podcast, “Thinking Historically About.” Since then, we’ve released one episode a month featuring an interview with a historian. We discuss a particular Curated Research Paper that students engage with in our curriculum. In all of these instances, the interviewed historian consulted on the actual CRP, ensuring that it was aligned to scholarship and appropriately provided opportunities for students to analyze the questions in the same ways that scholars do. For a list of historians who have consulted on our curriculum, head to our website.
Next month, we plan to launch a parallel version to the podcast, where we think historically about the current state of education. We will primarily do this by bringing in key leaders and thinkers to discuss the findings and implications of our recently released white paper, courtesy of Education Week. We hope that our podcast continues to be a place for people to be thinking historically about both past and present issues.
For now, I want to highlight some of the episodes we released in the final months of 2023, and provide a quick summary of our January episode that was released today– an interview with historian John Fea.
In September, we released our inaugural episode with Nadya Williams, a scholar of Ancient Rome and Greece. In that first episode, Dr. Williams contextualized the evolution of citizenship in Ancient Rome for us. Students who engage with our resources are asked to evaluate how citizenship developed over time in Ancient Rome, and Dr. Williams gave us key insights into the types of primary sources that could be helpful to understanding everyday Romans during the age of the Roman Republic.
In October, we interviewed Dr. H. Paul Thompson, Jr., a scholar of temperance movements and 19th and 20th century Black American history. Dr. Thompson provoked deep questions around how we would frame our own exploration into how the New Deal impacted Black Americans. In that episode, we talked a little more at length about historical thinking more generally, giving listeners a helpful methodology for exploring the topic at hand. Dr. Thompson also reminded us about how important primary sources are to the historian’s job.
Then, in November, we coupled an additional interview with the release of Nadya Williams’ first book: Cultural Christians in the Early Church. In this interview, Dr. Williams helps us better understand the similarities and differences with the two most known Greek city-states: Athens and Sparta. As she did in the first interview, Dr. Williams really pushed us to think more broadly and inclusively in our historical analysis. She also reminded us of the importance of sourcing, that is knowing the background information behind a source in order to better evaluate and analyze it.
Our last episode of 2023 was an interview with Pearl Young, a historian of the American South with particular emphasis on women and gender in the 19th century. In that episode, Dr. Young took on the role of both scholar and teacher, thinking strategically about how to best guide students through the Curated Research Paper that asked students to compare the experiences of women on the homefront during the Civil War. Her guidance in the pedagogical, as well as scholarly aspects, will hopefully help future students think more deeply about the subject when they engage with that unit of our curriculum.
Lastly, in our first episode of 2024, released today, we interview John Fea, a historian of Colonial America and the early republic era. Dr. Fea helps us to think historically about the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and how their ideas shaped the founders’ vision for government. Dr. Fea really pushed us to think historically in order to best contextualize that particular time and place in order to best understand what shaped their views, and how their views shaped others.
We are excited to continue our podcast in 2024, and pushing the topics for what we are thinking historically about. I’m looking forward to interviewing others on the state of social studies education and what we can do about it. Stay tuned!
One helpful way to understand the historical thinking skill of continuity and change over time is through turning points in history. Well, this week was a turning point in our own organization’s history. This weekend, we transitioned to Artificial Intelligence for grading essays. As I’ll address below, the human touch is still very much present, but we have spent the last few months working on the AI’s infrastructure and coding to give teachers and students detailed and instant feedback on the essays they write for our Curated Research Papers. We’ve tapped into AI to go beyond assessing memory of the past to using AI to assess historical thinking.
In the future, I’ll write more at length as to why this will be so transformational, but I do want to make the primary reason known right away: We can give students instant feedback and scores on complex writing tasks by programming the AI to assess the writing in the ways we tell it too. The level of detail in feedback that used to only be possible for the super humans among us can now be given to every student, every time. It’s remarkable. AI can enhance historical thinking
Simply, we can incentivize the type of inquiry-based lessons and assessments that we all know to be essential for real understanding without using up so much of our teachers’ outside-of-class time toward grading, or the time it took for our own graders to go through 1000s of essays that may come in any given week.
So what does this look like for Thinking Nation? From the inception of our organization, we always knew that removing the barrier of time spent grading for teachers was critical to shift the paradigm of social studies education. We also knew that social studies lacked key data metrics that could be used to appropriately assess student understanding within our discipline. This is why we’ve always graded the student essays for our partner teachers.
Our goal was to give students detailed feedback and teachers data reports on student learning without burdening the teacher with losing 12 hours of their weekend to grading essays. As we’ve grown, though, doing this consistently and timely has become harder. Then ChatGPT came out a year ago. We began to see that, given the right prompts, AI could give robust feedback to complex writing tasks with remarkable accuracy. After that, we began to plan out how we could do this for our own CRPs.
Here is an essay graded by AI. This is only it’s first iteration, so the feedback can be strengthened, but this was provided within seconds of the student submitting their essay.
Now, once a student submits their essay, our AI instantly grades it, providing detailed feedback for every single category on the rubric. We know that AI comes with its own set of issues of course, so we still have all of our essays run through human eyes to check on AI’s understanding of our rubrics, for any bias in the programming, and language of the feedback given. We’ll be continuing to refine the algorithm based on the feedback from our (human) graders in an effort to give students immediate detailed feedback on their argumentative writing.
This new addition of AI will only further help our mission to shift the paradigm of social studies education. With immediate and detailed feedback, teachers can have students reflect on their writing in real time, enhancing students’ metacognition that is essential for the discipline itself to be cemented in their minds. AI is a game changer for enhancing historical thinking and we are really excited to provide our partner schools with a way to better shift the paradigm of social studies education.
At the end of last school year, many of the teachers we work with had a common reflection. It went something like this: “While I appreciate seeing the robust data from the Curated Research Papers, I don’t have enough time to do these often. I do really enjoy the formative assessments on historical thinking, though. The ability to assess a student on a particular thinking skill in a short (less than 30 minute) time span is incredibly helpful for gauging student growth. Can you make more?”
Yes, yes, we can.
Over the summer, we gave ourselves the goal of having 4 formative assessments for all 80+ of our current units. This meant that we would have to more than double the amount of formative assessments we offered on our platform. So we did! As a rule of thumb, I often recommend that teachers implement a formative assessment on disciplinary thinking every other week in their classes. With over 40 available for teachers in each of our course offerings, this is now an easy feat to accomplish.
Why formative assessments?
We’ve identified 8 different skills to assess in our formative assessments (We recently added Quantitative Analysis!). Essentially, these assessments are stimulus-based, consist of one “Weighted Multiple Choice” (WMC) question and one “justification” short answer question. Here is a sample for the skill “causation.” Our goal with our formative assessments is to help whole departments shift their own paradigm for how they measure student success.
Usually, formative assessments in social studies classrooms consist of memory-based assessments to ensure that students have retained the information taught. Essentially, success is measured by a student’s ability to retell us what we told them earlier. However, this is not historical thinking.
Nothing is moncausal.
Our formative assessments on historical thinking allow for teachers to assess how the students approach the information they engage with, rather than simply their ability to remember it. For instance, in the sample linked above, students are presented with historical context and a primary source. The WMC question asks them to use those sources in order to select the two strongest statements that describe why an event happened. Then, the short answer component asks them to defend one of those statements as the stronger cause for the event, citing evidence in their justification.
This simple task on causation emphasizes two key components of the historical thinking skill of causation. First, nothing is monocausal: “select two.” Second, historians make evidence-based arguments about the past. This second part is critical if we want to empower our students with the agency to enter into nuanced conversation, whether about the past or our present.
Vertical Alignment through Historical Thinking
Another critical component of these formative assessments is that whole departments can norm around them. In fact, the idea of building collaboration without losing teacher autonomy was the focus of my California Council for Social Studies session back in February 2023. Social Studies departments have been siloed by content for too long and our formative assessments give teachers a common language for success regardless of the content of their classroom. If teachers of different subjects each gave a formative assessment on causation, they could then come together and have meaningful and productive conversations around student success, as well as create aligned goals across the department. Common assessments transform history departments.
We cannot shift the paradigm of social studies education without a common language for success. Formative assessments on historical thinking can help get us there. That’s why we listened to teacher feedback and more than doubled our offerings of this particular assessment tool.
At Thinking Nation, we’ve consistently stood by the belief that historical thinking empowers students. When students think historically, they are equipped with the skills and dispositions necessary to sustain democracy and carve out a better future. Social Studies, as a discipline, is uniquely set up to equip students in this way, but what these historical thinking skills exactly are can be challenging to define.
Causation
One of our first blogs simply asked “What does it mean to think historically?” In the blog, I wrote, “Simply, historical thinking skills are the skills needed to properly interpret documents, events, and their outcomes.” Being able to interpret (and effectively analyze) what is put in front of you in order to make meaning of what you are interpreting is one of life’s most critical skills. It is a skill at the heart of our discipline.
Staying at a 30,000 foot view of the definition of historical thinking skills, I’d also like to add that these are simply the skills that historians employ in their study of the past. While they are by no means natural, as Sam Wineburg points out, they can be learned if students are given adequate instruction and practice.
Historical Empathy
Historical thinking skills are the historian’s toolbelt. At least that’s how I summed it up when asked by historian John Fea. But these skills, while cultivated in social studies, don’t just remain there. Historical thinking skills are incredibly helpful in navigating everyday life—from the news, to the workplace, even to our relationships. I often tell people how learning to think historically did not just make me a better analyst or writer. It’s made me a better dad, husband, and neighbor.
Evaluating Evidence
As I wrote above, historical thinking is empowering. Paradoxically, historical thinking is humbling, too. When students think historically, they have the agency to enter into conversations about complex ideas. They are empowered. But, they also know their limits. They seek to empathize with who they study. They rely on evidence over their own opinion. They’re humbled.
With all of this in mind, as we continue in our goal to shift the paradigm of social studies education in building both teacher’s and student’s capacities to think historically, we wanted to have a simple and clear way to communicate those skills to those who engage with our resources. We needed a visual.
Therefore, as a part of our organization’s rebrand, we worked with the talented design firm, Josh Warren Design, to create visual icons to represent the various skills embedded into our curriculum. Currently, we’ve focused on 10 skills. Below, you can see each of them with their corresponding icon.
Each of these icons will now follow their respective historical thinking skill around our curriculum. Students will see them when they engage in document analysis, formative assessments, or engage in a curated research paper. We hope that these clear visuals, along with their succinct definitions (some examples here!), will help students internalize these thinking skills. We know that the internalization of such skills won’t just be a good way to score well on a history test. Most importantly, it will set up students for success outside of the classroom in creating confident citizens, prepared to think critically about the world they live in.
As many of you know, we continually try to be a bridge between secondary education and the university. Rather than thinking how we can put a historical thinking “twist” on traditional classroom narratives in social studies, we look at how professional historians define their discipline and then think through how to scaffold those approaches for younger learners.
Another way we try to be that bridge is by seeking out the expertise of scholars as we construct our own units. Thanks to the generosity of so many historians offering their expertise, Thinking Nation students have access to high level thinking about complex historical events through our materials. I appreciate historians like Carol Berkin, who helped shape our unit on Women and the American Revolution, Manisha Sinha, who guided our unit on Slave Resistance, John Fea, who made sure students can think historically about Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and James Walvin who thought deeply about the Haitian Revolution with me and how to best get students thinking about its consequences. These scholars, among many others, have made our curriculum so much stronger.
One of the next stages of incorporating the expertise of scholars into our resources is through our new Youtube Series and Podcast: Thinking Historically About. In this series, we interview scholars specifically about the inquiry questions that students engage with in our units. Our goal with these is that students can hear how an expert in the field wrestles with the same question they will wrestle with and potentially write about through our Curated Research Papers. We’ve been quietly uploading some on our Youtube channel, but starting this month, we will release one interview a month via podcast. We hope that this gives teachers multiple methods for allowing students to engage with these quick conversations either before or during their own engagement with the historical events they study in their classes.
Our first episode, Thinking Historically About Ancient Rome can be found on Apple Podcasts here (Or Spotify). Or, if you want to play the video interview for your students, you can find it on Youtube. We are grateful to Ancient Rome scholar, Nadya Williams, for sharing her own expertise in both the crafting of the unit and in her reflection in the interview. We hope these interviews become useful for your classroom!
Lastly, to contribute to the funding of these interviews and other collaborations with scholars You can donate here.
Today’s blog comes to us from Annie Jenson, Thinking Nation’s Director of Curriculum, who has been hard at work this summer creating a variety of resources for our teachers:
We’ve all heard some iteration of this quote by Mark Twain, “Facts are stubborn little things, but statistics are pliable.” And in an era where stats and data are so easily accessible and then disseminated, the role of the historian and educator has become even more integral to a functioning democratic society.
Our mission at Thinking Nation may be simple – “To cultivate thinking citizens” – but our work is complex. Part of developing critical thinking skills in students must include education and practice in analyzing data.
Over the summer, we have created a tool to help teachers do just that. We are calling it our “Quantitative Analysis Formative Assessment.”
Our newest resource is a 15-30 minute activity in which students are first exposed to data. After a brief analysis, students evaluate the accuracy of conclusions based on the information provided in the data. To conclude, students justify their answer.
We utilize “Weighted Multiple Choice” (WMC) in this assessment in which there is only one incorrect answer and the other options are ranked. As described by historian Bruce Vansledright, WMCs allow us to “retain some scoring efficiencies while assessing much more complex ideas and interpretations. These items also do improved justice to the [history] domain’s complexity…”
The inclusion of WMCs in the classroom not only does “justice to the domain’s complexity” it also fuels increased classroom discussion. As answers are correct to a differing degree and students must justify their answer, there is ample opportunity for debate. Rather than a student feeling embarrassed from choosing an incorrect answer, they feel motivated to defend their choice.
In these discussions, we have witnessed democracy in action. Students make claims, use evidence to support their reasoning, and provide counterarguments to the assessments of their peers. And this is how students become both empowered and capable of engaging in meaningful dialogue outside of the four walls of a classroom.
There are so many ways to misinterpret data. From considering the collection of data, to analyzing whether the data is sufficiently representative, to generalizing information, it is no wonder that the exact same graph can yield wildly different conclusions.
In our Quantitative Analysis Formative Assessment, students are exposed to both accurate conclusions and data misunderstandings. Through this practice, they will become more attuned to the critical way in which statistical information should be evaluated.
The most polarizing conversations in our nation lately have been political in nature. And there are abundant recent examples of both the misinterpretation and misuse of political data presented. Thus, we especially focused on creating Quantitative Analysis Formative Assessments for students in an American Government course.
In one of our formative assessments (Linked here!), students have the opportunity to consider the balance between civil liberties and national security. The graphs depict American attitudes from 2004 to 2015 on how the government has handled terrorism.
In our WMC, one conclusion states, “Age is the only factor that impacts one’s opinion on U.S. efforts to protect civil liberties.” This is a classic example of misinterpretation. Just because age is the only factor represented, it does not mean that it is the only factor involved. For students who choose this answer, they would receive “0” points, however, the weight of the lesson learned is immeasurable. These students will be much more critical in the future as they consider what data is represented andwhat data is not included.
We are excited about this new offering to our partner schools as we are continually seeking ways to support the efforts of cultivating thinking citizens!
The Thinking Nation team has been hard at work this summer preparing for the 23-24 school year. We will roll out various changes, updates, curriculum, and more in the coming weeks; but, today, I want to address our summative assessment: the Curated Research Paper.
As you will see, our summative assessments have not changed in structure. They contain an inquiry question, context activities such as vocabulary, relevance to the present, and historical context, and a document set made up of primary and secondary sources. Students take all of this information and construct an argumentative essay that addresses the inquiry question and incorporates the analysis they did of the abovementioned components. In short, they complete a curated research paper.
Out with the old and in with the new.
Most people call this process a “DBQ,” or Document Based Question. This name has its origin in AP (Advanced Placement) Exams, put out by the College Board. The College Board, of course, has received a ton of attention in the past few years with many universities foregoing SAT requirements, the new African American Studies course, and the particularly low AP U.S. History scores that came out about a month ago. For much of High School history education in the United States, the College Board serves as an anchor for teachers and schools to compare what they do too. Thus, it has made sense for us and others to use “DBQ” as a term to describe what it is we do.
However, we have decided to break away from this terminology and call our assessments what they actually are. I want to take today’s blog to briefly explain our rationale for this change in hopes of continuing the dialogue for our organization’s ultimate goal: to shift the paradigm of history education. We hope to bring a new dialogue in social studies.
The term “Document Based Question” does not accurately describe what we are asking students and teachers to do. In fact, I can recall dozens of instances when I told someone we did DBQs and they told me that they did too. Then, they began to explain what, essentially, was a textbook reading assignment. Read a short excerpt of a document, and answer one or more questions about it. Sometimes these questions never even broke the DOK 1 threshold. Clearly, we had a different definition!
A part of growing up is making decisions because you thought through them, not simply because that’s what your parents did. For sometime, most of us have used the term DBQ because it’s what the “parent” (College Board) used. Those of us in that circle knew exactly what we meant, but the broader public (and most new teachers) had no idea, unless of course, they took an AP history class. This means that every time we talk about DBQs with a new audience, we have to add an extra layer of explanation. We believe that this extra layer can be removed and we can make a more evidence-based conclusion about what to name the process we are asking students to engage in. Thus we have the Curated Research Paper, or “CRP.”
To recap, we believe that Curated Research Paper is the best way to articulate the summative tasks within Thinking Nation’s curriculum. Using CRP with both the professional community and the wider public will more clearly articulate for all stakeholders what exactly the expectations are.
We are looking forward to engaging in CRPs with our partner schools this year! In the weeks to come, I’m excited to draw attention to more exciting things coming out of Thinking Nation!
Last week, Education Week published my response to the recent NAEP scores which showed a decline in students’ understanding of both American History and Civics. They summarized my article succinctly: History Teachers Deserve Respect. I’d like to nuance this slightly to say that “The Discipline of History Demands Respect.” Please read an excerpt below, and then head over to Education Week to read the full article.
Trend in eighth-grade U.S. history average scores (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ushistory/)
“The National Assessment of Educational Progress released the 2022 scores in history and civics for 8th graders earlier this month. I cannot say I was surprised by the decline. As others have noted, decreased time spent on social studies, a lack of funding, and recent state legislation prohibiting the teaching of a full and honest history were likely contributing factors.
I’d like to make the case that each of those causes represent a larger issue worth addressing: the lack of respect or attention to history education. This lack of respect permeates school buildings in how tests are built, professional development is allotted, teacher bonuses are awarded, and teaching assignments are given.
…
Most people do not actually see history as a discipline. They see it as a content. This distinction is crucial. When we only see history as a content of stories to be told, we get lost in the weeds of which stories to choose. The ongoing culture wars over what we can teach in history classrooms illustrates how this quickly spirals out of control. Rather than having constructive conversations about competing interpretations of the past, many people have become dogmatic about particular narratives, distracting us from the disciplinary practices inherent to the study of history.
…
If we truly care about equipping the next generation of citizens to be proficient in history and civics, we need to start by redefining what it is we do as history teachers. Of course, as I often tell the teachers I coach, this does not mean that we get rid of content in favor of skills, but it does mean that content becomes a means to an end—to the loftier goal of empowering our students to think historically.
…
We must… cultivate historical thinkers, empowered to engage with the diversity of ideas that they encounter both in and out of our classrooms.
To do this effectively, we need to build a common language around how we think about history so that social studies teachers don’t just have surface-level conversations about student progress within their content silos. We also need to provide common assessments on historical thinking that facilitate the use of that common language.
…
We can bring legitimacy back to what we do. Focusing on the discipline rather than the content allows us to rise above the culture wars, redeem ourselves as teachers of literacy so that we can properly collaborate with other content areas, and, most importantly, empower our students with the skills and dispositions to reinvigorate a visibly injured democracy.
As a bonus? Yeah, the NAEP scores will increase, too.”
On our social media this week for Teacher Appreciation Week, we featured teachers at some of our partner schools around the country who are absolutely CRUSHING IT! We are so grateful to work with such inspiring teachers and want to take some time to honor them here, too.
Following each teacher introduction, we will highlight some of their thoughts on history education through a mini Q+A.
First up for Teacher Appreciation Week: Dr. Carlo Aaron Purther. Dr. Purther currently is the department head at Birmingham Community Charter High School and has been teaching for 21 years. This year teaches US History, US History EL, AP Euro, and Government. To add to that he also teaches at Cal State University, Northridge. We love how we constantly integrates historical writing and analysis into his classes. We appreciate you, Dr. Purther!
Dr. Carlo Aaron Purther, Birmingham Community Charter School, Van Nuys, CA.
Q: Why do you think it is important to teach your students to think historically?
A: The mission is to help students become responsible democratic citizens. In addition to the number of skills one needs to be an effective citizen such as supporting an argument with textual evidence like they do with DBQs, one should also be able to think historically. That is, students should be able to understand the context and contingency of situations to better understand their place in the present and future. Additionally, students should be able to identify the cause and effect of events, how things change over time, and be able to comprehend the complexities of situations. All of this leads to students becoming responsible democratic citizens.
Q: Where would you like to see history education go in the future?
A: I would like to see (1) more cross-curriculum skill-based work with other subjects (2) students being service focused (3) focus on depth of historical events based on interests and/or needs of a local community.
Q: Share with us a bright spot of student thinking from your classroom!
A: Because of our school’s work with Thinking Nation, students have improved in (1) summarizing documents (2) being able to explain how textual evidence supports a thesis (3) and connecting what they learned from the writing an essay to event in another historical era.
Moving across the country to Michigan, we want to highlight the work of Uplift Michigan Online High School teacher, Jenifer Gould! Mrs. Gould is an incredibly reflective educator who continuously pushes her students to think deeply about the past. We appreciate you, Mrs. Gould!
Jenifer Gould, Uplift Michigan Online School
Q: Why do you think it is important to teach your students to think historically?
A: Teaching students to think historically is so important as it teaches them lifelong skills of analyzing, thinking objectively, and making sure they have evidence to support their position. Especially in the current climate we live in, it is more important than ever that students have these skills.
Q: Where would you like to see history education go in the future?
My hope is that history education would start focusing much more on primary sources, analysis, and critical thinking, versus memorization and multiple-choice answers. Teaching history using primary sources is so rewarding as students see historical events in an entirely new light.
Q: Share with us a bright spot of student thinking from your classroom!
It has been so fun, rewarding, and worth the effort to incorporate and use primary source documents in class as I have seen “light bulb” moments in several students as they have learned about historical events that they previously learned about, but now are seeing it from a totally different perspective.
From the Mitten State to the Lone Star State, we are going to the classroom of Gabriel Hernandez at Idea Public Schools in Weslaco, TX. Mr. Hernandez is a go-getter and risk taker that cares deeply for his students. We appreciate you, Mr. Hernandez!
Mr. Hernandez reviewing for the AP exam with all of his students at Weslaco IDEA Pike College Prep!
Q: Why do you think it is important to teach your students to think historically?
A: It is important for our students to think historically and view concepts through a historical lens to ensure we grasp it through the interpretation of then and now. To make sure history does not repeat itself, since history is a generation away from being lost.
Q: Where would you like to see history education go in the future?
A: History in the future should be something we all carry with us, and be showcased through multiple platforms, topics and not just what is required, but special topics, narratives, and interpretation from scholars and others that will bring more attention to History education.
Q: Share with us a bright spot of student thinking from your classroom!
A: A bright spot of student thinking in my classroom consists of peer feedback, pair shares and a WATCHA wall (oh look at this work/Spanish translation) that showcases student work and achievement. The photo that I attached is one of our last days of review, we build Key Concept hats and students were to showcase all day to other staff and students! I apologize for the walls being covered, since it was right before exams, we are not allowed to have any work up (timelines, anchor charts and such).
Finally, for Teacher Appreciation Week, we’d like to (again) highlight the work of Abraham Martinez at Stella Middle Charter Academy in Los Angeles, CA. Mr. Martinez has been teaching for 7 years and continuously reflects on how to best empower his students to think historically. We appreciate you, Mr. Martinez!
Mr. Martinez going over a Thinking Nation Formative Assessment with his 8th graders.
Q: Why do you think it is important to teach your students to think historically?
A: Teaching students to think historically is important as it gives them a framework and thought process to approach primary sources in an academic setting. I also believe that this framework can be applied outside of the history classroom into other content areas and beyond. Ultimately, it helps them become better people and gives them the problem solving skills that they will need throughout their entire lives.
Q: Where would you like to see history education go in the future?
A: This is a tough one. I believe that history education has moved into the right direction in the last 20 years by focusing on the historical thinking aspect of the discipline in addition to the names, dates, and facts. However, I don’t think that everyone in education seems to see this importance. I would like for education leaders to highlight and recognize the importance that history education plays in the role of developing the “whole student”. Perhaps this may be a reflection of my thoughts on education as a whole, but we need to make sure that we are developing better humans that are able to think for themselves, not just for academic purposes.
Q: Share with us a bright spot of student thinking from your classroom!
A: One of the brightest moments that I witnessed this year was when we had a socratic seminar on the Monroe Doctrine. Students were so excited to discuss what would normally be a rather “boring” topic according to an 8th grader. My 4th period class was so engaged in the conversation that they chose to stay in during lunch to continue the discussion. It was amazing to see their excitement and passion.
Take some time today to celebrate the teachers in your life for Teacher Appreciation Week. And all the teachers out there: Know that we see you and appreciate how much you do for the students in your room.
[This blog was adapted from a previous Thinking Nation blog on May 28, 2021]
The month of May is AAPI Heritage Month, or Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. We want to take this week’s blog to honor those who resisted injustice and persisted toward equality within the AAPI community. This week’s blog will highlight three instances where Asian Americans called the United States to live up to its founding ideas of liberty and justice for all. Each of these stories come from our curriculum’s library of DBQs and we hope that as you engage with their heroism today, students will engage with their stories in the classroom.
Our first story of resistance and persistence comes from San Francisco in 1886. Chinese men Yick Wo and Wo Lee were denied permits to operate their laundry businesses under a new discriminatory law in San Francisco. While the law did not mention race at all, after the city council passed it, only white laundry business owners could obtain permits to legally operate in the city. Yick Wo and Wong Lee challenged this discrimination on the basis of the relatively new (passed in 1868) 14th Amendment, which states, “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” To put the amendment to the test, they continued to operate their businesses without permits, and then when threatened by the city, made their case in the U.S. legal system. Despite the new city law not explicitly referencing Chinese San Franciscans, Wo and Lee took their case (Yick Wo v. Hopkins) all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that the city’s laws violated their 14th amendment rights. The court unanimously sided with Wo and Lee and set a profound precedent in U.S. legal history. The court argued that just because a law is not racist on its face doesn’t mean it can’t violate a citizen’s 14th Amendment rights. Their resistance and persistence led to an important change in our justice system. (Here is a free document analysis activity highlighting the court case).
Our second story to highlight during AAPI Heritage Month comes during the American tragedy of Japanese internment. During World War II, the American government forced Japanese Americans out of their homes, rounded them up, and forced them to live for almost three years in concentration camps in remote areas mostly in the Western United States. Resisting this unjust internment, Fred Korematsu hid in Oakland. He was later arrested and jailed for refusing to be taken from his home to one of these camps. The ACLU used his arrest as an opportunity to test the legality of Executive Order 9066, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed to intern Japanese Americans, arguing that it was in the interest of national security. Sadly, the U.S. Supreme Court did not uphold the 14th Amendment rights like it did in 1886 and ruled 6-3 in favor of Korematsu’s conviction. Still, Korematsu paved the way for America’s apology for this atrocious act against Japanese Americans. In 1982 a federal commission found that the Executive Order was shaped by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” In 1988, the government paid $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee. Korematsu’s resistance set the foundation for justice.
Our third story takes place in 1965. Thousands of Filipino farmworkers in California were working underpaid and in inhumane conditions in California farms. Filipino-native Larry Itliong, who led the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led a successful strike in Coachella to raise the wages and working conditions of Filipino farmworkers. From there, the workers followed the grape crops to Delano, CA. When refused the same wages they were granted in Coachella, they planned another strike. But to avoid Mexican workers taking the jobs once the Filipinos went on strike, Itliong approached Cesar Chavez, the leader of the association that primarily served Mexican farmworkers. Initially hesitant, Chavez agreed to help Itliong and join the strike. This became the great Delano Grape Strike that lasted 5 years and became an international movement to advocate farmworker rights. If it were not for the resistance and persistence of Larry Itliong, the movement would have never come about.
During AAPI Heritage Month, may we remember the contributions of the above three men and so many more within the AAPI community who resisted injustice and persisted toward equality on behalf of Asian Americans throughout the United States.
