We shipped this week’s blog elsewhere thanks to The Fulcrum, “a platform where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.”
In it, I address how we can continue the National Week of Conversation in our classrooms by giving our students ample opportunities to read primary sources.
The primary source the student in that classroom analyzed.
Here is a taste:
As seen in the classroom that day, listening to the past through the analysis of primary sources can be a powerful act of empathy for students. When we incorporate student discussions into that analysis, we only deepen empathy. Students model a listening process for their analysis of past documents as a way to set them up to listen in the contemporary conversations they engage with every day.
It is my hope that we continue the themes of #NWOC [ National Week of Conversation ] far beyond this week. Let’s support teachers around the country as they pause and look for opportunities to have students listen to the past and engage in empathetic conversations about its significance. Not only will students grow in their intellectual capacity through these conversations, such conversations are foundational for the preservation of our constitutional democracy.
This year’s National Charter School Conference takes place in Austin, Texas. This is the weekend of our nation’s newest national holiday: Juneteenth. As a way to celebrate a holiday defined by liberation, our art competition challenges students to imagine and envision a Black leader or artist and their contributions to liberation. The top 20 students will be featured in a pop up exhibit at the National Charter School Conference. Then the top 3 students will even win cash prizes of $1000, $500, and $250 respectively.
The National Alliance for Charter Schools is sponsoring this contest. This means it is only open to HS charter school students, so if you teach at any charter school in the U.S. WE’D LOVE FOR YOUR STUDENTS TO SUBMIT THEIR ART WORK! This is a really great fourth quarter activity to stretch students beyond the traditional scope and sequence and demonstrate civic participation.
Teachers: We’ve also collaborated with the National Liberty Museum on two introductory activities, linked here. The first has students read General Granger’s Order NO. 3, dubbed the Juneteenth orders, which declared the Emancipation Proclamation to the wrongfully enslaved communities in Texas. The second has students analyze art work to help them plan out their own art submission. Please use these activities in your classrooms to situate your students before they begin on their submission for the Juneteenth art contest.
We can’t wait to see what students come up with! If you have any questions, please contact Thinking Nation’s Community Outreach Manager, Tiana Day (tiana.day@thinkingnation.org)
Here is our flyer! (Also linked here in PDF form). We cannot wait to see all of the talented submissions by your students!
I was visiting one of our partner schools in Los Angeles recently and I happily saw that the 8th grade teacher, Mr. Martinez, had student writing on the wall in the hallway outside his classroom. His school, Stella Middle Charter Academy, has partnered with Thinking Nation for a few years now and it has been so rewarding to watch the students grow.
Mr. Martinez’s Wall
My initial reaction was admittedly a little proud. It’s always cool to see Thinking Nation out and about. But as I reflected, I recognized that what Mr. Martinez was doing was both shifting and shaping the culture of learning at his campus.
Most times that we put up student work, it is the work that has immediate visual appeal. Artwork, maps, pamphlets, etc. This work does indeed look nice, but it often does not showcase student thinking. In fact, many of these assignments require the same amount of DOK 1 knowledge that most content-based multiple choice questions require. In a way, these pieces of student work reward students for restating the information that we or a textbook or website gave them at an earlier date. By putting them up, we are sending a message of what we reward in our class.
In the case of much (not all!) student art work, we are sending the message that what is valued by us (and at our school) is visually appealing work that demonstrates content knowledge. But this isn’t history.
History is the study of the past and we have to employ historical thinking in order to do that well. What Mr. Martinez was doing was demonstrating to students and passing staff and parents that he was rewarding something deeper. He was showcasing student writing that couldn’t simply be taken in by quickly walking by. It encouraged the passerby to stop, read samples of student work, look at a rubric that assessed higher order thinking and writing skills, and engage with a variety of arguments. Mr. Martinez was rewarding historical thinking.
This may seem small, but in this simple way he was setting a tone for the type of work that was celebrated in his class. He was shifting the culture from “this looks nice, let’s post it,” to “this is deep work, let’s celebrate it!” If we want to cultivate thinking citizens and shift the paradigm of history education, this is the school culture shift we need. If we shape our culture to reward deep thinking and complex writing, guess what? Students will begin to showcase their deep thinking and push to become better writers. From there, the paradigm will shift.
As we reflect on what we reward at our schools, I hope that Mr. Martinez’s example can serve as an inspiration for us all.
For our last blog, we talked about the special occasion of listening to Dolores Huerta speak on International Women’s Day. Today, we want to continue to celebrate Women’s History Month by honoring a lesser known, but incredibly important voice: Elizabeth Keckley.
If you’ll recall our last blog post of 2022, I highlighted my top 5 history books of 2022, one of them being Keckley’s autobiography. Her story is incredible. From that blog:
“Wow. Keckley’s experience as an enslaved, then free, seamstress was riveting. Put simply, there needs to be a movie about her. A seamstress for Jefferson Davis’s wife before the Civil War, she refused to go with them once the war began. Through her own grit, she became Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress during Lincoln’s tenure in the White House. She was a confidant for Mrs. Lincoln and was often “in the room” with President Lincoln at critical personal moments. I could not put her book down.”
Keckley’s life story is truly incredible. I was blown away by her story and how she was able to be such a crucial part of the Lincoln family’s life while they were in the White House. She witnessed so much! She spent so much time in the presence of the first lady and her husband, the president, that she offered such fascinating insights into the inner workings of Lincoln. For instance, read her perspective on his integrity and trust in others:
OFTEN Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln discussed the relations of Cabinet officers, and gentlemen prominent in politics, in my presence. I soon learned that the wife of the President had no love for Mr. Salmon P. Chase, at that time Secretary of the Treasury. She was well versed in human character, was somewhat suspicious of those by whom she was surrounded, and often her judgment was correct. Her intuition about the sincerity of individuals was more accurate than that of her husband. She looked beyond, and read the reflection of action in the future. Her hostility to Mr. Chase was very bitter. She claimed that he was a selfish politician instead of a true patriot, and warned Mr. Lincoln not to trust him too far. The daughter of the Secretary was quite a belle in Washington, and Mrs. Lincoln, who was jealous of the popularity of others, had no desire to build up her social position through political favor to her father. Miss Chase, now Mrs. Senator Sprague, was a lovely woman, and was worthy of all the admiration she received. Mr. Lincoln was more confiding than his wife. He never suspected the fidelity of those who claimed to be his friends. Honest to the very core himself, and frank as a child, he never dreamed of questioning the sincerity of others.
Elizabeth Keckley in many ways was an American hero. The stability and restraint that she brought to the White House flies flat in the face of the “get ahead however you can” culture that often runs our world. Her empathy for others is worth emulating.
In our middle school Civil War DBQ, students are asked to look at the various experiences of women during the Civil War, one of whom is Elizabeth Keckley. Teachers, if you would like to introduce Keckley’s story and efforts to your students, please download this document analysis worksheet that highlights her efforts during the Civil War.
This past Wednesday, we celebrated International Women’s Day, and of course, this month is Women’s History Month. Fortunately, I was able to attend an event honoring the great civil rights activist, Dolores Huerta, on Wednesday. She spoke to the crowd and challenged us, she read a beautiful children’s book capturing her life to a group of local 4th graders, and those 4th graders sang a perfect rendition of “De Colores” for the audience. It was such a special day.
An art piece from the new exhibit at CSUCI.
It’s not often that you are presented with the opportunity to sit in the presence of such a powerful person in history–and the crowd at California State University, Channel Islands knew it.
Dolores Huerta came to the university that day to inaugurate a new exhibit housed at CSUCI put together by the Smithsonian. I was lucky enough to sit next to Maria del Carmen Cossu Saettone, the Project Director for Latino Initiatives at the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Cossu Saettone’s hard work on the exhibit manifested itself clearly that day. Her dedication to spreading the word of important history shined in her passion and focus.
Before reading the children’s book, Huerta took the opportunity to speak to the intently focused crowd. She mentioned how her organizing helped save the local community of La Colonia in Oxnard, CA from being bulldozed in the 60s before the Farm Workers’ Movement really began to take shape. After she told that story, she reminded us, “All they [the people] have to do is come together, organize, vote, and I’ll say it again, vote!” She wasted no time in her efforts to organize at the event.
An art piece from the new exhibit at CSUCI.
She spoke to the necessity of passing the Equal Rights Amendment, the importance of funding education and dissolving the education to prison pipeline, she addressed what she identifies as creeping fascism in the United States, and even challenged the crowd to write to our senator to stop the inhumane treatment at a migrant detention center in Kern county. “Can you do that?” she asked. We’ll make it easy for you, readers. Here is his contact information. Voicing my concern took less than 5 minutes.
Huerta ended her speech by asking everyone to stand up in true organizer form. She had us answer her questions. “Who has the power?” and “What kind of power?” In return, the crowd shouted: “WE HAVE THE POWER.” and “PEOPLE POWER!” This moment brought me right back to my studying of the Delano Grape Strike, where Huerta, Caesar Chavez, and Larry Itliong organized a nationwide strike on behalf of the farmworkers who were working for deplorable wages in inhumane conditions.
Awhile back, our blog covered this event to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. Huerta and others sacrificed so much for the voiceless. Now, at 92 years old, Huerta has not stopped the fight. She is the personification of tenacity, grit, and service. May we take some time to reflect and learn from her this Women’s History Month (Teachers, use this primary source analysis resource to talk about Huerta’s work and the Delano Grape Strike in your class).
Dolores Huerta addressing the crowd at CSUCI.
Huerta’s response to a 4th grader’s question sums up her goals well. The 4th grader asked, “What’s your favorite thing to do?”
Dolores shouted: “Organize! I love to get people together and tell people that they have power… Come together and fight for justice.”
Or perhaps another 4th grader’s question: “What sport did you play when you were little?”
Chuckling, she responded, “Well I was so small that no one picked me for sports teams. But, I love dancing. Everyone should dance. If you dance when you’re small, your legs get strong so you can march!”
Two years in March, our blog was titled – A Needed Teaching Revolution: The Importance of a Skills-Based Curriculum. One year ago, we posted it again.Well, it seems that March is the month to reevaluate our foundation and remind ourselves of the work that needs to be done, so today’s blog highlights just why we need a teaching revolution in history. Lets cultivate historical thinkers.
The Reminder:
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. It helps us cultivate historical thinkers.
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.
To wrap up the year, I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of my favorite books read in 2022. These books continue to shape my understanding of history, historiography, methods, and pedagogy. Here are the top 5, in order of when they were read.
One of our partner school teachers recommended this book that I had sadly not read yet. More than anything, this book challenged the way I think about how others think. It reminded me that what we think is not just contextualized into our own experiences, but how we think is too. The methods of our thinking vary based on our own lived experiences, and as we develop curriculum we need to consider these varying modes of thinking. Like millions before me, Friere challenged me deeply.
As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker
I read this immediately after Friere’s book as I was building a unit on Indigenous Environmental Justice for our Ethnic Studies curriculum. At the end of the unit, students are asked how they can promote justice (free graphic organizer!) based on their engagement with this history. Gilio-Whitaker’s work was incredibly scholarly and incredibly readable, a combination that is pretty hard to come by. She challenged the way I saw certain events in history and enlightened me to just how important environmental justice is to American Indians. She demonstrated why land is so much more than a physical asset for indigenous communities, as land is tied to indigenous culture, religion, economics, food, and more. Her holistic history was incredibly eye opening.
Wow. Keckley’s experience as an enslaved, then free, seamstress was riveting. Put simply, there needs to be a movie about her. A seamstress for Jefferson Davis’s wife before the Civil War, she refused to go with them once the war began. Through her own grit, she became Mary Todd Lincoln’s seamstress during Lincoln’s tenure in the White House. She was a confidant for Mrs. Lincoln and was often “in the room” with President Lincoln at critical personal moments. I could not put her book down.
Back on Juneteenth, I dedicated a whole blog post to this book, so I will link to it rather than restate much of what is there. In sum, Gordon-Reed’s book was equal parts memoir, history, and a treatise on historical methodology. This book should be read in undergraduate methodology courses.
This is somewhat of a canonical book in historiography, and yet I hadn’t read it until this year. Bloch was a part of the Annales school of historical methodology in France in the years before WWII. An activist, he stood against the Nazi regime when they took over the area of France he lived in. He was imprisoned by the Nazis and wrote this entire book while imprisoned. The book ends with a “…” because he was executed before he finished and edited the book. Even in its incomplete state, Bloch’s reminders of what it means to “do history” are foundational to what we do at Thinking Nation.
Each of these books were formative in my own historical thinking and I’m excited for students to experience this type of thinking in our curriculum.
This week, I had the opportunity to teach a few classes at one of our partner schools: Rise Kohyang Middle School in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. For three class periods, I was able to work through the history of Ancient Rome. Specifically, the students were working on answering the essential question: How did the idea of citizenship in Ancient Rome change over time?
As a guest teacher, I never really know what I’m walking into. I find this exciting! It gives me the opportunity to let the students lead a little as I pry and figure out what they know and what they know how to do.
We started reading some historical context of Ancient Rome. Right away, the students were making poignant observations. One student noted that “just because the plebeians became citizens did not mean that they became equal to the patricians” pretty early on. I had some fun and ignored raised hands when it was time to give an answer to a text based question and simply said “say it if you know it!” Dozens of students shouted out the answers. The students were engaged, inquisitive, and prepared to participate. I was impressed.
An 1882 painting depicting Rome’s upper class men.
As we began to talk about the document that cemented the last large expansion of citizenship in Ancient Rome, the Edict of Caracalla, some of the students’ brains really began to turn. Emperor Caracalla signed the Edict of Caracalla in 212 C.E. It essentially gave citizenship to all free people living in the Roman Empire. Many scholars point out that this was probably the largest expansion of citizenship to ever take place from a single event in world history. People across the empire, living on three continents, instantly became citizens. Its significance is profound.
The classroom was set up with four rows of desks on each side of the room, all facing the center. As I looked down the center walkway dividing these sections, I noticed one student sitting in the first row, closest to the center but in the back of the room. She was clearly pondering something. Her hand went up.
“You know how a lot of people say that Rome didn’t fall because of invaders from the outside, but that it crumbled from within?” Without waiting for my response, she continued, “Do you think that Rome expanding citizenship to too many people too fast was a reason that it fell from within? That they couldn’t make everyone happy or keep order which led to it crumbling?”
Of course, this was not where my brain was at that moment. I was thinking about the inclusiveness of the act. She was thinking about its unintended consequences. To be sure, I’m no expert on Ancient Rome. I let her know that that is a really interesting and plausible consequence of the edict. We then opened the conversation up to the class. What is the purpose of a government? What happens when it can’t fulfill that purpose? Students began to express their thoughts, compare Rome to the U.S.A today, and most relevant to this unit, really began to grasp just how large the Roman Empire was.
It’s always a privilege when I get to join students in their academic journey. This week was yet another example why. I came in with a specific purpose around a specific question. That particular student was making different connections, based on her own interests. The intersection of those two goals produced a brilliant exchange with a group of Los Angeles middle schoolers. We often are unsure if young students can analyze deep concepts in history. I hope this example reminds us not just that yes they can, but that they want to. We just have to provide them the opportunities.
Hispanic Heritage Month began last week. As we celebrate both Hispanic heritage and Hispanic contributions to United States history, we are going to focus on an area often under explored: Chicana feminism.
The Second Wave of Feminism is largely seen as the feminist movement that began with The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in 1963 and then lasted into the early 1980s. Over a twenty year period, women pushed for equality that went far beyond the right to vote, which is the right that defined the first wave of feminism (1848-1920). Even within the noble aims of this second wave, however, many feminists of color felt a disconnect between the fight of their white counterparts and their lived reality. Thus, Black and Chicana feminists often called out racism within the movement and sometimes banded separately from the “mainstream” movement to fight for rights at the intersection of race and sex.
The disconnect felt by Chicana feminists in particular are illuminated in a provocative poem by Jo Carillo. Carillo was Chicana and Native American and published this poem, entitled “And When You Leave, Take You Pictures With You,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, published in 1981. For today’s blog, we want to publish the poem below, as it gives a good glimpse into a perspective of Chicana Feminism. In our DBQ on the second wave of feminism, students analyze this poem as well.
Our white sisters radical friends love to own pictures of us sitting at a factory machine wielding a machete in our bright bandanas holding brown yellow black red children reading books from literacy campaigns holding machine guns bayonets bombs knives Our white sisters radical friends should think again.
Our white sisters / radical friends love to own pictures of us walking to the fields in the hot sun with straw hat on head if brown bandana if black in bright embroidered shirts holding brown yellow black red children reading books from literacy campaigns smiling. Our white sisters should think again. No one smiles at the beginning of a day spent digging for souvenir chunks of uranium of cleaning up after our white sisters radical friends.
And when our white sisters radical friends see us in the flesh not as a picture they own, they are not quite sure if they like us as much. We’re not as happy as we look on their wall.
In the realm of historical thinking skills, I fear that analyzing historical significance is the most forgotten. We love to talk about causation, continuity and change over time, and contextualization, but historical significance (besides not conveniently beginning with a “c”) receives far less attention. What a shame.
Canada’s Historical Thinking Project, on the other hand, lists it first on its page of historical concepts. We could learn a lot from our friends up north in this respect. The project admits that “Significance depends upon one’s perspective and purpose.” History, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The project’s description elaborates that, “a historical person or event can acquire significance if we, the historians, can link it to larger trends and stories that reveal something important for us today.” Today, though, I want to extend its importance more broadly to Thinking Nation’s mission of cultivating thinking citizens.
On all of our DBQs that focus on historical significance, we include this simple definition for students: “Thinking historically means identifying and exploring the reasons why historical people, places, events, or ideas are worth remembering; that is, their historical significance.” Exploring historical significance challenges students to consider the importance of historical events and people that they may not initially connect with. In essence, it is a tool that leads to historical empathy.
When we try to understand why something is historically significant, we are empathizing. We are trying to better understand past people, places, and events in a way that accurately reflects what happened. This type of understanding–of people not like us– is something our democracy desperately needs.
As we’ve argued before, the past does not need to be familiar to be relevant. Students who try to understand the significance of events can more easily humanize their subjects. This act of empathy is such a beautiful result of historical thinking that we must stress more in our classrooms. We don’t just want to cultivate historical thinkers. We want to cultivate thinking citizens. Citizens who make their neighborhoods, states, and country more understanding, inclusive, and kind. Teaching students to analyze historical significance can do a lot to help us get there.
I remember baseball practice vividly growing up. For a decade of my life, baseball consumed me. I honestly loved every minute of it. Practice began with stretching, playing catch, running the bases, fielding ground and fly balls, and sometimes, batting practice. We practiced skills. What practice didn’t consist of, however, was playing a full game.
Fast forward to my life as a teacher. I regularly watched the soccer, basketball, and football players practice on campus. Just like my own experience, these players rarely played games. They conditioned, practiced specific skills in drills, and learned a little bit of the “why” for certain plays.
In reality, the vast majority of time playing a sport is not game time. It’s practice time. Filled with repetition and focused training, practice is much more time consuming than playing the game itself, but it is absolutely essential if one wants to perform well come game time.
Coaches understand that without constant repetition and concentrated practice in specific skills, players will not be adequately prepared once the referee blows the whistle or the umpire shouts “play ball!” As teachers of historical thinking, we would do well to adopt a similar approach.
From “Team Drills Are Beneficial at Any Age” littleleague.org
As much as we love deep discussions through socratic seminars or long, elaborative essays answering profound historical questions, our students cannot feel successful in these big tasks if they have not internalized the foundational skills of historians. In a sense, we need to bring “the drill” into the classroom. At Thinking Nation, we believe that in order to cultivate thinking citizens, we need to give students constant practice in the skills of historical thinking. A practical way we do this is through our Document Analysis graphic organizers.
For all of our units, we pair primary and secondary sources with our THINKS (free download!) analysis organizer. We also provide various historical thinking skill-specific organizers (Skills like Historical Significance, Causation, Causation, and Continuity and Change over Time). Teachers should try to carve our one day a week for students to do this time of focused analysis on a single document.
We believe that if students have regular practice asking the questions of documents inherent to these organizers, students can internalize those questions as they analyze all texts, whether in or out of our classrooms. The organizers (more free downloads!) act like a drill. Just as the athlete will field 100 ground balls in order to be prepared for the couple that may come during a game, the student will repeatedly ask the same questions of every document in order to be prepared for the rigor of a DBQ or socratic seminar.
Athletes who don’t practice consistently cannot perform well during a game. Likewise, we cannot expect our students to flourish in complex tasks inherent to our domain if we do not give them regular and adequate practice with the skills they need to succeed. As teachers plan out the year ahead, let’s prioritize giving students regular practice with rigorous concepts. This way, our students feel empowered to dive into history deeply, knowing they have the skills to do so.
Summer is quickly coming to an end. Teachers are preparing for the return of a new group of students to enter their classroom. The beginning of the school year is always so exciting because it is filled with so much potential. A full year of new learning, beautiful growth, and deep relationships is about to unfold.
As teachers begin to plan out that first week of school, it’s important to carve out time to simply get to know the students, create a safe atmosphere for learning, and set clear expectations that will make for a successful school year. But it is important to not let those priorities completely replace setting the foundation for the content we teach. Weaving our social emotional goals into our curricular goals is a great way for students to get a clear picture of both the style of our class and the content we teach.
In short, the first week of school is a great time to introduce historical thinking skills! We can do this with fun get-to-know-you activities like having each student bring in their own personal object to guide a discussion about primary sources. We can even have their classmates guess the object’s meaning to the student who brought it in order to facilitate a conversation around the importance of contextualization. Or, if we want students to begin to grapple with the skill of continuity and change over time, maybe we want them to document their own life story, paying close attention to how they have changed over time as well as certain ways that they have remained the same.
In tandem with these types of activities, it will also be helpful for students to have hard copies of these definitions and their thoughts about historical thinking that they can reference throughout the year. Thinking Nation’s “What is…?” worksheets are helpful reference points on what each historical thinking skill is and how it can be used. They are linked to this blog! So, please feel free to download them and use them as you prepare for your school year.
The beginning of every school year is such a great opportunity to set the foundation for the importance of historical thinking in your classroom. We hope these simple graphic organizers can help spur deeper conversation about what each skill means.
It is foundational to our goals as an organization to teach students history in order to cultivate thinking citizens. But, we believe that our approach to history goes much deeper. By rooting our curriculum in a definition of history as the study of the past and not merely the past, we equip students to think critically. But this approach to history also cultivates humble citizens rather than arrogant students.
When teaching history only requires students to remember the past, students are not equipped to think for themselves. The necessary ability to evaluate sources and make evidence-based claims is left uncultivated. Instead, students race to prove that they know whatever information is on the test. But, as we’ve noted before, this only creates walking encyclopedias. If students can recall relevant (or seemingly irrelevant) information but do not have the skills to evaluate that information, they only mirror a google search. Like an encyclopedia, they can provide facts but offer no analysis.
A history curriculum rooted in the teaching of historical thinking, however, offers something better. Students can encounter different types of information and employ their skills of historical thinking in order to make meaning of that information. Rather than seeking to memorize, they seek to understand.
This is empathy. Quite simply, the definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Students who think historically, by nature, practice historical empathy. They seek to understand what is in front of them, whether it be historical events or people. They try to set aside their own biases in order to put themselves in the shoes of those that they study in order to best understand the actions and events that make up the past.
In contrast, students who only remember cannot cultivate those skills. Instead, they become entrenched in whatever narrative they were first presented with. They do not have the skills to ask questions of that narrative, compare it to other narratives, or contextualize it into a larger picture. Within this, pride can seep in as they seek to prove that they know more than someone else. They become arrogant students. When history is only about the retention of facts, whoever can retain more “wins.” History becomes a competition, not a conversation.
To avoid the cultivation of arrogance in our students, then, we must shift the paradigm of history education. We must break away from making knowledge about the past the end goal of our lessons. Rather, we must work to teach our students how to analyze the past, ask questions of the information they encounter, and seek to understand history’s complexities. When we do this, we can cultivate thinking citizens, yes. But, perhaps most importantly, we can cultivate humble and empathetic humans.
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.
