[The readers] fundamental purpose is to understand the text, to grasp what is being said from the point of view of the person writing.

—Richard Paul

In recent blogs I have written about teaching strategies for involving students in inquiry and using primary sources, strategies that I have found engage students and help them “enter into” the content. And while we should be engaging our history students in inquiry by using primary sources, we also have textbooks that we are to use in our classes. Can we use the textbook in thoughtful active ways, ways that help the reader understand the text, or is “read these pages and do the chapter questions” part and parcel of history instruction?

This blog will examine a teaching strategy, and some variations, that I have found make reading text material a more engaging, interactive, and thoughtful learning experience for my students. The strategy is known as GIST.

Generating Interactions between Schemata and Texts is a rather imposing name, but my 7th graders have no difficulty grasping this acronym. I learned this strategy this past summer in a workshop put on by two of my district’s ELL staff, but soon found that it benefitted all of my students. I often use this strategy when using the textbook, and have also adapted it for DVD clips and use with primary sources.

When using GIST your students read a passage in a text, and then discuss the section. During the review they find and note a small number (four or five depending upon the size of the reading) of key concepts or terms that they consider most important to understanding that reading. Finally, using their own words, students write a summary of the reading which uses those key terms. Those terms are underlined or highlighted in their summary.

When first using the strategy, it is important to model it. My students are in groups and so I give each group a paragraph about a topic we are studying. They read through it together, and, when the reading is complete, underline/highlight what they feel are the key terms.

I have the same paragraph written on my Smartboard. We talk it through in class, and use the highlighting function to make note of their key terms (volunteers come up and do the highlighting). Finally we write a summary in class that includes the highlighted terms.

As an example, take these paragraphs from Joy Hakim’s A History of Us: War, Terrible War, 1855-1865. In this section, Ms. Hakim writes about President Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg. She begins with a few words about the main speaker of the occasion, Edward Everett:

He talks for almost two hours, without notes, in a voice deep and rich. Later no one seems to remember what he said, but they knew he said it well. There are prayers and other speeches, and the 15,000 listeners who sit or stand in the afternoon sun are hot and tired when the president finally rises, puts on his steel-rimmed glasses, and reads his few remarks. His is a country voice, and it sounds dull after the polished tones of an orator.

The speech was a failure; so Lincoln tells his friends, and so he believes. But he is wrong. The presidency has changed Lincoln. He has grown in greatness. He had learned to use words as a poet uses them—with great care and precision. He has been an able country lawyer with a good mind and a taste for jokes. Now he is much more than that. The deaths and the burdens of war are making him noble, and thoughtful, and understanding, and sad.

After students have read the passage, individually, in pairs, or small groups, I ask them to go back and choose the key terms and ideas that they feel are most important to understanding the passage. In this passage, for example, they might choose speech, failure, Lincoln, grown, noble.

Their final task is to rewrite the two paragraphs in a few sentences, using their own words, and including many, or perhaps all, of the key terms that they have listed. The key terms must be underlined or highlighted in their paragraph.

For instance, a student might write:

At Gettysburg President Lincoln spoke after Edward Everett, a famous speaker of the time. President Lincoln spoke briefly, and felt his speech was a failure. But he had grown from a small town lawyer to a noble president, and his speech reflected that growth.

Although I only learned the GIST strategy this summer, it has become one of my go-to strategies for reading. Because work in my class is interactive, be it in pairs or small groups, students do at least part of the GIST reading assignment with others.

The basic ideas behind this strategy can be used with primary source readings by having students read the quotation, write the key words, and than summarize in their own words. Finally, it also works well with DVD clips. Set up the section for students to view, and then have them think about the section, decide on key terms, and write their summary.

The next blog will deal with my go-to strategy for using DVD or video clips in the classroom.

Give GIST a try, adapt the strategy, and make it your own.

This is the fourth in a series of film reviews reprinted from the Journal of American History. These reviews model ways of looking critically at popular films, documentaries, miniseries, and other history-based features.

Long awaited by both historians and buffs, the film Gods and Generals is a prequel to the 1993 film Gettysburg. As Gettysburg was based on the historical novel The Killer Angels (1974) by Michael Shaara, so Gods and Generals is based on the 1998 historical novel of that title written by Shaara's son Jeff. The new film's purpose is to sketch highlights of the Civil War in the eastern theater from Virginia's secession through the death of the Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

The need to set the stage for Gettysburg influenced the choice of what to cover in the almost four-hour-long prequel. For example, Gods and Generals covers the battle of Fredericksburg while entirely omitting the much more pivotal battle of Antietam. This omission occurs in part because Fredericksburg was the first combat experience of the key Gettysburg protagonist, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and because it was the event for which the Union repulse of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg was a suitable payback. One suspects that another reason the film skips Antietam is that it led to Abraham Lincoln's issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; coverage of that document might have led viewers to suspect that the war had something to do with slavery. Of this, more anon.

Like the Civil War soldiers it depicts, the film Gods and Generals has its triumphs and its defeats. In some ways it is an improvement over Gettysburg. Robert Duvall's portrayal of Robert E. Lee is infinitely superior to Martin Sheen's glassy-eyed performance in the earlier film. The makeup is better, too, so that the viewer does not see what appear to be beavers clinging to generals' chins, as in Gettysburg. And the artillery pieces actually recoil when fired.

On the other hand, Gods and Generals perpetuates some of its predecessor's weaknesses. Actors still deliver, in spoken form, lines that their characters composed for written communication, making some scenes even more stilted than the 19th century actually was. Other scenes have the feel of that favored entertainment of the mid-Victorians, the tableau vivant—but not very vivant. Sometimes it is like watching an animated wax museum.

The greatest triumph of Gods and Generals lies in Stephen Lang's splendid depiction of Stonewall Jackson. It is difficult to imagine a more authentic and convincing presentation of the renowned general. Eschewing popular mythology that makes Jackson a wild-eyed maniac, Lang presents an understandable character that is, in almost every case, true to what we know about Jackson. This is important to Gods and Generals because Jackson's role looms so large that the film might more accurately have been titled simply Stonewall Jackson.

When they wanted to do so, the makers of Gods and Generals were accurate in both detail and nuance. Unfortunately, the filmmakers preferred to spend much of the nearly four-hour running time of the movie doing a great deal of ax-grinding. The result is the most pro-Confederate film since Birth of a Nation, a veritable celluloid celebration of slavery and treason.

Gods and Generals brings to the big screen the major themes of Lost Cause mythology that professional historians have been working for half a century to combat. In the world of Gods and Generals, slavery has nothing to do with the Confederate cause. Instead, the Confederates are nobly fighting for, rather than against, freedom, as viewers are reminded again and again by one white southern character after another.

In stark contrast, the pro-Union, antislavery view of the war is expressed only once. In one example of this unequal presentation, viewers hear the Confederate defenders of the famous sunken lane at Fredericksburg exclaiming that they are fighting for freedom and independence, but the Union attackers, members of the renowned Irish Brigade, make only trivial comments. Yet historical sources document in the Irishmen's own eloquent words why they, as immigrants, believed they ought to fight for the Union. The filmmakers did not see fit to have any of the actors mouth those lines.
Similarly, the film depicts slaves as generally happy, vaguely desiring freedom at some future date, but faithful and supportive of their beloved masters and the cause of the Confederacy. Slaveholders in the film treat their slaves like family or better, and the slaves reciprocate by doing their best to protect their masters' property from the invading Yankees. The many thousand times more numerous slaves who eagerly sought freedom and aided Union soldiers are invisible in Gods and Generals.

Another aspect of Lost Cause mythology depicted in the film deals with religion. Echoing pro-Confederate claims since the war itself, the movie represents the South as being uniquely and sincerely Christian, while the North has at most a vague spirituality. In fact, both sides had about an equal representation of Christianity. Once again, Gods and Generals presents a skewed depiction of history through judicious omission. While the film—for the most part accurately—presents Stonewall Jackson as a saint in every sense of the word, viewers never learn that Oliver O. Howard, the Union general whose troops Jackson's men so savagely attacked at Chancellorsville, was an even more fervently evangelical soldier.

Jackson's attack at Chancellorsville is the dramatic climax to the film and a neo-Confederate's dream of paradise. As Jackson rides boldly forward flanked by staff officers, the mounted party gallops toward the viewer, larger than life, and the score swells, simultaneously triumphant and otherworldly, a fittingly Wagnerian style of accompaniment for this ride of the Confederate valkyries. Any lingering doubts as to the filmmakers' sympathies promptly vanish.

The final scene at Jackson's deathbed is meant to be sad, and it is indeed very moving. Yet I left the showing quite sad in a different way. Despite the makers' large expenditures and serious efforts toward accuracy in some details, they marred the result by their willingness to perpetuate a distorted view of the Civil War.