Plowing Freedom's Ground

Abstract

The Lee County, Tallapoosa County, Alexander City, and Phoenix City School Districts in eastern Alabama include four schools that had not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress and two that were in Year 2 Delay status at the time of the grant application. Plowing Freedom's Ground will target schools with low student achievement in history and few teachers who have completed advanced course work in U.S. history. Yearly activities will include a week-long summer seminar, a week-long lesson study workshop during which teachers will prepare problem-based historical inquiry lessons, three day-long professional development retreats during the school year, and mentoring and technical support through affiliates of the Persistent Issues in History Network at Auburn and Indiana Universities. Lesson Study teams will visit one another's classrooms during the year to observe and videotape fellow teachers delivering jointly designed lessons. A cohort of 30 teachers will participate in the program each year and will be encouraged to develop themselves as curriculum leaders and mentors in their districts. The thematic focus of Plowing Freedom's Ground will be pivotal events in American history that exemplify the persistent democratic challenge of ensuring fairness and justice for all Americans. The primary instructional strategy to be employed is problem-based historical inquiry learning; Lesson Study workshops will help teachers develop technology-enhanced, problem-based historical inquiry lessons that promote student engagement, historical thinking, and reasoning and democratic citizenship. Each Lesson Study team’s refined lesson plan, support materials, and video products will become part of the Persistent Issues in History Web site.

The (In)Visible Author in History Texts

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A selection from an American History textbook. NHEC
Article Body

Written history, whatever the concern for objectivity, is inevitably shaped by the perspectives of its authors. Consequently, the first move historians often make when approaching a document is to identify its author. Yet in the high school history classroom where the impersonal voice of textbooks is often the norm, students can be unaware of the importance of author. As a result, students can see history as a story to be learned and recited rather than a mosaic to be assembled, rearranged, and interrogated.

In designing this study, Richard J. Paxton of Pacific University hypothesized that the presence of a visible author would change the way students read texts. But, he wondered, would it also influence the way they constructed historical understandings? Would it transfer to other texts and to the act of writing? To find out, he designed an experiment in which he worked with 30 high school sophomores and juniors to explore what effect authorial presence had on a reading to write task.

What Paxton found was that students from the visible author group said more than twice as much about the documents as their counterparts...

Exploring the murder of Julius Caesar, students were divided into two groups. The first group read an authoritative textbook narrative by an anonymous author followed by a set of six documents written from various perspectives. The second group read a text containing similar information but featuring a more visible author; they then read the same set of six documents. Students were then asked to write one-to-two page essays.
What Paxton found was that students from the visible author group said more than twice as much about the documents as their counterparts, they referred to authors more than three times as often, and they were more than twice as likely to attempt to interact with authors. In their own writing, students who read the visible author text also tended to write longer essays, ask more questions, and think more deeply about the historical events in question.

Interacting with texts

Students from the experimental group began with a first-person account rather than an omniscient textbook account. Having thus “primed the pump,” these students displayed greater interaction with documents and reflected a higher degree of interest. While Paxton was not surprised to see students make more interactive comments while reading the first text, he was surprised to find that this extended to the six documents that students read afterwards. Further, in their own writing students displayed higher levels of interaction with texts and authors and wrote longer and more substantive essays.

Awareness of authors

Students from the experimental group also interacted more with the authors of their six documents. Working with the same texts as their counterparts, this group paid more attention to authorship, evaluating style, speculating on author trustworthiness, and reflecting on the various perspectives offered. In their essays students were not only more likely to demonstrate recognition of audience but also displayed higher degrees of personal agency and original thinking.

Asking Questions

Overall, students who first read the visible author text tended to ask more questions than those who began with third-person textbook narratives. As they read subsequent documents they considered the purposes and goals of each text and, recognizing competing narratives, tried to place them within the context of the historical issue as a whole. In their essays the trend continued, with students from the experimental group asking 12 questions to the one asked by their counterparts in the control group.

In the Classroom
  1. Have students read more than the textbook in your classroom. Use many varied texts including primary sources.
  2. Use texts in your classroom with visible authors. Authors can be visible through:
    • clear attributions on documents,
    • use of first person in the text and statements of personal beliefs, and
    • authors’ statements about how they know what they are writing about.
  3. In discussion and on handouts, refer to texts and sources using the author’s name and coach students in how to cite sources similarly. Ask questions that prompt students to have ‘conversations’ with a text’s author.
  4. Teach the skill of sourcing to your students. Explicit lessons will help them understand how knowing the author, date, and genre of a source matters to understanding it.
Sample Application

Paxton found that reading texts with different degrees of author visibility heavily influenced how students read subsequent documents and wrote historical essays.
Students who began with a textbook passage by an anonymous author tended to be intellectually disengaged. For example:

  • Textbook: “The two most successful generals were Pompey (PAHM pee) and Julius Caesar (SEE zuhr). Pompey was popular because he cleared the Mediterranean Sea pirates. He also added Syria, Phoenicia and Palestine to the lands Rome ruled.”
  • Susan: “Well, I’m thinking that it’s kind of boring. I mean, who cares really? I mean, I can’t even read those words.”

The case of the visible author text, however, was quite different:

  • Visible author text: “To those of us looking back at the ancient past, Julius Caesar remains one of the most controversial figures. I, for one, have a hard time deciding if he was a great leader, or a terrible dictator.”
  • Lisa: “Um, I’m thinking that I don’t know much about this guy.”
  • Visible author text cont’d: “Other historians have the same problem. Let’s see what you think.”
  • Lisa: “Well, right now—right now I don’t think much. I guess I’m like consumed. I mean, like who is writing this? Who is this ‘I’? I mean, he asks what I think. Hm. Well I don’t think much yet.”

The students responded differently to the two different kinds of texts. The first, a traditional textbook excerpt, produced passive and mildly negative responses from students. The second, in which the author is much more visible, produced questions and engagement. That engagement, or lack thereof, also extended to other texts:

  • Susan responding to text by Dio Cassius: “I don’t know. So this is like from one of his books.”
  • Susan responding to text by Cicero: “I liked that one the best.”

Now look at how Lisa, who read the visible author text, responded to the same documents:

  • Lisa responding to text by Dio Cassius: “So, I kind of think this writer was for Caesar. I mean, even though he was alive after Caesar. I mean it says he was pro-imperial.”
  • Lisa responding to text by Cicero: “Well, this is a letter to Atticus. So he supported Pompey and later Brutus and Cassius. So he was on their side, well, that’s pretty obvious.”

Reading first-person narratives by visible authors did not transform all students into expert historians. However it did tend to raise student consciousness about the role of the author in history and prompted them to view themselves as active players in the construction of historical narratives.

For more information

Watch our What is Historical Thinking? video for an overview of using multiple sources in the classroom and teaching sourcing. Available on our home page.

Watch sourcing in action to see how a historian considers the author and circumstances of a source’s creation to help her understand the document.

See this lesson plan review for an approach to challenging the authority of anonymous omniscient textbook accounts.

This approach to using textbooks helps students see differences between them and consider how their perspectives can contrast.

Bibliography

R.J. Paxton, “The Influence Of Author Visibility On High School Students Solving A Historical Problem,” Cognition and Instruction, 20, no.2 (2002): 197-248.

Using Primary Sources to Teach Both Story and Skills

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Students closely examing the Declaration of Independence. NHEC
Article Body

History is the story of the past. But because the past comes to us via fragments, that is, surviving documents and accounts, history as a discipline focuses on interpreting what happened and why. Due to time constraints and standardized testing, many teachers focus on teaching students the basic story of the past, sometimes leaving out historical analysis. Many teachers who use primary sources to teach about historical thinking worry that it will take time away from helping students understand what happened. However, one study suggests both activities can—and should—happen at once.

Many teachers who use primary sources to teach about historical thinking worry that it will take time away from helping students understand what happened. However, one study suggests both activities can—and should—happen at once.

In two separate experiments, Charles Perfetti and his colleagues interviewed 30 undergraduate students, trying to understand how history students use texts. Students were given documents about the Panama Canal taken from textbooks, primary sources, and secondary sources, and written from a variety of perspectives. The researchers found that reading primary sources helped the students learn to read, write, and think historically. As a consequence, they gained a better understanding of the past. By reading multiple documents to develop their own opinions about the past, students became more thoughtful consumers of information even as they received a richer, fuller, and more accurate story of what really happened.

The Search for Accuracy

When students are presented with only textbook and/or secondary accounts, they tend to see history as simple and straightforward. They rarely seek out more information, and while capable of identifying author bias, do so only where bias is obvious.

When they encounter primary sources, . . . students become aware of subtle biases depending on when a document was written, where, and by whom.

When they encounter primary sources, on the other hand, students become aware of subtle biases depending on when a document was written, where, and by whom. They often express greater interest in seeing more sources in order to verify their understanding of past events. Students who are given primary sources refer more frequently to evidence, citing the sources of their information. Thus, examining primary sources helps students think more critically about the importance of accuracy, both in the sources and their own interpretations.

The Search for a Fuller Picture

In many cases, students look to the textbook to find out what happened. But when they were given primary sources, the students in this study began to question the textbook accounts, asking questions about issues the textbook had failed to cover. In seeing themselves as historical detectives, students began to piece together various accounts to build a fuller picture of events, using the textbook as a resource and not the ultimate arbiter of truth.

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Lithograph, "The Raven," J. Keppler, 1890, Library of Congress
In the Classroom
  • Begin by having students read the textbook account of a particular event. Aim for a manageable topic like the creation of the Panama Canal, rather than a large and complex event such as the Civil War.
  • After they have read the textbook passage, have students write about (or briefly discuss as a class) whether they believe the textbook account is reliable, or if they need more information.
  • Next, present students with 2-4 primary sources on the topic. They can read these either individually or in groups. Good primary sources can be found at websites like American Memory or The Internet Modern History Sourcebook. Ideally, such sources will add new information about the story, revealing gaps or inconsistencies in the textbook account (check out how Historical Thinking Matters handles the Spanish American War, the Scopes Trial, Social Security, and Rosa Parks).
  • After your students have reviewed their primary sources, ask them to reconsider the reliability of the textbook account. What has changed? What questions do they have that they didn’t have before? Are there disagreements among the texts? What could account for those? What additional information would students like to see?
  • At the end of the unit, discuss what the students have learned. It is likely that they will emerge with more historical thinking skills, as well as a better understanding of the past.
Sample Application

The authors of this study exposed students to different types of sources—primary, secondary, and textbook—and asked them four questions about each text which required some historical interpretation:

  • Did the author present a neutral coverage of the events? If not, what do you think the author’s attitude was?
  • Did you notice inconsistencies among texts?
  • Were events perceived similarly by the different groups involved?
  • What else would you like to know?

Through such questions, the researchers prompted students to consider author bias, inconsistencies across texts, narrative incompleteness, and presence of conflicting views.

Such an activity is helpful for history students of all ages. They can learn to identify bias, resolve contradictions, recognize the limitations of certain documents, and grasp the meaning of multiple perspectives.

Bibliography

Charles A. Perfetti, M. Anne Britt, Jean-Francois Rouet, Mara C. Georgi, and Robert A. Mason, “How Students Use Texts to Learn and Reason about Historical Uncertainty,” in Mario Carretero and James F. Voss, eds. Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), pp. 257-283.

Learning to Think Historically: A Classic Study

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Students exploring the Declaration of Independence. NHEC
Article Body

The School's Council History Project (SCHP) was the largest innovation in history teaching in an English-speaking country and arguably the most successful. But few in this country have ever heard of it.

Founded at Great Britain's University of Leeds in 1973, SCHP grew by 1984 to embrace a quarter of all British high schools. By the time the project ended in 1988, SCHP had left an indelible mark on how history was taught in the United Kingdom.

Rote Learning vs. Historical Thinking

Project founders believed that traditional instruction might leave students with bodies of information, but little idea how to evaluate it. Students could commit to memory an agreed-upon narrative but they lacked a way of deciding whether it—or any other narrative—was compelling or true. The project's evaluator likened students from traditional history classes to those in a drama class, who could talk "sensibly about the separate scenes and characters of King Lear, but do not know what a play is."*

What is History?

The three-year curriculum began in the eighth grade with a course called "What is History?" This course introduced students to the idea of evidence, an important first step since many students had no idea that evidence played any role in understanding history. Other units exposed students to how historians reason about evidence, the role of primary sources in reaching historical conclusions, and how historical understanding depends on inference and imagination.

The curriculum favored depth over breath, engaging students in research projects and thrusting them into focused inquiries, on such topics as Elizabethan England, Britain in the years 1815–1851, the American West, and the Arab-lsraeli conflict. The curriculum included other topics because they helped students to see that their current conceptions were often poor guides to understanding the past. For example, studying the history of medicine over a long time span challenged students' ideas about causation and change and continuity.

Thinking Historically

The project evaluation showed that with well-planned curriculum and teachers who enacted the SCHP philosophy, adolescents could learn to reason about history in sophisticated ways. This finding contrasted sharply with overzealous Piagetian ideas that historical reasoning was beyond the ken of middle and high school students.

Getting Better at History

A lasting contribution of SCHP was its model of how adolescents "get better at history." In other words, what does it mean to make progress in historical understanding or become more sophisticated as a historical thinker? In his evaluation report, Denis Shemilt provided a rough model of how adolescents progress in historical reasoning:

  • At Level I, adolescents view history as random events, with no inner logic other than their arrangement in chronological sequence.
  • At Level II they view history with "an austere, Calvinistic logic," equating historical understanding with putting pieces of a puzzle into a preexisting form. They view history as an inevitable progression of events.
  • At Level III, adolescents have a budding awareness of the difference between historical narratives and "the past"—and they begin to understand that narratives, based on selected pieces of surviving evidence, never fully capture the complexity of what occurred in a different time.
  • At Level IV, adolescents start to see problems with a search for timeless explanatory principles and come to understand historical explanation as specific and rooted in particular epochs and contexts.
Assessment

SCHP also left behind an approach to assessment that differs from the multiple-choice tests familiar in this country. In SCHP examinations, students reviewed short, carefully selected documents (including photos and charts) and had to respond in a few short sentences. These assessments allowed Project leaders to not only track student progress but also to detect common student misconceptions that could be addressed in future instruction.

In the Classroom
  • Recognize that many of your students will come to your classroom with beliefs about history that may prevent them from learning what you want to teach them.

    • Work to uncover students' preexisting beliefs.

  • Start the school year with a "what is history" exercise. For example, bring in two different textbook accounts of the same event or contrast a new textbook's account with an older one.

    • Students will need practice with this type of exercise to overcome their initial confusion and gradually become more adept at dealing with multiple accounts.

  • Help students understand the connections between analyzing historical accounts and figuring out which of two modern newspaper accounts to believe.

    • Present students with short sources (such as those listed in the Sample Application) and help them see the relationship between what is said and who says it.

Sample Application

Study the sources below:

Source A: The (buffalo hunters) have done more in the last two years . . . to settle the Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. . . Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, the forerunner of an advanced civilization. —General Philip Sheridan, U.S. Army, c. 1882.

Source B: That buffalo slaughter was a dirty business. . . All this slaughter was a put up job on the part of the government to control Indians by getting rid of their food supply. But just the same it was a low down dirty business. —Teddy Blue Abbot, a cowboy in the 1880s

How do the attitudes of Sheridan (Source A) and Abbot (Source B) differ?

Sample Student Responses:

  • According to the grading manual, sub-par answers were superficial, e.g.,

    • "Sheridan wanted killing/Abbot didn't."

  • An adequate answer compared "attitudes which can be reasonably inferred from sources, in their historical setting," e.g.,

    • "Sheridan says that killing the buffalo will get rid of the Indians, and he wants to do it because the army could not solve the Indian question. Abbot kills the buffalo but doesn't want to. He is not happy doing it. He does it for the government."

  • Advanced answers looked "beyond the immediate issue of killing buffalo," and took into consideration the probable interests of the two different authors, e.g.,

    • "Abbot is a cowboy and therefore presumably approves of cattle ranching … (as does Sheridan), but, unlike Sheridan, is sympathetic toward the Indian, and disapproves of the government policy of cutting off their food supply."

* From the 1982 Written Examination, "Schools Council Project: History 13–16," administered by the Southern Regional Examination Board, October 1982 (with slight modifications).

For more information

Denis J. Shemilt, "The Devil's Locomotive," History and Theory 22 (1983).

L. W. Rosenzweig and T. P. Weinland, "New Directions of the History Curriculum: A Challenge for the 1980s," The History Teacher 19 (1986): 263-77.

Bibliography

Denis J. Shemilt, History 13-16: Evaluation Study (Edinburgh, 1980).

SCIM-C: Historical Source Analysis

Article Body

In this short video, created by the Historical Inquiry project at Virginia Tech, Education Professor David Hicks describes the five steps of SCIM-C, a model for analyzing historical sources and placing them within a historical narrative. The steps ask students to:

  • Summarize
  • Contextualize
  • Infer
  • Monitor, and
  • Corroborate

For a more detailed explanation of the SCIM-C method, check out this section of Historical Inquiry: Scaffolding Wise Practices in the History Classroom.

Website
SCIM-C: Historical Source Analysis Video

Making Sense of Advertisements

Article Body

Advertisements are all around us today and have been for a long time; advertising-free "good old days" just don't exist. This guide offers an overview of advertisements as historical sources and how historians use them; a brief history of advertising; questions to ask when interpreting ads as historical evidence; an annotated bibliography; and a guide to finding advertisements online.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/ads/

Making Sense of Letters and Diaries

Article Body

In an attic or an online archive, coming across personal correspondence and diaries can open a tantalizing window into past lives. This guide offers an overview of letters and diaries as historical sources and how historians use them; tips on what questions to ask when reading these personal texts; an annotated bibliography; and a guide to finding and using letters and diaries online.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/

Making Sense of Numbers

Article Body

Does the very thought of quantitative analysis make you shake in your shoes? "Making Sense of Numbers" provides a place for students and teachers to begin working with quantitative historical data as a way of understanding the past. Written by Gary J. Kornblith, this guide offers an overview of quantitative methods, how historians use historical data, and step-by-step instructions using actual historical data to determine totals, rates, averages, standard deviations, and coefficients of correlation.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/numbers/

Modeling Historical Thinking

Video Overview

Professors John Bieter and Kathleen Budge believe that successful TAH grant projects focus on thinking skills as well as content. By having historians model the historical thinking process for them and using tools created by Professor Robert Bain, educators in Bieter and Budge's project learned to approach history in creative, problem-solving ways.

Video Clip Name
LL_Kathleen1.mov
LL_Kathleen2.mov
LL_Kathleen3.mov
LL_Kathleen4.mov
Video Clip Title
Opening Up Historical Thinking
A Tool for Evaluation
Inside the Historian's Study
An Enduring Commitment
Video Clip Duration
3:36
2:47
2:54
2:26
Transcript Text

John Bieter: So many of the grants, I think, separate content and pedagogy. So they do summer intensives that are loaded up with wonderful scholars that come in and do wonderful work, but if I'm a classroom teacher, 5th grade, 9th grade, or 11th grade, and I've got 20 minutes to cover this topic—four days is going to enrich me tremendously, but can I really distill that down to something my students could use? And can I—I would argue, most importantly, develop a set of skills that are going to be retained as long or, we hope, even longer than the information, that may or may not be relatively fleeting?

So what we really try to do consciously, and I think the biggest—Kathleen and I sat down after year one and said we really need to retool—is to develop content and pedagogy alongside of each other and to integrate that in everything that you do. So with all your partners, insist that they do that. With your scholars, get them to practice exactly this model that we've been trying to do.

Kathleen Budge: So one of the things that I think I have an advantage and a disadvantage. I'm not a historian, I'm not a history teacher, I'm an educator, actually an elementary teacher, before I went to higher ed. And so I have learned a tremendous amount in terms of what John and the other grant writers have been trying to get teachers to do that's different than just knowing content. And so the whole title, "Making the Invisible Visible," historians, obviously we all think in our head and it isn't a visible thing, and so one of the things we've tried to do in the grant is really focus in on helping teachers and kids literally see the thinking of historians.

And so when John says we ask the scholars to do this, too, when the scholars come who are experts in some period of history, we're also asking them to open their thinking to the teachers so they can see, when you look at a source, what are you, what are the questions. In reading, in the literacy field, it's called a think-aloud.

John Bieter: So there are three big things that we continue to talk about—the work of historians and the work of teachers. And we say that historians frame problems and they use evidence to generate accounts, so that's our simplified way, and in each one of those we take and we focus on one of those per year of our TAH grant. So framing a problem is critical. Knowledge gets created out of questions that arise, so if you don't have a good question or you don't have a good problem, you're not going to be interested in the class that I'm teaching. So it's critical that the problem be framed well and drive the instruction because than evidence can get gathered and accounts can get created.

On the teacher side of that, we're trying to say that instruction is critical to this whole process, that the way that the teachers generate assignments is formative to that, and then the third component of the rubrics is we're trying to say what happens with student work because ultimately it's got to end there. So our rubric tests those three dimensions that parallel for us framing problems, using evidence, and generating accounts, but what we realize is that there's really a dearth of well-generated tools to get at what we thought was really the essential part of it, which is the historical thinking skills.

Kathleen Budge: We would not have thought of creating what we created, nor the purposes for which we think, now, it's going to be able to be used. Originally the design was we knew we needed to measure historical thinking in teachers and in kids because it was part of the grant that we wrote, and so we knew we either had to find a tool or develop a tool to do that, to evaluate the entire project. And as it turns out it's written in such a way that we believe that it will have much more valuable, in my opinion, formative uses with teachers—because even as we showed it to them and got feedback and explained that this is really to evaluate the effectiveness of our grant project, what we found is organically, teachers starting to work together, to talk about, well, if I really am going to create a lesson plan or a unit, and this is the rubric for it, this is a three, this is a two, this is a one, what does that really look like?

And so they're starting to dig in deeper together, which was part of what we hoped to do, is that they would be a community of professionals that would work together. And the rubric's been a bit of a prompt to help them do that, even though it was designed for a different purpose. So now we see it as having these two purposes—the summative purpose and a formative purpose—that we hope, we think, has the potential to guide instruction.

John Bieter: There's an assumption that if I just pour enough information in at the top, it will funnel its way down into the classroom and this will work, and we're just not convinced that that is going to work and nor were we absolutely convinced that after year one it was working. And so what we really realized was that this rubric forces us to really recalibrate, redesign, the whole thing. You just simply can't, if you have to address these things, you can't think that way anymore.

And so it reorients, it reframes, the way we do our seminars ourselves, the way we do the coming year, and it forces us to redo it because we have to answer it and as professors, we can fall into that trap as much as anybody else. And it gives us a common way to move away from that tendency, and, I think, in many ways, that ease of just dealing on the content side. It's not to minimize content at all, but it's instead to say that content has far greater meaning when it's matched up with a set of skills that you're developing. The content sticks so much better if it's actually attached to a real problem that you're trying to solve.

John Bieter: So there's a show on television called Inside the Actor's Studio, if you're familiar with that [unintelligible], where professionals come and they interview them, and what they're really trying to do is get that professional to externalize the process that they just intuited. So, along with Bob Bain, we do a variation of it called "Inside the Historian's Study," and so it gives teachers a chance to ask questions, to ask how do you work, how do you do this? So that they hear teachers—they hear professors, rather, scholars in the field, say that this is how I go about it. And most of them have done it so many times, so it's just second nature to them. For them to externalize that process and really verbalize it so that teachers can be clear about it. Teachers sometimes, again, after teaching for so many years, they may kind of intuitively do it, but if they can make it even more clear for themselves and for their students, it seems to raise the whole level of what happens.

Part of our grant was to connect the local situation, local events, with the national narrative, and try to realize that place really matters, and that if students can connect those things, it's a lot richer environment for them. We're going to go down to the Basque Museum, the cultural center, Boise has a pretty sizable Basque community, an ethnic group in Spain and France that runs along the border there. And so we think that we're more sensitive to saying, okay, where could it fit, where does it fit in the curriculum, what's the problem that we're dealing with, and then, what's the sources that we could tag that could more accurately help them work with this problem—rather, with their students in their classroom at the 5th, 9th, and 11th.

So in that way, it feels like it's much more bottom up, it's much more consistent with this process that we've been talking about, and it's less just hoping that if you pour enough information in somehow it's going to stick, a couple topics that might help teachers out. We feel like it's just a much more natural way in the sense that that's really how historians work and ultimately we think that's how students learn, or learn more effectively, anyway.

Kathleen Budge: What we have found, in another lesson learned, is that it is very difficult for teachers to think of curriculum in terms of problems and problems spaces, or essential questions and enduring understandings—that's kind of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins's verbiage for it. That's kind of, that is, one marker of a higher quality of intellectual engagement that we would hope to see in instruction, in lesson planning, and finally, in student work, so when kids are engaged in problems and thinking about enduring understandings, that's a higher level of intellectual quality, and that's what we're looking for.

John Bieter: So I think the toughest thing is how you view yourself and some still view themselves as imparters of knowledge and not developers of a process, or at least along a—both of those things. So that the challenging thing is that this framework, this rubric, may immediately call into question how I view myself as a teacher. And so whenever identity gets threatened, you know you have a roadblock. There's some that just immediately take to it, and it gives language to what they know that they should be doing—or feel like they have been doing, many of them. There's some that are in the middle, and there's others are really hesitant to do it. I mean, we're really muddling our way through this, so if we seem quite polished, than we're clearly not, we're just working this the same way as I think any other group would.

Our teachers made a three-year commitment to the program, so you've got teachers who were pretty committed, if they're willing to give three years anyway. And the other thing is that, for substantive change to really occur, it takes that kind of time—because what we're seeing now is that at the end of this second year, it's beginning to permeate. And the ones that were already there are even more there and the ones, that critical middle group that you want to get on really—to make, to feel like the grant turn. Both of us at the end of this summer looked at each other and said, this second set of summer sessions, said, I think we turned a corner here, I think we got a critical mass believing what we're doing really makes sense. But this is two years of doing it.

Kathleen Budge: You have them long enough you develop trust. You make it safe for them to share, you give them lots of choice where they can volunteer and they can emerge as leaders, they can support each other. And I think we're seeing it, this is a really fine—one of the best parts of being involved in this TAH group is the teachers themselves, this is a fine group of teachers. They were strong teachers when they came in to begin with. But I think that we made some good decisions to have the same group over a course of years and to try to be as purposeful as we can about developing a safe environment where they can learn from each other.

Making Difficult Connections

Video Overview

TAH grants, James Liou argues, support the teaching of the broad scope of American history, instead of subdividing U.S. history into narrower and narrower specialized narratives in an effort to appeal to students.

Video Clip Name
LL_Liou.mov
Video Clip Title
The Range of the American Story
Video Clip Duration
1:47
Transcript Text

I don't think a lot of kids necessarily have a natural connection to say, "Oh, this is how this relates to what happened when people were marching on the Liberty Tree after the Boston Massacre." But, I mean I think if you really—I think that's our job as educators, is to really create structured opportunities and lay out materials in a way so that those connections are a little bit easier to make. I try to be really deliberate in terms of the case studies that I've chosen.

And, you know, there's space now for variety, two of my friends and colleagues are currently teaching the class and I keep in touch with them. And I think that so often sometimes, especially in history education, that you tend to go a little bit too extreme and say, "Alright, 'minority' kids, let's look at 'minority' history because that's obviously what's important to you." And I think kids lose out.

And I think that's one thing the Teaching American History grant gets right: let's look at traditional American history because that's our history and that’s our story. And we have to really create opportunities for them to identify within it and to say they are products of it and also they are the promise of it.

So in the case studies I looked at I didn't want to just choose instances of—you know these are really strong young men and women in urban areas who look like you who did this. I want to make sure there's some of that, but I wanted to choose early 19th-century 13-year-old girls from Lowell, I wanted to look at community activists of different races, in different geographic areas, with different interests. I think in the end they have an identity as young people, and they have a voice that's necessary and important and it's worthy of being developed. And I think those are the connections I really try hard to make for them.

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