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Reviving Clio: Inspired History Teaching and Learning (Without High-Stakes Tests) By Alan Stoskopf History teachers need the time to rearrange the classroom, spread documents out on the floor, understand a common problem through an artifact, and listen to competing interpretations from others, Mr. Stoskopf points out. When these moments occur, they are magical, and we need more of them. Illustration by Mario Noche |
History should not only remove prejudice, it should breed enthusiasm.
To many it is an important source of the ideas that inspire their lives.-- George Trevelyan, 1913
A lot of people limped through history classes and grew up hating history because there was no passion in it for them. Excitement in history leads to wanting to know something in greater depth. So for me as a teacher, I want to inspire some of that passion in my kids to probe deeper in thinking about their connection to the past.
-- Seventh-grade teacher, 2000
TWO VOICES separated by nearly a century. The first, an English historian, argues for inspired history writing in the name of Clio, the ancient muse of the discipline. The second, a master teacher in an urban school, discusses what makes history come alive for her students. These voices speak both to the canon of history and to best practice in today's classrooms. It is a tragedy for history in particular and for public schooling in general that these voices have been cast aside by a standards movement that insists on measuring excellence through scores on high-stakes tests.
The solution to this problem is not just to halt the unprecedented orgy of testing in our schools. Those of us who are outraged at seeing our schools transformed into test centers are obligated to offer another way. We need to identify the qualities that characterize inspired teaching and learning for all students. We need to explain how high-stakes testing undermines these qualities. And, most important, we need to argue that there are much better alternatives for assessing student learning and high-quality teaching.
In this article, I address these issues through the example of history teaching in K-12 education. I refer to benchmarks in the history of the discipline as well as to research in the field of history instruction and motivational learning theory. But above all, I rely on interviews with classroom teachers.1 Listening to these teachers talk about their craft provides us with valuable clues about what constitutes meaningful reform.
The craft these teachers talk about is built on elements of historical thinking that date back to ancient Greece. In the fifth century BCE, Thucydides first articulated guidelines for historical inquiry. He called for the careful evaluation of evidence and of witnesses in the search for truth in history.2 From today's perspective, Thucydides' work might have fallen short of his own standard, but he established the notion that history was not myth making but a method of intellectual inquiry.
We see the most thorough articulation of this method in the work of Leopold von Ranke. Through his use of the "seminar method" in the early 19th century, von Ranke elevated history to the status of a separate academic discipline. Von Ranke gathered students around a table to examine primary source documents in an attempt to understand a past age on its own terms. Students would question and reexamine what they read. Interpretation of a historical moment would be offered only after much investigation and after many viewpoints had been solicited.3
The historical thinking skills employed in von Ranke's seminars have been refined over the years to include the following qualities:
As we begin the 21st century, we have also seen a broadening of the scope and a widening of the audience in the teaching and learning of history. Once the province of white, gentleman scholars, the discipline has now been expanded to include diverse voices. With greater ethnic, class, and gender equality, the field of history has gone through a wonderful, if at times contentious, expansion. New perspectives have forced a rethinking of the dominant assumptions of how history is written and for whom. The triumphalist narrative that characterized the political history of great men in the early 20th century has given way to many narratives and expanded into such fields as social, economic, and cultural histories.
What does all of this mean for the way history is taught in our schools today? Are these historical thinking skills simply the stuff of graduate seminars? Shouldn't we just concentrate first on covering the "basic facts of history" before we get into such sophisticated thinking? Talking with some of the best history teachers at elementary, middle, and secondary levels suggests that students can and want to engage in the practice of historical thinking. It does not happen by itself, but it can occur. It takes inspired and thoughtful educators to make history both accessible and rigorous for diverse student populations.
Inspired history teaching and learning happened in the fourth-grade classroom of an independent school in New York City. The teacher had grown tired of doing American history in the same way. She did not want to cover more material; rather, she wanted to slow down and capture the students' interest and reinvigorate her own passion. The opportunity to try another way came with a unit on the Pilgrims. A theme in her social studies class for the year was immigration. She used that theme to frame a case study. This meant using primary and secondary sources, visiting Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, and using the Web to enhance student learning.
She needed time to make these changes in her teaching. She also needed scaffolding techniques to get her students to begin thinking about history in unaccustomed ways. First, she had them talking and writing about themselves as travelers between different places in their daily lives. They moved on to do oral histories of older relatives and family friends. Eventually, she had them think about a more remote past, a past where they were not able to interview eyewitnesses.
Enter the Pilgrims. The students discussed their own conceptions of who they thought the Pilgrims were. They came up with many of the usual images that have become standard fare in popular culture. The real historical investigation began with students working in study groups, examining actual people from the past. With help from the Plimoth Plantation Museum and by accessing relevant websites, the teacher was able to provide her students with letters, diaries, wills, and ships' inventories. The students researched individual people and created composite characters out of the source material.
The students came alive with the assignment. They felt a human connection to the people they were investigating. The lives of the Pilgrims of the 17th century were very different from their own lives, yet these were still people who had hopes and fears. This recognition fed the students' appetite to know more. Normally, such investigations using primary sources are reserved for older students. But this teacher demonstrated that this approach could begin earlier and lead to greater learning by students. The teacher wrote:
The critical issue is selection of the appropriate sources -- they must engage the students without being too difficult. A wide range of resources can be used that go beyond the traditional documents used with older students. Letters and diaries, oral history transcripts, political pamphlets, and cartoons can all be introduced to young students as historical evidence to be analyzed. These sources can stimulate students' interest and help them formulate questions for further research.4
The students initially had some trouble with the historical context and the archaic language of the documents. But their teacher was there to guide them and help them think about what they were reading, check other sources, and ponder the differences between these past lives and their own. While it was not a von Ranke seminar or a graduate course in historiography, the project was much better than a brief excursion through the textbook and then on to the next topic. Most important, the students wanted to do more history. They wanted to learn.
To do this kind of work, teachers need resources, time, and professional development. This teacher had a school environment that allowed her to be creative. She also had a small class. And, as she told me when I interviewed her:
Teachers have to have the passion themselves. They also have to be knowledgeable. They have to have some historical foundation. They need experiences with this sort of thing. If teachers have the opportunity to work with other colleagues and be immersed in this approach, they then have the idea they can do it with kids. Finally, teachers need to be more trusting of kids.5
Trusting students and having a passion for doing history well were not exclusive to one independent school in Manhattan. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a seventh-grade public school teacher did her own unit on immigration. Her students came from a mix of class, ethnic, and achievement backgrounds. In this unit, the class focused on Irish immigration to Boston in the mid-19th century. As in the Pilgrim unit, the students "got to know" the lives of the people they were studying.
They did this by using the passenger lists of four ships that left Dublin in 1850. This information was recorded in a database created by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.6 The students examined the lists to find out who actually came over on the ships. Based on what they found, they formed historical hypotheses about who was leaving Ireland. They then compared their initial hypotheses with other accounts of the demographics of Irish immigration.
The students developed a strong personal interest in the subject matter when they got to "adopt a family." They chose one of the members of the family on the passenger list and "retold" the immigrants' stories. The students explained the reasons why their characters left Ireland, what their journeys to America were like, and what they experienced when they got to Boston. The narratives were presented in the form of diaries. The students needed to use their imagination to create the stories, but they also had to be conscious of historical accuracy. They read primary and secondary accounts of the potato famine, learned about the "coffin ships" that transported Irish immigrants across the Atlantic, and read records of housing and employment in Boston.
The students were asked to make decisions about how their families could realistically survive in the new land. Their choices of ways to earn a livelihood had to be drawn from the actual accounts they were reading. In the database, they could examine such information as average wage levels for different jobs, the types and cost of food sold in local markets, and the housing available to immigrants. Sometimes, the students would have to read information four or five times to understand it. The teacher was there to help, but the students were motivated to learn more throughout the project. They were doing hard work, but it was interesting work.
The students' journals revealed how much they understood. These diaries became powerful assessment tools for the students and teachers. The teacher explained:
We conduct review panels at the end of the eighth grade in our school. Students present their work to a panel of adults. They invariably bring their diaries with them and talk about how they came to understand this period of history in a different way.
They also learned how to write historical fiction. They had to create something that they knew was going to be read by other people. The standard was high. You did not want to have sloppy writing and spelling mistakes. You also knew you were being judged on being historically accurate and yet also being creative, which I think is key for middle school kids.7
It took a while before the students had polished diaries. Along the way, they had to change things (eliminating references to using light bulbs in 1850) and respond to the teacher's questions (How could an immigrant get a job as a teacher if he or she could not write?). They also developed good study habits (learning to seek out supporting evidence for their characters' actions).
No, the students did not become historians after this eight-week unit. But they did develop self-confidence in their ability to stay with something that did not come to them automatically. They learned "facts" about history, but they did not rush through the curriculum simply to cover more and more. They learned how to think in a different and deeper way, and they were better able to remember the details of the period because the information was embedded in a meaningful context.
The teacher could do this unit because she was allowed to make time in the curriculum for such a long project. She had a part-time student teacher and an adult volunteer in the room, which allowed for more individual contact with students. She also had access to a rich resource in the Project Zero curriculum material. Finally, she was able to share ideas about how the unit was going with the two adults in the room as well as with a colleague on her humanities team.
THESE two examples translate many of the qualities that are hallmarks of the discipline into real-world teaching situations. There is a growing body of research into history instruction that suggests this approach is doable and needed. A research study funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) contends that a higher standard in history teaching "goes beyond storytelling to include, as part of the analysis of the story, some implicit knowledge of the 'methods' of history."8 As the authors of this and other studies have pointed out, limitations of time, resources, and tests "often emphasize learning the story to the exclusion of introducing the student to the complexity of historical analysis. The interplay of [various] social forces, for example, is likely to be sacrificed in the classroom for a simple story about dates and names."9
If students are to go deeper and become wiser about the hows and whys of history, they need the guidance of a teacher who is also trained to do this kind of work. It is not a natural act,10 but it is, as one writer states, possible to "transform a class of novices into a community with shared, disciplinary expertise."11 This happens best when the teacher takes on the role of coach and director, not just giver of dates, places, and names. Achieving a high standard in the learning of history does not ignore basic information about time and place, but it goes well beyond those basics. Gaea Leinhardt of the University of Pittsburgh puts it this way:
History is a discipline that is framed by chronology and geography, but it is not constrained or limited by them. It is not a collection of reminiscences or anecdotal chit-chat any more than it is a list of vacuous dates. Thinking in history means being literate within these frames and being capable of analysis, synthesis, and case building. To achieve these goals, students need to have both opportunities to reason in history and guidance from history teachers who are able to think flexibly, dynamically, and powerfully within their discipline.12
The two teachers I've quoted above and the others whom I interviewed did not claim that they had moved all their students to higher-order thinking. Yet they did attempt to do the very things many researchers in the field believe are necessary for such movement to occur. They also did another thing. The teachers enabled their students to make their own personal connections to the lives of the people they were studying. Even if the people they studied lived in the distant past, the students wanted to know more about them and wanted to think about the implications for their world today of choices made by people in the past.
In the language of motivation theory, the students were "intrinsically motivated" to do their investigations. Numerous studies on achievement motivation in learning have underscored the value of student interest in subject matter if successful learning is to reach a higher level.13 In a report partly supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), researchers found that, when students were pressured to perform well in a controlling environment -- as in responding to an externally based, high-stakes test -- many experienced a lowering of self-esteem and a disengagement from the learning process.14 Moreover, getting a high score was no indication of deep, substantive learning. On the other hand, when students were motivated because the task at hand was interesting and the teacher allowed them to be investigative and creative, the learning was deeper and lasted longer.15
The implications of these findings for education are profound. The authors of the NIMH-sponsored study conclude that the "top-down" push for higher standards may actually produce a lower quality of education, "precisely because its tactics constrict the means by which teachers most successfully inspire students' engagement in learning and commitment to achieve."16 These words ring true for teachers in all subjects and at all grade levels. They seem particularly relevant to history teachers, who have said again and again that engagement and connection with the past are important first steps for their students if they are to develop historical thinking abilities.
One teacher in a Los Angeles high school commented that, for her working-class and limited-English-speaking students to get motivated to learn history well, they needed to feel that something in the past spoke to them.17 She talked about how her unit on the Great Depression had that very effect. The students could relate to the struggles for survival of ordinary people. The stories from the past resonated with episodes in the lives of students' family members, especially students whose parents had worked in sweatshops. Many of these students did not see themselves as success stories in American schools, but the teacher piqued their interest because they were reading about others who had struggled against hardships.
The efforts of this teacher cannot be dismissed as simply doing "identity politics" in history. She used real stories from the American past to interest students who had felt left out of American history and American education. Her ability to use history to connect to students' personal identities equipped them to take the next steps toward deeper investigation. The students looked at artifacts, read diaries, and examined old newspaper clippings. They wrestled with the material at times, but they also were intrigued.
In addition, the teacher attended training in the latest literacy techniques at local universities. She creatively combined language decoding skills with historical thinking skills, enabling her students to examine sources critically. If she had stuck to a single textbook and moved through the standard chapters, the students would surely have turned off their minds and fallen into the "history is boring" refrain.
The teacher used a variety of assessment techniques, including peer evaluations of group work and self-evaluations of the students' own writing. They discussed the criteria for evaluations together. As a result, the students felt that they had a better understanding of what they were doing well and what they needed to improve.
But another kind of assessment usurped this teacher's work. The entire school had to prepare for and take the state Stanford Achievement Test (SAT 9). The teacher saw a visible and negative impact on many students' self-esteem and motivation to learn. Preparation for and administration of the tests interrupted the bond she had developed with her students. Now time was being taken out of the class to take tests disconnected from the students' actual learning. The tradeoff between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation was no longer abstract theory; it was being played out with her students. Her anger was palpable when she said:
These people who are making these tests, I would like to know how long they have been in the classroom or how long they have been away from kids. And the people making all these decisions about education, I don't think they know what goes on in a classroom and the issues the students deal with. Not all kids deal with the same issues, yet they are all being evaluated the same way. That is inherently unfair.18
Clearly, her students had achieved some real breakthroughs in their learning. She found it hard to reconcile this reality with the single-number scores that told her students that they were below the statewide norm. Something was wrong with this picture.
And it is a picture that is becoming more familiar across the nation. Standards tied to high-stakes tests in history and social studies err on the side of too much information as they evaluate limited domains of knowledge in an anxiety-filled atmosphere. The Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory estimated that it would take 6,000 extra hours of classroom time to cover all the information required on most state standards, roughly the same amount of time needed to earn a master's degree.19 History is especially prey to the seductions of more information. For example, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam in history/social science is tied to a framework that insists teachers cover 51 world history topics and 258 subtopics during the ninth and 10th grades.20
THE EFFECTS of this limited approach to history teaching and learning are distressing and predictable. One Houston middle school teacher said that her district expects history teachers to cover "Texas history starting with the beginning of 'man' to the space missions. Unfortunately, with the pacing of all that information, we spend very little time on any one topic. It is frustrating because I often feel my students are just getting surface knowledge and there is no time to go into anything in depth."21 A high school history teacher on Long Island sees the newly constructed Regents Examinations as "using a script that encourages many teachers to just run through to get ready for the test. It stifles teacher creativity and student interest. I never could have done my end-of-the-year history project if I had to be focused on boosting scores."22
Loss of curriculum control, narrowing of instructional focus, acquisition of surface knowledge rather than in-depth reflection, and lowered student self-esteem are the signs that something has gone very wrong in the standards movement. There is also another aspect of this phenomenon that is undermining the teaching and learning of history. The pleas for more "basic facts" and "core knowledge" in history, especially in American history, have come to mean that students are subjected to disembodied lists of facts that are forgotten in short order. How important is it to try to create students who do well on such questions as "Which President signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff into law?"
But the standards movement is taking us in this direction with history education. And at the same time it is ushering in a new form of triumphalist history: things happen because some omnipotent force is guiding our nation to greatness. Covering so much does not allow time for students to acquire a nuanced view of the contingency of historical moments or the complexity of choices in history. It is certainly important to know when the U.S. Constitution was created and who the central political figures in the Civil War were. But it is even more important for students to receive guidance in how to understand why the compromises were made at the Constitutional Convention or what slavery did to undermine the economic and moral fabric of the U.S.
Contrary to some popular opinion, the traditional canon of history is not built on the retrieval of the flotsam and jetsam of the past from unexamined narratives. Rather, historical knowledge and good history teaching are both informed more by the ancient Greek tradition of skepticism. American historian Joyce Appleby and her colleagues explain:
Skepticism is an approach to learning as well as a philosophical stance. Since the Greeks, a certain amount of skepticism about truth claims has been essential to the search for truth; skepticism can encourage people to learn more and remain open to the possibilities of their errors.23
But skepticism is not the same as cynicism. Skepticism in this sense fosters an active and inquiring approach to history. No one account is the sole source. No one narrative can explain all there is to know about an event. Allowing our students to take time to become skeptical about what they read lays a solid foundation for informed citizenship. Success in history should not be measured by the number of dates of treaties and tariffs that a student knows and can parrot back. It is time to reexamine what we mean when we say that students "know history."
We already have the signposts that can point the way out of the trap of testing for minutiae and toward a more rigorous approach to achieving high standards for all students. These new directions do not involve prescribing a rigid formula that fits all schools. Instead, they lead to adopting an approach to reform that is done with teachers and schools, not to them. Promoting inspired history teaching and learning occurs within this wider context of authentic reform. Three broad categories help frame a new direction for thinking about standards:
In all my interviews with history teachers, there were comments about the need to be involved in a culture of professional development that is rich in content and pedagogy. This holds true for both beginning and veteran teachers. The history units created on the Pilgrims and on the Irish immigrants were developed out of consultations involving teachers within the building, outside resources, and other educators.
When this practice is part of the ethos of the entire school and cuts across all disciplines, it can be even more effective. One teacher at a community high school in the Lower East Side of Manhattan says that her school has committed itself to giving all staff members time to reflect on and discuss their subject matter, their students' learning needs, and their own teaching strategies. She believes that "when you have teachers designing what they are interested in and being treated as professionals, then they are more likely to stay than if you give them a prescribed curriculum and say, 'Teach to get ready for the test.' I would not be teaching if I had to do that."24
She also had a culture of "critical friends" to offer feedback on the design and implementation of curriculum units. Once a week, team members in her discipline met for three hours to plan and critique what they were doing in the classroom. Twice a month, they met as part of a seventh- through 12th-grade humanities team to talk about teaching strategies, doing interdisciplinary work, and making big ideas accessible to all learners.
Providing this kind of renewal can be done on a state level. The first years of education reform in Massachusetts are a good example.25 The creation of the history/social science framework and of the frameworks in the other disciplines involved open and ongoing discussions with teachers and community members. There was agreement that assessments needed to capture deep learning. And there was a vision that professional development should be rooted in disciplinary rigor and best practice in the field. Teachers would meet with colleagues from other districts, with university scholars, and with resource specialists (e.g., librarians, museum staff members) to learn from one another throughout the year. Unfortunately, this collaborative process and vision for professional development were cut short with a change in the state board of education. A small group of policy makers reduced reform to high-stakes tests.
If state departments of education could step outside the box of the testing mindset, they could play a more constructive role in assessment. The model of School Quality Review (SQR) teams allows state boards of education to become involved in helping to create teaching and learning capacity, rather than just focusing on the limited outcomes of standardized tests. Tests could still be used, but they would not have high stakes attached, and their purpose would be more to gauge basic literacy and math skills.
There are many variations on how SQRs could work, but usually a school or network of schools establishes benchmarks for a successful learning community.26 These could be approved and monitored by the state, but the actual work would be local, collaborative, and rigorous. For example, teams of local school personnel and outside evaluators might visit a school for a week and examine all aspects of the school community: curriculum, assessment measures, stated goals, scheduling, and so on. They would then issue a report accenting what was working well and what needed to be improved. Then they would come back in six months and check the progress.27
This is too brief a sketch to do SQR justice, but the model sees assessment and teacher performance within the context of school life. Using history as an example, an SQR team would include an educator trained in the discipline. Rather than look for scores on a standardized test, the evaluator would review samples of student work over time and across grades. Evaluators would use the criteria of how successfully students made use of their historical thinking skills to examine rich content. The criteria could be calibrated for different age spans. Reviewers would get a better sense of how an individual student had sharpened those skills over the course of a semester or a year. They could actually examine a record of the student's thinking and look at the work that went into a unit, such as those on the Pilgrims or the Great Depression.
The evaluators would be an extension of a "critical friends" group that was already established within the school and supported statewide by the state department of education. So when the evaluators discussed what was exemplary or what was lacking in student work, they would have the tone of mentoring colleagues within a wider community of shared principles related to the teaching of history. Coverage of material would be spread over the school's plan for K-12 education, so no single grade would have to cover a thousand topics superficially.
Thinking through these options for professional development and assessment must take place with a view toward building equitable resources for all school districts. The type of high-quality historical investigation mentioned in this article is enhanced when teachers have smaller classes, longer teaching blocks, released time to meet with colleagues to discuss their craft and their students' needs, and access to resources that allow them to get the professional development they need in order to do high-quality work.
These new directions in thinking about standards in history tap into the real traditional core of the discipline. At its core, the teaching and learning of history needs to be inspired. The enterprise is also messy and sometimes mysterious -- adjectives that seem out of place in the current Zeitgeist of accountability through testing. History teachers need the time to rearrange the classroom, spread documents out on the floor, understand a common problem through an artifact, and listen to competing interpretations from others (students included) about what the source means. When these moments occur, they are magical, and we need more of them. They need to be nurtured. Our teachers need to believe they can make them happen, and students need to know they have a right to them.
When we do this well in our history classes, we will do more than just revive Clio. We will breathe life into teaching and learning for all students.
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