history

History Case Studies

How do you make learning history dull, boring, monotonous and tedious? Teach broad survey classes with lots of multiple choice questions!!!

Sound familiar? Yup – that’s how most of us learned history and how most history courses are taught now, sadly.

Not this class! The article, “A Better Way to Teach History,” by Christine Gross-Loh outlines a college history course modeled on the Harvard Business School pedagogy of teaching through case studies. Professor David Moss gives students the arguments on both sides of a controversy. Students read, discuss, argue and make a decision. Only then does he tell students what actually happened. This method uses critical thinking, primary source analysis, decision making skills and communication skills.

Traditional history teaching values facts over skills, something that has long been debated. I fall strongly on the side of teaching skills over content. Even back in the early 1990s, pre-internet, I taught students that it was the process of finding information and analyzing it that was important. I gave only open book assessments – rarely, if ever, did I give “tests.” Today, it’s even more useless to memorize tons of facts. It’s not possible. It is possible to teach students to find information. Do students need a minimal amount of historical content in order to analyze? Of course. But that can be learned in the process of analyzing and doesn’t require excessive rote memorization.

Multiple choice tests definitely favor facts over process. As the article states, there is little context to facts in a multiple choice test. This article promotes the use of narrative over fact – one I wholly support. Narrative gives context, reason, rational, instead of random, disconnected facts. “…the narrative provides context and a more effective way to learn and remember.”

Love this quote:

The argument I make all the time is, it’s like if I were to ask someone to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle without the box-top picture of it. You could of course eventually put it together but the effort to match shapes and colors on each piece would be monumental, and you’d likely give up quite quickly. Such is what happens to many kids in school

 

Video

Understanding Ukraine: The Problems Today and Some Historical Context – YouTube

I love John Green. He talks so fast, I think he gets in twice as much info as anyone else….

I cannot evaluate the content in this video, as I know next to nothing about the situation in Ukraine.

I do know, however, that John Green has nailed how students – and adults – learn. I learned more about the situation in this 6 minute video (which I watched twice) than I have in the last few weeks.

Green makes great use of using history to understand a current situation. There is really no way to understand what’s going on there without knowing the history, but he does a great job moving through the essentials, and demonstrating how history, geography and politics all contribute to the current situation.

Wouldn’t it be great if students were empowered to do this type of assignment? Not only does video production require writing (like a paper), it also requires visual literacy skills. Yeah! 21st century skills!

Professionally, I would love to be able to produce content out this quickly as it relates to current events. I’m not keeping my fingers crossed….

Teaching History

Wonderful article about the art and philosophy of teaching history from The Atlantic, “You Have to Know History to Actually Teach It” is an interview with Eric Foner by David Cutler.

I taught history many years ago – before the internet, before Wikipedia, before this testing craze. Even then, I told my students it wasn’t the goal to memorize a bunch of dates and facts. The goal was to know how to find the information (remember, pre-internet) and analyze. In my current work, we promote the analysis and critical thinking about historical resources — not the memorizing of dates/facts to spit back on a test.

So you can imagine my glee in reading this interview with Foner.

I’m strongly in favor of students knowing the facts of history, not just memorizing or having it drilled into their heads. I’m certainly against this testing mania that’s going on now where you can judge whether someone really understands history by their performance on a multiple-choice test.

My daughter’s history classes have pretty much been multiple choice tests. That’s about it. Her AP history last year? Read 10+ pages of dry text, take notes and take a huge test. She (wisely) chose to not to AP U.S. History this year to avoid more of that slog. Her “regular” U.S. History course is still filled with multiple choice tests (although not as bad) but is so stuffed with content and the need to cover all the standards that there is no room for analysis and thinking.

Yet, my daughter chooses to watch historical documentaries on her own. After watching one on the Dustbowl (such an uplifting topic), she’s been finding connections all over the place. It’s stuck with her.

Foner encourages the teaching of history to teach students the skills they need to be citizens. Funny how the skills he identifies are the skills we promote in the concept of 21st Century Skills.

We try to teach people the skills that come along with studying history. The skills of evaluating evidence, of posing questions and answering them, of writing, of mobilizing information in order to make an argument. I think all of that is important in a democratic society if people are actually going to be active citizens. Teaching to the test does not really encourage emphasis on those aspects of the study of history.

 

I also really appreciate his sense that it’s the teacher that matters — the ability of the teacher to convey their passion for history:

the training of the teacher, the ability of the teacher, the knowledge of the teacher, and the teacher’s ability to inspire students by conveying his or her own enthusiasm for the subject.

 

How can tech integration help with this? It has tremendous potential. The ability to find information and sources. The opportunity to create projects that allow students to think critically (analyze) sources and information. Moving towards the use of visual sources, not just text. The opportunities are endless! Is it as easy to assess as putting a Scantron test through the machine? Nope, but it’s far better.