Teaching History in the Digital Age

Susan on Understanding by Design: Standards are potentially very useful on many levels, and certainly the backward design idea is at the heart of the movement at its best. Having sat on standards-writing commissions, complex instructional design, and ordinary lesson-planning sessions of my own and with teachers, I also believe that it is essential to know what the students are supposed to come away with. The outcome determines the steps that need to be taken to bring the students there. So many times, teachers and materials fail to recognize that intermediate steps have been omitted in the lesson, and the desired result is not forthcoming. For example, teaching elementary students about latitude and longitude with the goal of having them identify cities by their coordinates is a clear goal, but the requisite steps to get them to be able to do that are missed on the September Map Skills pages in every social studies book. We have to realize that we are asking students to understand and be able to use a four-quadrant grid, when they may not yet be familiar with the idea of coordinates at all. It is necessary to start with “Bingo” and go through the intermediate steps to the complex system that gives us the Global Positioning System. Another part of the skill is the divisions of degrees on a compass or clock apparatus. It is too easy to think of the end without breaking it down into components.

There are teachers who teach their subject, and there are teachers who teach kids. They are not mutually exclusive, but the former could teach just as well to an empty room. The Stages of Backward Design model looks simple at first, and has certainly come to be incorporated in instructional design of late. The model hides within it, however, a lot of complexity, because there are scales at which instruction functions: the “desired results” include demonstrable skills, knowledge, and concepts. So instruction is not linear, but moves up and down scales, zooming in and out from smaller to larger fields of vision. Fig 3.3 illustrates these multiple scales in one possible way (p. 71). By the end of the book, the process seems so complex that it threatens to engulf its subject. I may be very wrong, but the elaborate discussion of understanding seems like a huge detour.

It was surprising that the example of nutrition featured a standard that was governed by the vague and unmeasurable verb “understand” The essential questions were quite diffuse, and the “understandings” only gave way to performance-based goals as three skills objectives (headed up by “students will be able to read and interpret…analyze…plan.”) Instead of performance objectives like these, performance tasks were laid out. The sequence of learning experiences was quite exhaustive, however. The three stages laid out in the UbD standards are a very tall order, but do make sense as an aspiration to attain. The wrenching title of chapter 2 “Understanding Understanding” testifies to this embedded problem. What good design ought to do—if the goal of learning is unfortunately stated that way—is to tease out what student performance will provide evidence of that understanding. This has to involve action verbs, like “explain, list, describe, organize, identify, etc., bringing the designer into Bloom’s taxonomy territory. The book, on p. 36, again goes past these specific verbs by telling the designer that benchmarks are formulated with the phrase “students know, or students know how.” This just adds another layer. HOW do we assess that students know and understand? Because they can show us by doing something, they couldn’t do unless they know and understand. I think it adds an extra layer. Cut to the chase. A huge amount of the book is devoted to unpacking understanding, and I believe that an overly complex schema is laid out that would be horribly intimidating to the teachers who use it either to actually design lessons, units and yearly plans. In working with teachers, I have found that it is extremely difficult to get them to go through complex superstructures like this.

Wiggins and McTighe are respected experts on this, but to me their analysis of broad and narrow standards falls short, and makes the mistake that many critiques of standards make. That is the failure to note that all of the national standards documents (looking especially at history) represent levels or hierarchies of specificity. As they state, there are separate skills standards that are really prerequisites for gaining knowledge. There are broad knowledge standards that encompass major areas of focus, and these are then broken down into bullet items on what students do to engage with this broader material. At the most specific level are exemplars that suggest activities for the classroom. No standards document is inclusive of these. Some of these national and state documents are good teaching guides, useful and intelligible, while others take existing knowledge standards, for example, and dis-integrate them by tossing them up on graphic organizers. They are most assuredly not equal from document to document.

Wiggins and Tighe, as well as Calder in his specific way, seek to provide answers to some of Wineburg’s deep questions. They break down the process to create a reproducible technique for designing lessons that ideally can be applied by any teacher or instructional designer. In education schools everywhere, I imagine, teachers are diligently trying to absorb and apply this method in excruciating detail. I am sure it is helpful, but I fear it is too complex to affect change in more than a general way, and I am even more worried that the design process will become codified into another jargon-based recipe that education colleges and education bureaucracies will beat into a dead horse. It isn’t that I want to dismiss it, but it runs the risk of being so refined that it pulps the creativity out of lesson design. The test mavens, on the other hand, will find in it evidence that their assessment items that involve bubble sheets can be proven to give the desired results. Like the guy on the Internet who put out a challenge that he can develop a lesson on anything using Legos®, the people in the testing business will claim that their assessments, can demonstrate learning if their process of backward design is followed. It is an odd form of teaching to the test. Having said that, there is much to think about in Wiggins and Tighe, if it doesn’t get imposed on one mechanistically.

Wineburg, Historical Thinking: It is a pleasure to finally read a book I have heard so much about and read excerpts from. The historical overview of the research is itself a lesson in reading the past. Like the historical overview of the Western Civ course and other aspects of history in the US education system, his survey reveals the odd collection of ideas on which the dogmas about teaching are built. Most striking is the persistent theme of asking the wrong questions, and not being able to dig deep enough to formulate ideas about how to improve classroom practice, or even to prepare practitioners. Calder is an example of a gifted teacher whose work is worthy of study in Wineburg’s scheme.

Among the important aspects of Wineburg’s study, which has not entered the public debate at all, is the critique of standards-setting as an exercise. He mentions the Bradley Report of 1989 that set history standards on what seemed to be a good course—in the direction of bringing historical scholarship back in. Bradley looked at not merely what is taught, but the framework in which it is taught from K-12. Unfortunately, a fork in the road happened with the controversy surrounding the Natl History Standards, which did attempt to set parameters for study, and was taken to task precisely because it tried to draw teachers’ attention to historical research. It was the exemplars, not the standards that were denigrated, and with it the whole document. The organization that continued to carry the Bradley Report model, in contrast, produced a laundry list of history topics to be “covered,” along with a set of questions that were quite biased, at least in world history. The central virtue—at least potentially–of the standards movement, is not addressed by Wineburg. Instead of doing what state curricula have done for decades — tell what classroom teachers TEACH–the writing of good standards can turn that equation on its head, laying out instead what STUDENTS are supposed to be able to DO. Curriculum can be taught to an empty room and still be curriculum. Standards involve backward design—starting with the end point, the skill or objective to be achieved. The other aspect of standards that Wineburg—and most everybody discussing them in the press—is the restructuring of teaching for greater meaning, while incorporating the wealth of knowledge gained in the past 50 years or so. On the way to state standards in the various disciplines, however, much of this has been lost. History standards have fallen prey to the politics of the “Johnny doesn’t know who the President is” folks whose efforts to test students into the Stone Age Wineburg chronicles during the 20^th century. It is very thought-provoking how he peels back every effort to analyze history teaching, including his own, to determine that we still don’t know what we are looking for in terms of shaping excellent teaching. Fortunately, not a few students who have come to love history as a study did so because of a teacher.

Reading the whole book almost at one sitting, the way in which it comes full circle struck me; he begins with the politicized efforts of our self-appointed cultural nannies to wag their fingers at the schools who are supposedly teaching the students nothing, leaving each successive generation less aware of the national past (most don’t care a fig for world history knowledge and never test it in their surveys). Wineburg began by questioning the truth of these assessments as indicators of historical un-consciousness, and ends by showing how history in fact figures into the national life in the last chapters. In the intervening chapters, a lot is said about the techniques and possibilities for teaching history. Some very specific techniques are laid out on the example of gifted teachers, but little analysis of how those techniques can be replicated is given. This is freely admitted. To me, an aspect that is very dear to my own efforts at creating and fostering integrated curriculum through my work with teachers is mentioned near the end of the book, namely how the educational experience as a whole can be shaped for maximum effect. The standards movement—if its broadest impulses and serious work are heeded—has the potential to achieve this integration across the curriculum. Not only do we now have a finely graduated picture of what might be taught in each discipline from K-12, but we also have a near-perfect congruence of skills development across the disciplines. That ought to send the message that integrated curriculum is probably the only way to achieve that mass of expectations. The content standards as a group present a veritable buffet of knowledge integration potential that was not accessible to curriculum planning teams before, because each discipline worked in isolation.