Teaching History in the Digital Age

Last week’s readings left me a bit frustrated by the ongoing tension between university professors dedicated to scholarship and the demands for good teaching. This week, however, I feel comforted. The readings all revolved around the cognitive aspects of learning and how history teaching could improve. Discussions on those grounds seem far more productive than political arguments about what specific facts are taught in the classroom. In fact the entire debate about a return to teaching “standard” American history can be seen as entirely missing the point. It isn’t which list of facts should we communicate to students but how do we teach them to think like historians that matters.
What appealed to me this week were the concrete steps and ideas the authors suggested that were not based on mere anecdotal evidence but had undergone review and testing. Lendol Calder’s website for example provides evidence for the success of the methodology discussed in his article Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey including pre and post class testing and surveys. What’s more much of this data came from the students themselves. That seems rather appropriate considering that a major shift in teaching style suggested by all the authors “uncovered” in this week’s readings was the emphasis placed on turning the students into active participants rather than passive recipients. They are expected to work toward their own understanding of history rather than rely on a pre-chewed serving of names and dates distributed as smooth factual matter from text books made easy to swallow. After years of such fare it is no wonder that students fail to remember what they heard last year. Who would? It’s also no surprise that they are now conditioned to see history as having one right answer since as the author’s point out text books rarely use conditional terms such as maybe, perhaps, or seems. Samuel Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts suggested that instead of having students gather facts from text books to be ordered into a single “true” history they are taught how to gather evidence themselves, examine the data, ask questions, understand perspective, and refine interpretations with sensitivity and a knowledge of their own biases. This is historical thinking.

The Wiggins and McTighe book, Understanding by Design is slightly more abstract than the Wineburg book but still offered a concrete method to accomplish the change in pedagogy. They detailed the concept of backward design wherein teachers begin creating curriculum by first understanding what critical ideas or enduring understandings they want to impart to the students along with the essential questions they want the students to ask when approaching historical topics. Second, they suggested teachers determine what will be considered acceptable evidence that the students either are gaining or have gained that understanding. Once this is determined the teacher can then select the appropriate learning experiences, tools, and instructions needed to reach that end goal. This is akin to knowing what dish a chef wants to prepare, understanding how he will judge when to add ingredients and only then should he select which pots, pans and ingredients to use. It would make less sense to gather tools and ingredients prior to deciding what meal he wants to serve. Templates are provided at the end of the book for teacher to use in organizing and planning their curriculum. This helps put their concepts into practice in the real world.

What I noticed most this week was how each author identifies the same basic “habits of understanding” needed for history. Their terminology may differ but the concepts are the same: explanation, interpretation, application, perspective, sensitivity, and self knowledge. They all similarly discussed the means and uses of testing students in more meaningful ways. Wiggins and McTighe used intersecting circles to graphically show that supporting knowledge worth knowing is appropriate material for traditional quizzes. Calder also used quizzes to verify students were grasping mains arguments from assigned readings. More profound understanding was tested through more performance based testing as in Calder’s assignment where students had to pull together everything they had learned and write an argument supporting one book over another. In doing so they demonstrated their understanding of how to pull together material to support an argument. This corresponds to Wiggins and McTighe’s testing of “enduring understanding”.

Finally and perhaps most importantly the authors discussed the need to test not just their students but their methods of teaching as well. For example Calder used “think alouds” where students verbalized their thoughts as they solved complex problems or read sophisticated texts. This was done both before and after the survey semester. Samuel Wineburg described using the same technique in his article Probing the Depths of Student’s Historical Knowledge. The emphasis on testing the actual impact of this approach to teaching history as “thinking historically” is a positive departure from the anecdotal evidence that often came from minor changes to course activities that only supplemented traditional lecture classes.

All of this seems to me to be moving the teaching of history surveys in the right direction. This doesn’t alleviate my earlier fear regarding what will motivate university professors to make the effort to learn these techniques. If one thing is clear it’s that this new methodology requires a lot of effort. Without wide spread adoption of a new focus on teaching historical thinking we will only widen the gap between classes that teach useful skills and those that recite “facts” soon to be forgotten.