OAH/NCPH Sessions “Chart the Future of Teaching the Past”
Teaching students to think like historians may be an idea whose time has arrived. The April annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH/NCPH)/National Council for Public History (NCPH) in Milwaukee certainly offered abundant evidence of its spread. This approach rests on several key premises. First, history is understood not in the popular sense, as everything that has ever occurred in human history, but rather as an interpretation of the relatively meager evidence that has been left to us by the past. Interpretation of this evidence, in fact, constitutes the essence of the discipline. If students do not have the opportunity to grasp and practice this essential activity, they will not grasp history; instead they will misunderstand it as a chronicle of forgettable events. A second premise recognizes that history, as practiced by historians, requires the application of certain understandings and cognitive skills that are unique to the discipline. For example, historians master a conceptual framework that includes causation, chronology, and many other concepts, and, in analyzing primary and secondary sources, they deploy specific cognitive skills like sourcing and inference in order to interpret these documents.
Over the past thirty years, scholars and educators have come to recognize that, for students, these skills are neither natural nor intuitive; on the contrary, to be learned effectively, they require an explicit naming and repetitive use. They must be incorporated into history curricula as an essential component of historical understanding. (1) A third premise maintains that when students approach history as an inquiry-based enterprise -- that is, like historians -- they grasp that history is not a single story, but a contested one, and they can, once they have mastered basic skills and concepts, make their own meaning out of the evidence left to us by the past. With this understanding, the study of history can actually provoke excitement, as opposed to the tedium with which is often associated. History becomes memorable.
The number of OAH/NCPH/NCPH sessions devoted to teaching historical thinking -- with titles like “Reading and Writing like Historians: Literacy in History Teaching,” “Thinking Like a Historian,” “SOCC it to ‘em: Teaching Historical Thinking in High School and College,” and “Thinking Like Historians: Issues and Challenges Facing K-16 Educators and Students in the Twenty-First Century” -- was impressive, and suggested a remarkable singularity in approach. All of them challenge the traditional survey course model, or “coverage,” as it is often called, with courses that rely on historical thinking as their fundamental objective. The survey is especially important because it is often the only history course a college student will take.
Lendol Calder, commentator for the session entitled “The End of the History Survey Course” (no question mark), noted that the papers for sessions addressing history pedagogy have matured. How does he know? He no longer sees simple samples of successful teaching; he sees alternative approaches grounded in a body of scholarship. Papers about historical pedagogy now contain footnotes, signaling a new seriousness and a growing community of scholars and teachers. The scholarship even has a name: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, or SoTL, pronounced the way it looks. The sessions also offered considerable evidence of collaboration between college and K-12 teachers, which can only enrich the practices of both groups. (2)
Obituary for the Survey?
At all levels, history teachers are challenging the coverage model, in which large periods of historical knowledge are ladled into putatively receptive minds. The panel on “The End of the Survey” may have exaggerated the survey’s demise in higher education, but it nevertheless offered compelling evidence of the failure of the coverage model. For many years, panelist David Voelker explained, the survey has survived on the musty but persistent proposition that students must master a foundation of knowledge before they can think properly about evaluating evidence. (3) As test after test has proven, however, generations of students have not retained the knowledge served up to them over a century of lectures. Increasingly, coverage is being replaced by “uncoverage,” a curriculum less concerned with “Plato to NATO” than with encouraging students to interrogate the past using the tools of the historian. (4) Panelist Joel Sipress advocates an argument-based approach that “centers on student participation in a contested evidence-based discourse.” As for that foundation of knowledge, Sipress emphasized that content does not, and cannot, disappear from the argument-based model of uncoverage he practices; on the contrary: “[A] well-designed argument-based course is content rich.” (5) The emphasis, however, rests on the analysis and interpretation of that content. Sipress’s paper documented his own and a number of other college courses that claim to have successfully replaced the survey with a disciplinary approach, as did Catherine Denial for her own college courses in the “SOCC it to ‘em” session. (“SOCC” will be explained presently.)
In K-12 history curriculum, where the survey predominates, historical thinking is also advancing. Colorado has recently made it central to its state standards for social studies, (6) and the Rochester City School District in New York is in the midst of adopting the approach. Seven Iowa school districts have fully adopted elementary history curriculum through the Bringing History Home program designed by Elise Fillpott and Catherine Denial. (7) As a result of Abby Reisman’s “Reading like a Historian” project, San Francisco high schools now use her excellent lesson plans, which have also been downloaded by other teachers nearly 300,000 times from the Stanford History Education Group website. (8) Perhaps the most powerful evidence of the changes underway is the College Board’s revision of its Advanced Placement history curriculum, which will reduce coverage in favor of the development of historical thinking skills. The examinations will be reconceived to address the new emphasis. Considering the limits imposed by state requirements and tests, these changes go as far toward uncoverage as a high school course can go, according to Lawrence Charap, Director for History and Social Studies, Curriculum and Content Development, Advanced Placement Program. (9) They are likely to radiate into other levels of instruction, as AP teachers, who typically teach non-AP courses as well, undergo training and implement the new approach. The national scope of the AP program will encourage the spread the historical thinking approach.
None of the presenters who challenged the traditional survey course with disciplinary approaches offered analyses of student performance to demonstrate the superiority of uncoverage. But there is already a substantial body of such evidence, as my last article on history education, Abby Reisman’s “Reading like a Historian” project, documented.x The work of Chauncey Monte-Sano and Ben Hoffman can now be added to the bibliography. Monte-Sano has been studying the development of historical writing skills for some time; (11) she and Hoffman presented the results of their introduction of historical writing skills into the curriculum of 8th grade classes filled with struggling readers. Over two years, they found that students exposed to their skills-based approach, as opposed to the district’s textbook-reliant summary writing methods, were able to use evidence significantly more effectively than students who did not work with their curriculum. And students of teachers whose lessons maintained a “high fidelity” to the new curriculum performed even better. During the second year, when they were afforded more time to work with teachers, the results were more striking yet.
Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom
The OAH/NCPH sessions revealed not only the growing momentum of uncoverage, but also the growing sophistication and profusion of variant approaches to historical thinking skills. In Lendol Calder’s influential 2006 Journal of American History article, which described the transformation of his “U.S. History: World War II to the Present” course from coverage to uncoverage, he listed seven “cognitive moves” he sought to inculcate in his students through repeated and systematic instruction and use: questioning, making connections, sourcing, making inferences, recognizing different perspectives, and recognizing the limits to one’s knowledge. (12) Anyone trained as a historian can quickly develop an even longer list. Pre-collegiate teachers, however, will probably find long lists too difficult for students to absorb and apply. Reisman consolidated her skills (13) into four manageable cognitive actions: sourcing, contextualization, close reading, and corroboration, reinforced by wall posters, daily document work, and oral repetition. As Sam Wineburg famously pointed out, historical thinking is not natural; teachers must habituate students’ minds to historical modes of thought. (14) Monte-Sano and Hoffman employed the mnemonic “IREAD”: identify, read, earmark, assess setting, and detail your evaluation of the document. The mnemonic “SOCC” of the “SOCC it to ‘em” session stands for source, observe, contextualize, and corroborate -- similar to Reisman’s skills except for the replacement of close reading with observe. According to presenter Elise Fillpott, this substitution was made because “SOCC,” like IREAD, is pronounceable and catchy, enabling even elementary students to internalize the process. And “observation” offered a way to encourage students to stop, see, and record before proceeding with analysis. The SOAPS formula—speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, and significance—has been practiced widely for many years. The Advanced Placement changes include organizing “Historical Thinking Skills” into four categories: “Crafting Historical Arguments from Historical Evidence,” “Chronological Reasoning,” “Comparison and Contextualization,” and “Historical Interpretation and Synthesis.” Catchiness and convenience are not among their objectives; they are rather a fuller approximation of the skills employed in doing history. 15 As Calder noted at the “End of the Survey” session, “A thousand flowers are blooming.”
Indeed they are—enough, anyway, to bear some scrutiny. Much of the creative new work in history teaching focuses on the use of primary documents; these are the texts on which historical thinking skills are largely honed. The acronyms and skills lists are mostly applied to the interpretation of this evidence, although they are sometimes directed at secondary sources, textbooks in particular. But doing history is not equivalent to doing documents. Historians approach their work with an elaborate set of “second-order,” or “disciplinary” concepts and knowledge that include evidence, causation, change and continuity, periodization, historical significance, and so on. Historians are able to master large stores of factual knowledge because facts become meaningful as they adhere to this established conceptual framework and accumulated knowledge. Their knowledge and conceptual mastery enables them to pose questions of the past and to approach primary and secondary sources equipped not only with a set of cognitive, or interpretive, skills but with a constellation of historical understandings. This is the busy intersection of content and skills. The combination and interplay produces “first-order” historical analysis, or historiography.
There is thus a potential pedagogical gap between the development of specific “procedural” skills and teaching a broader understanding of the historical enterprise. No one can expect non-majors or K-12 students to develop the acumen of historians, but some familiarity with these domains of historical thinking seems an essential objective. (16) The AP’s “Historical Thinking Skills” address the domains well, but as fields for skill application, not as concepts. And judging from many of the presentations, skills appear generally to be getting more attention.
In the final session on “The End of the Survey,” panelist Nikki Mandell addressed this issue by distinguishing between “the way historians study the past” (“historical process,” which encompasses the varieties of historical thinking skills deployed in document analysis) and “the way historians organize their understanding of the past” (“historical categories of inquiry”), like the disciplinary or second-order concepts mentioned above. These two modes comprise the “disciplinary literacy” of history, and there is a dynamic relationship between them. She suggested that it is not enough to teach students to analyze documents competently; they must also learn how to discover what, if anything, is significant about the documents and the event or events they illuminate, an exercise that engages the broader practices of historians. (17) The categories of inquiry enable historians to pose questions, including about significance, which are answered in the historical process. (18) These considerations, it seems safe to say, are better understood among college professors than K-12 teachers, but devising a method for making them teachable at the secondary level, at least, would make a worthy project.
How do these ideas reshape the curriculum? Mandell pointed out that “the coverage model presumes that everything matters.” In contrast, she structured her US history course “uncovering” the end of Reconstruction to the late twentieth century around four “thematic threads,” two of which address what has changed—the nation’s rise to power and the emergence and evolution of consumer society—and two of which address how those changes occurred— “contending ideologies/mentalités” and “mass movements for social reform.” (19) Sounds like a great course. Once liberated from coverage, the opportunities for creative history courses seem boundless, as does the conversation and debate they will stimulate.
History Standards
Curriculum plays out differently in the K-12 arena than it does in higher education. During the discussion following “The End of the Survey” session, a secondary history teacher noted that history professors enjoy an enviable freedom to innovate—a challenge and a satisfaction more limited for public K-12 teachers governed by school boards, state legislatures, and a federal government that understand too little about history and historical thinking. Instead, these bodies lurch after more and more standards and standardized tests to guide and measure student and teacher performance. Developing and implementing uncoverage in K-12 therefore demands considerably more persuasion.
Standards were discussed in several sessions, and, unsurprisingly, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) drew the most attention because their anticipated impact on K-12 teachers is great. The CCSS resulted from efforts of the National Governor’s Association Center and the Council of Chief State School Officers, funded mostly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop a framework of expectations that will produce high school graduates who are “college and career ready.” (20) The CCSS have never been field tested, but, largely because Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made their acceptance a condition for federal Race to the Top money, 45 states have adopted them (21) The CCSS are focused on English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics; other disciplines are integrated into the two main subject areas. A cottage industry of conferences, webinars, and workshops has arisen over the past year to dissect the standards and inform teachers and administrators of what will soon be expected of them.
Of the 66 pages of the CCSS devoted to ELA, a single page addresses “Literacy in History/Social Studies.” Judging by its language, the page was written by a person or persons versed in ELA, not history. What does the page mean for K-12 history teachers? Several speakers expressed little concern about the implications of the standards, with Robert Bain noting that the CCSS represent recognition of the literacy crisis in the United States and have appeared at a potentially “propitious moment” for history educators. Abby Reisman, presenting at the “Reading and Writing like Historians: Literacy in History Teaching” session, expressed a less sanguine view. It is good, she conceded, that the standards place emphasis on a variety of literary genres, rather than the usual curricular focus on literature; the CCSS also elevate the importance of text complexity; finally, by making specific reference to history/social studies, the standards recognize, however slightly, the distinctiveness of the discipline. But she lamented several “missed opportunities.” The term “informational text” is used throughout the standards to mean anything that is not literary fiction; thus, the term is a convenient “catch-all” that in effect ignores disciplinary distinctiveness and implies that all the reading is the responsibility of ELA teachers. (Conversely, many history teachers believe they are about to be turned into reading teachers.) The standards also imply that the purpose of reading is to extract information, “flying in the face” of genre recognition. Text complexity is also “misaligned with students’ reading ability and/or teachers’ instructional knowledge.” Finally, the single page devoted to history effectively relegates it to the obscurity of general reading while failing to emphasize the specific cognitive resources employed by historians. Still, Reisman acknowledges that, however meager, the page does provide an opportunity for history educators to join the conversation and improve the outcome.
Social studies, of course, do not constitute a discipline. The category is itself a catch-all, created to address perceived social and educational problems during the early 20th century. One consequence has been to obfuscate for generations of students, teachers, and the public the disciplinary virtues of history. The conflation of history and social studies also makes it easier for standards writers to diminish history. Still, there may be more advantage to be gained from the CCSS’s dubious commitment to history than Reisman admits. The specific skills articulated generically on that one page are susceptible to translation into the language of history, and, properly formulated, can offer an argument to school boards and state education departments for a disciplinary approach. (22)
Doing Documents
The proper use of primary documents, while not debated in any of the sessions, nevertheless elicited informal comment. The topic matters most to pre-collegiate history teachers. Monte-Sano and Hoffman adapted the documents used in their project, but acknowledged the tension between accessibility and authenticity. The eighth graders in their study, who mostly did not read at grade level, were provided two documents as examples of conflicting perspectives toward the Democratic Societies of the early 1790s. The language was modified to the point that it bore no traces of the English written or spoken by Americans at the time. Some educators and probably many historians understandably disapprove of such modifications. Authenticity matters for several reasons. Modified documents cannot capture the “pastness,” or strangeness, of the past; presentism, the default mode for most students, can only be reinforced by their use. When students encounter the peculiar language of the past, one can argue, they should be encouraged to engage the distinctive world that its archaic language evokes. Sam Wineburg has argued that an appreciation of the strangeness of the past, and the humanizing consequences of this appreciation, are a major reason to study history. (23) Students reading adapted documents will not have to confront that textual strangeness, though it can also be conveyed through images and explanation. Modifying a document can also deprive it of nuance and tone, sensitivity to which is certainly one objective of improving historical literacy. The alien texts of the past force those who engage them to exercise their historical imaginations, to better grasp the distinctive character of the period. The Rochester City School District, which includes many struggling readers, has been using a Teaching American History grant to introduce historical thinking more systematically. Acting Director of Social Studies, Stephen LaMorte, told me:
To me, “translating” the source into contemporary language or substituting easier words for difficult vocabulary is something that students should be doing themselves—of course with support from each other and their teachers. I want students to do that work so they can better connect with the source and improve critical literacy skills. If that means we take an extended period of time to focus on one important document or if it means me excerpting the document to make for a more manageable task in a shorter amount of time, then that is what I would do. Diminishing this opportunity through modification thereby diminishes the magnitude of understanding while slowing the growth of historical literacy. (24)
So there is a cost to document modification. However, student literacy is so poor it qualifies as a crisis that cannot be ignored. (25) Interpretation of primary documents is central to the discipline, and not all teachers will be as willing or able to take the extra time to preserve original texts as LaMorte is. In that case, if educators do not modify them for struggling readers, these students will be deprived of an important part of history education. If document adaptation becomes necessary, providing students the opportunity to examine the original version of a modified text should be essential. (26) There are other ways to avoid or mitigate the consequences of modification. First of all, literacy competency is sufficient in many classrooms to avoid it altogether. And as LaMorte suggests, when time pressures are too great, teachers still have the discretion to abbreviate documents. Teachers can also define archaic or obscure words, make contextual and explanatory points in head notes, and assist students in a variety of other ways with difficult vocabulary and syntax. Effective teachers, trained in the discipline of history as well as pedagogy, can make an enormous difference. A well led discussion can tease out a great deal of concealed meaning. Reisman’s lessons on the Stanford History Education Group’s website eliminate modifications by the time they reach the twentieth century, mainly because American English modernized over time. Teachers can also gradually wean students from adapted documents as their fluency improves.
Teaching History Teachers
Teaching students to think like historians presumes the existence of effective teachers who already possess that ability, but that is often not the case. Linda Salvucci, chair of the National Council for History Education, noted in one session that 88 percent of K-12 history teachers in Louisiana have not been trained in history, and nationally, the share is near 50 percent. Too often, teacher preparation is poor. Educators and historians have often lamented the breach between education schools and history departments (though the lamentation is no less applicable to the other academic departments).
Many of the sessions offered evidence of a growing collaboration among K-12 teachers, education school professors, and historians. Panels included public school teachers, historians, history educators, and in several cases, presenters held joint appointments in history and education departments. Perhaps no program traverses the breach more systematically than the School of Education at the University of Michigan. Robert Bain spoke at the session called “Thinking Like Historians: Issues and Challenges Facing K-16 Educators and Students in the Twenty-First Century.” A historian and noted scholar of teaching and learning, who holds joint appointments in the history department and education school at Michigan, Bain reported with lucid passion on a remarkable project, seven years in the making, that is revamping the structure and quality of teacher education at the university. (27) He traced the breach between pedagogy and the disciplines to the 1916 reforms that gave birth to social studies. These reforms marked the end, with the exception of several abortive reforms in the 1960s and 1970s and the more promising current efforts, of disciplinary thinking in the public schools. By the 1920s, schools of education had separated content and pedagogy. This divergence has grown into a “continental drift,” with three separate territories and jurisdictions—education schools, schools of arts and science, and teacher training classrooms—which communicate with one another poorly and leave the teacher trainees, who are in the least advantageous position, to navigate the seas between them.
The innovations of Bain (and his School of Education colleague and collaborator Elizabeth Moje, who was not present) aim to reorganize history teacher education by pulling the estranged domains back together, in large part by reorganizing it along the lines of medical school. Called the “Rounds Project,” it attempts to replicate the closely supervised and coordinated training of medical students and interns. The changes appear ambitious, but Bain described himself during his presentation as an “incrementalist,” and he and Moje write that “[t]his work involves something more than tinkering, but less than whole-scale restructuring or reinvention.” While many education schools do not distinguish between the disciplines (a signal deficiency), at Michigan prospective teachers, called Teacher Interns (TIs), are trained in “tightly connected” disciplinary literacy and disciplinary methods courses. Their development is monitored closely, and the curriculum’s coherence is insured “across courses and semesters, and between the university and the field.” (28) Similar to medical interns, TIs rotate through different school sites, classrooms, and teaching tasks while teacher supervisors and university faculty engage in “rounds,” often intervening in classrooms as doctors would during a surgery. All participants—TIs, “attending teachers,” field instructors, and faculty—meet frequently, and frequently all together. TIs also earn credit for analyzing the teaching in their history courses, as they take pedagogical as well as course content notes, and learn what makes content teachable as they master it themselves. (29) A central objective is not only to train future history teachers to think like historians, but to think like history teachers—the two things, as Bain pointed out, are not the same. History teachers, while versed in the discipline and content of history, must also understand how students learn, and how to plan curriculum and manage a history classroom accordingly. Education and arts and sciences schools across the country would do well to study the Michigan model, which Bain and Moje claim could be replicated “in many forms and contexts.” (30)
History in Crisis
The growing attention to teaching students to think historically occurs in a context of devastating cuts in public schools, colleges, and universities, weakening history’s grip in the curriculum and depriving schools of the funds necessary to implement new approaches. At the same session during which Robert Bain made his exciting presentation on the Rounds Project, Linda Salvucci painted a discouraging picture of the state of history and history education: diminishing K-12 instruction time for history, a steady decline of history majors and history enrollment in general in colleges, polarization caused by K-12 state standards, defunding and devaluing of history at the federal level (Teaching American History grants are . . . history), alternative certification routes like the reprehensible Teach for America (31) and poor teacher training in general, and poor performance on ill-conceived standardized history tests (effective tests are costly). History’s presence has, in fact, been weakening in both K-12 and higher education for many years. Implementing historical thinking programs across the country may not be enough to reverse the damage and decline, but they are a necessary beginning.
Lendol Calder’s comments on the papers delivered at the “End of the Survey” session captured both the excitement of historical thinking pedagogy and the dangers should it fail. (32) As a former fellow at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, where the pedagogy of historical thinking gained great impetus, he appreciates the headway SoTL has made over the past dozen years, and savored its growth and influence. But he asked, “Is it impacting tenure criteria and faculty reward systems?” In that vein, one might ask of the OAH/NCPH attendees, how many history teachers and professors not professionally engaged in teaching and learning attended the history education sessions reported on in this article? An unscientific impression suggests not enough.
Calder also questioned whether the argument-based model presented by Joel Sipress should be the “master key” for the study of history. He noted that most students are averse to the word “argument” to begin with, and the approach might encourage students to conclude that history is just a matter of opinion. He suggested an alternative that hooked him on history: narrative. “We should be arguing about stories that make sense of ourselves, not just historiographical ‘positions’. . . [b]ecause moral formation comes through stories.” Of course, historical narrative is also a form of argument.
Calder somberly quoted from Ronald Ridgely’s 1973 essay, “Will the History Survey Be Salvaged?”:
Our chief concern must not be the history major . . . but must be the student who will never take another history course. It is our responsibility to this citizen to aid him in equipping himself with an important tool for life. A lethargic, meaningless, and meandering history survey will not do this. . . . If we do not reform, our elimination will be justifiable.” (33)
Ridgely’s warning now appears “prophetic,” Calder observed. But the presenters and commentators at these sessions believe implicitly that such a calamity can be averted by offering a more meaningful and engaging approach to history. Elaborating on a point made by Nikki Mandell earlier in the session, he concluded, “[H]istorical literacy depends on using the historical process to inquire and develop an understanding of historically meaningful questions and issues. I think that the dilemma we face is in figuring out what historically meaningful questions and issues can or should replace the myriad events, people, and ideas that make the coverage model so untenable.”
That is, no doubt, one of the next, urgent tasks. Others include persuading more history teachers at all levels, as well as the various governing bodies in K-12, of the efficacy of a disciplinary approach. Education schools are often unfairly disparaged by academics in the arts and sciences, but many of them still need to catch up on SoTL, and history departments need to support and collaborate in these efforts. But the evidence of progress, dramatized in the OAH/NCPH sessions, is unmistakable and encouraging.
(1) Valuable introductions to the historical thinking approach include Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg, eds., Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History (New York: New York University Press, 2000), and Bruce A. VanSledright, The Challenge of Rethinking History Education: On Practices, Theories, and Policy (New York: Routledge, 2011).
(2) Because of simultaneous scheduling of two of these sessions, I was unable to attend the one on “Teaching to the Test? Creating Space for Historical Thinking amidst the Realities of State Standards and Curriculum Controversies in History Education.” Unless otherwise cited, all quotations are from my notes.
(3) For the full version of Voelker’s paper, co-authored by Joel Sipress, see “The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model,” Journal of American History 97 (March 2011), 1050-1066. For the point on a foundation of knowledge, see 53-54.
(4) See Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006), 1358-1370. Calder credits the first use of the term “uncoverage” to Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, Understanding by Design, 2nd ed. (Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2005), 46, 352-353. For McTighe and Wiggins, uncoverage applies to exposing student misconceptions, revealing complexities, and uncovering core ideas. Calder describes coverage as “covering up history as historians know it.” “Uncoverage,” 1363.
(5) Joel M. Sipress, “The Argument-Based Model of the Introductory History Course: Characteristics and Challenges,” paper delivered at the 2012 OAH/NCPH annual meeting, 21 April, 2, 12 .
(6) http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdeassess/UAS/AdoptedAcademicStandards/Social_Studies_Adopted_12.10.09.pdf Accessed 3 May 2012.
(7) http://www.bringinghistoryhome.org/about/districts. Accessed 9 May 2012.
(9) Author’s interview with Charap, 21 April 2012.
(10) Hnn.us/articles/how-teach-students-think-historians.
(11) Chauncey Monte-Sano,“Qualities of Historical Writing Instruction: A Comparative Case Study of Two Teachers’ Practices,” American Educational Research Journal 45 no. 4 (Dec. 2008), 1045-1079 and “Beyond Reading Comprehension and Summary: Learning to Read and Write in History by Focusing on Evidence, Perspective, and Interpretation,” Curriculum Inquiry 41 no. 2 (2011), 212-249.
(12) Calder, “Uncoverage,” 1367.
(13) My use of “skills” is a somewhat imprecise convenience. As Peter Lee has noted, “Skills are commonly single-track activities, such as riding a bicycle, which may be learned and improved through practice. The understandings at stake in history are complex and demand reflection. Students are unlikely to acquire second-order understandings by practice alone; they need to think about what they are doing and the extent to which they understand it.” “Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding History,” in M. Suzanne Donovan and John D. Bransford, eds., How Students Learn: History in the Classroom (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2005), 40-41.
(14) Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts.
(15) http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/WorldHistoryHistoricalThinkingSkills.pdf . Accessed 3 May 2012.
(16) Bruce A. VanSledright’s fictional and exceptionally tireless and learned high school teacher, Thomas Becker, possesses a sophisticated grasp of these matters. The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, 49-53. See also Lee, “Putting Principles into Practice,” 31-78, especially 32.
(17) Nikki Mandell, “What’s a Historian to Do?” paper delivered at the 2012 OAH/NCPH, 21 April, 4-5.
(18) To view Mandell’s two sided poster conveying her visual understanding of these points, see http://www.uww.edu/cls/history/for-teachers and scroll down.
(19) Mandell, “What’s a Historian to Do?”, 9.
(20) http://www.corestandards.org/about-the-standards Accessed 3 May 2012; Diane Ravitch, “Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?”, New York Review of Books, 7 June 2012.
(21) http://www.corestandards.org/in-the-states Accessed 3 May 2012.
(22) http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf, 61. Accessed 7 May 2012.
(23) Wineburg, Historical Thinking, 3-27. Notwithstanding this point, Wineburg, along with Daisy Martin, makes a case for modification. See “Tampering with History: Adapting Primary Sources for Struggling Readers,” Social Education 73 (5), 212-216. Thanks to Stephen LaMorte for bringing it to my attention.
(24) Email from Stephen LaMorte to Craig Thurtell, 8 May 2012.
(25) At the “Reading and Writing like Historians” session, Robert Bain pointed out that the crisis extends beyond the well-known struggling reader. Over the past ten years education policy scholars have noted a disjunction: As reading increases in sophistication in disciplines like history, the time devoted to literacy skills decreases. Elementary students receive a great deal of instruction, but it diminishes in the later grades. The Common Core State Standards, Bain noted, represent a “visible result” of that scholarship.
(26) Wineburg and Martin, “Tampering with History,” 24.
(27) Bain and Elizabeth Birr Moje discuss this project more fully in “Mapping the Teacher Education Terrain for Novices,” Kappan, Feb. 2012, 62-65.
(28) Ibid., 65.
(29) For a full explanation see Lauren McArthur Harris and Robert B. Bain, “Pedagogical Content Knowledge for World History Teachers: What is It? How Might Prospective Teachers Develop It?” The Social Studies 2011, 14-17.
(30) Bain and Moje, “Mapping,” 64-65.
(31) See Diane Ravitch, “How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools,” New York Review of Books 22 March 2012.
(32) Calder kindly shared his own notes for his comments to supplement mine.
(33) Social Studies 64, 7 (Dec. 1973), 315.