I’ve used the 4QM with my fifth-grade students and it has been wildly successful! It gets my students discussing more so than they ever did with the required textbook lessons. 4QM also provides a great foundation for students to write about what they’ve learned and what they think about what they’ve learned. My students are writing more and deeper reflections since I’ve started using 4QM. It’s great!
I love this approach! History would have been much more interesting me in school. However, I see this approach being very useful in our adult lives, especially in today’s political environment.
This new method sounds more promising than simply reading bone-dry textbooks and taking a test, but methodology does not address the question of content. Students can't answer the Four Questions properly if the content they've read is skewed or superficial. Here's a huge example from my own life: During the 1990s I was probably one of the last people to buy a physical copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As a bonus, included was a set of 21 books entitled "Annals of America", which you can sometimes find people selling on eBay. "Annals" is a chronologically-ordered set that begins with an English translation of Christopher Columbus' 1493 report back to the king on what he had discovered during his 1492 venture. From there we skip to the 1600s writings of the first settlers in Jamestown, Plymouth, and such. Some of the content consists of the opinion pieces of the people of the time, while other content includes rather dry things like the charters that the settlers created to govern themselves. But even the drier topics, like the charters, are fascinating because they ask the unspoken question: "What policies would I feel important enough to commit to writing if I were to establish a new colony in a place where there are no rules?" The Annals are NOT a history book; rather they consist ENTIRELY of original writings of the people of the time. As such they are fascinating in a way that no history book can ever be. Beyond that, they cover topics that history-book authors tend to omit, either by virtue of the need for brevity or due to political views of the publishers. For example, it is only through my reading of the Annals that I discovered that the scribes of our two earliest surviving colonies (John Smith in Jamestown and William Bradford in Plymouth) attributed the starvation in their earliest years to their communal system of food production. Through that I eventually did more research to discover that our early colonies were mostly communistic in nature, and that it would be only 150 years later that these people's great-great descendants would come to value capitalism. I've never heard such topics described in any history book anywhere. So: at the root of history education we must have quality content, otherwise there will be nothing worthwhile to ask Four Questions about. I recommend a history curriculum filled, whenever possible, primarily of original writings of the times being studied. Without having read the settlers' own original writings, for example, I would never have known enough about them to write this: "A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-communism-from-our-two
This is excellent. As a former social studies teacher, I would suggest a modification to the fourth question: "What do we think about that"? to either change the question to: What is the relevance to today's and tomorrow's world?" or to make this a possible fifth question...
I was unfamiliar with this method before and I really love it! These are of course the questions we want students to be able to answer in any history class, and in recent years I have been encouraged to introduce them to my 10the graders using all sorts of frameworks for what are now called Historical Thinking Skills. A lot of the language increasingly used in high schools on this originated (as far as I can tell) with College Board's AP curricula and has filtered out.
What I like about this method is that these questions are in plain English and can be universally applied. Even if it's only to make a poster with the questions and put it in front of the room, this post gave me something useful and immediately actionable. Thank you!
Hi Gary! Jon Bassett of 4QM here. Shoot us an email at info@4qmteaching.net and we'll send you a poster of the Questions! And you are spot on: the Questions actually drive student thinking, and "thinking skills" become tools to answer the Questions, rather than just another thing for teachers to be responsible for teaching.
In college I had an art history prof who had made a long horizontal chart with parallel timelines for various categories of human endeavor and global events. It was easy to see the correlations between tecnological advancement and the societal and geopolitical results. Art, media, war and peace, inventing, I can't remember all the lines but they reinforced the correlations in a way I've never seen in a history course. This from a passive chart that wrapped around his office. I'm an engineer and we sometimes get labeled as disinterested in history and the arts.
I have a timeline wrapping around my high school history classroom. Whenever we learn something new it goes in the timeline. I hope it helps my kids ❤️
So interesting! I teach all ages and abilities of of dyslexic kids to read. Some have no historical knowledge at all. But incorporating historical information into our lessons captures their attention, similar to the 4Q method.
After teaching writing for 28 years, my 29th year will begin my journey teaching writing through social studies. I have already created sentence-level activities (The Writing Revolution) to enhance my social studies curriculum. However, the 4QM will give me a variety of activities and also help me hit those dreaded ELA standards. YEA!
I’ve used the 4QM with my fifth-grade students and it has been wildly successful! It gets my students discussing more so than they ever did with the required textbook lessons. 4QM also provides a great foundation for students to write about what they’ve learned and what they think about what they’ve learned. My students are writing more and deeper reflections since I’ve started using 4QM. It’s great!
Excellent approach! As an educator I see how social studies gets shoved aside and loved reading this. Thanks!
I plan to encorporate this with my 5th graders next school year. I will use the remainder of this school year to sample it out.
I love this approach! History would have been much more interesting me in school. However, I see this approach being very useful in our adult lives, especially in today’s political environment.
This new method sounds more promising than simply reading bone-dry textbooks and taking a test, but methodology does not address the question of content. Students can't answer the Four Questions properly if the content they've read is skewed or superficial. Here's a huge example from my own life: During the 1990s I was probably one of the last people to buy a physical copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As a bonus, included was a set of 21 books entitled "Annals of America", which you can sometimes find people selling on eBay. "Annals" is a chronologically-ordered set that begins with an English translation of Christopher Columbus' 1493 report back to the king on what he had discovered during his 1492 venture. From there we skip to the 1600s writings of the first settlers in Jamestown, Plymouth, and such. Some of the content consists of the opinion pieces of the people of the time, while other content includes rather dry things like the charters that the settlers created to govern themselves. But even the drier topics, like the charters, are fascinating because they ask the unspoken question: "What policies would I feel important enough to commit to writing if I were to establish a new colony in a place where there are no rules?" The Annals are NOT a history book; rather they consist ENTIRELY of original writings of the people of the time. As such they are fascinating in a way that no history book can ever be. Beyond that, they cover topics that history-book authors tend to omit, either by virtue of the need for brevity or due to political views of the publishers. For example, it is only through my reading of the Annals that I discovered that the scribes of our two earliest surviving colonies (John Smith in Jamestown and William Bradford in Plymouth) attributed the starvation in their earliest years to their communal system of food production. Through that I eventually did more research to discover that our early colonies were mostly communistic in nature, and that it would be only 150 years later that these people's great-great descendants would come to value capitalism. I've never heard such topics described in any history book anywhere. So: at the root of history education we must have quality content, otherwise there will be nothing worthwhile to ask Four Questions about. I recommend a history curriculum filled, whenever possible, primarily of original writings of the times being studied. Without having read the settlers' own original writings, for example, I would never have known enough about them to write this: "A Lesson in Communism from our Two Earliest Colonies": https://daveziffer.substack.com/p/a-lesson-in-communism-from-our-two
This is excellent. As a former social studies teacher, I would suggest a modification to the fourth question: "What do we think about that"? to either change the question to: What is the relevance to today's and tomorrow's world?" or to make this a possible fifth question...
This is great. Try debates in the classroom. Another way to get kids engaged. And there are great formats for MS kids.
https://www.publicdebateprogram.org/middleschool-programdescription
I was unfamiliar with this method before and I really love it! These are of course the questions we want students to be able to answer in any history class, and in recent years I have been encouraged to introduce them to my 10the graders using all sorts of frameworks for what are now called Historical Thinking Skills. A lot of the language increasingly used in high schools on this originated (as far as I can tell) with College Board's AP curricula and has filtered out.
What I like about this method is that these questions are in plain English and can be universally applied. Even if it's only to make a poster with the questions and put it in front of the room, this post gave me something useful and immediately actionable. Thank you!
Hi Gary! Jon Bassett of 4QM here. Shoot us an email at info@4qmteaching.net and we'll send you a poster of the Questions! And you are spot on: the Questions actually drive student thinking, and "thinking skills" become tools to answer the Questions, rather than just another thing for teachers to be responsible for teaching.
I'm wondering from afar, how History will be covered with many things being wiped out as if never existed under your present Political landscape ?
I’ll be teaching about parallels between 1930s Germany and 2025 US next week. Let’s hope I don’t get fired.
In college I had an art history prof who had made a long horizontal chart with parallel timelines for various categories of human endeavor and global events. It was easy to see the correlations between tecnological advancement and the societal and geopolitical results. Art, media, war and peace, inventing, I can't remember all the lines but they reinforced the correlations in a way I've never seen in a history course. This from a passive chart that wrapped around his office. I'm an engineer and we sometimes get labeled as disinterested in history and the arts.
I have a timeline wrapping around my high school history classroom. Whenever we learn something new it goes in the timeline. I hope it helps my kids ❤️
So interesting! I teach all ages and abilities of of dyslexic kids to read. Some have no historical knowledge at all. But incorporating historical information into our lessons captures their attention, similar to the 4Q method.
After teaching writing for 28 years, my 29th year will begin my journey teaching writing through social studies. I have already created sentence-level activities (The Writing Revolution) to enhance my social studies curriculum. However, the 4QM will give me a variety of activities and also help me hit those dreaded ELA standards. YEA!
Yay for history!! I love the NCSS 3C framework for inquiry as well :)