Want Kids to Learn History? Ask These 4 Questions

Several initiatives aim to improve history education, but only one provides teachers with an overarching framework.

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History teachers generally get inadequate training and materials, and students often don’t learn much. Several initiatives are trying to address the problem, but only one—the Four Question Method—provides teachers with the framework they need.

Efforts to improve history instruction go back decades. A federal program called Teaching American History spent $1 billion between its inception in the early 2000s and its expiration in 2012, mostly on providing history teachers with “professional development” in the form of lectures by professional historians. Teachers loved it, but there was no evidence it boosted students’ knowledge of history.

And students’ knowledge needs boosting. On the most recent round of national tests in U.S. history, only 15% of eighth-graders scored proficient or above—a slight decline from previous years. Even college students may struggle to answer basic questions like “Who won the Civil War?”

Students often find history boring, and teachers’ knowledge and skill may be part of the problem. Only about 40% of social studies teachers majored in history, and many take on other responsibilities like athletic coaching. Of the various tests required of aspiring elementary teachers, the one they’re most likely to flunk is social studies. To make things worse, state history standards and textbooks based on them often try to cover an enormous range of topics, preventing teachers and students from digging deeply into any one of them.

At a time when reading and STEM subjects get all the attention, schools generally treat history as relatively unimportant. At the elementary level it’s rarely taught at all. Even many middle schools ignore it. But it’s hard to make sense of the present if you don’t know much about the past. And it’s hard to make sense of history if you first encounter it in ninth grade.

The most recent prescription for making history classes more engaging—and helping students see that narratives of the past are more complex than what is presented in textbooks—is primary source documents. These days, many such documents are available at the click of a mouse. And at least two different initiatives aim to put them at the center of history instruction.

One is the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (GLI), which offers a dizzying array of programs based on the 75,000 items in its collection, all searchable online. Like the Teaching American History program, it sponsors summer institutes with lectures by illustrious historians. But it also tries to reach students more directly. The institute counts some 30,000 schools as “affiliates,” and its document-focused lesson plans—some aimed at the elementary grades—are freely available online.

Then there’s the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which has created document-based lessons for secondary students. Teachers present background information on a topic and then have students “interrogate” a series of documents with a guiding question in mind. That might be “Was the New Deal a success?” or perhaps, “Was Lincoln a racist?” Students are taught to pay attention to the source of a document and the author’s purpose in writing it, to evaluate its reliability.

Primary sources can have value as teaching tools. But—speaking as someone whose job for 10 years was reading and analyzing eighteenth-century documents—they can be tough going. They use archaic language and convoluted sentence structure and refer to now-obscure events and individuals without explanation. If you want an example, try a paragraph or two from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan.

Many high school students, through no fault of their own, struggle to read and understand even contemporary texts written at a high school level. For elementary students, the challenges of reading primary sources are even greater. One GLI elementary-level lesson on the Pilgrims has kids parse the Mayflower Compact, written in 1620. The materials guide them to paraphrase the document, chunk by chunk, and students may find the effort engaging. But is it the best use of their time? Isn’t there a risk they’ll lose sight of why they’re reading the Mayflower Compact?

A third history-teaching initiative—the most promising one, in my opinion—takes a different approach, bringing in primary sources more as seasoning than the main course. It’s the brainchild of two Boston-area high school history teachers, Jonathan Bassett and Gary Shiffman, and it’s laid out in a highly readable and insightful recent book, From Story to Judgment: The Four Question Method for Teaching and Learning Social Studies. (I provided a blurb for it.)

The “four questions” are simple but powerful, and applicable to any historical topic. And, Shiffman told me, “The one cardinal rule is, don’t be boring. There’s no reason to be.”

The four questions are:

·        What happened? Constructing a coherent story about a series of events is difficult but crucial. Teachers often skip this step, leading to basic misunderstandings. As Bassett recounts in the book, two-thirds of the way through a unit on the American Revolution, several of his students were surprised to realize the war was against the British.

·        What were they thinking? Here is where primary sources can be used, judiciously, to help students place themselves in the shoes of historical actors.

·        Why then and there? This may be the most difficult question, calling for comparison with other times and places. But it teaches students to analyze and draw lessons from history.

·        What do we think about that? A great question, but it can only be answered meaningfully after a thorough exploration of the first three.

There’s much more about the method in the book, and I encourage anyone interested in history education to read it. But for many busy and perhaps inadequately prepared teachers, adapting the method to their own curriculum is a heavy lift.

That’s why Bassett and Shiffman, who also provide hands-on assistance to schools, are now creating a couple of complete teaching units, with materials and daily lesson plans. Even better, one of the units—created and piloted in partnership with a charter school called Nashville Classical—is at the elementary level, fourth grade.

The unit is on the Renaissance, and to develop it Bassett and Shiffman first streamlined an unusually content-rich but overstuffed elementary curriculum called Core Knowledge History and Geography. For example, rather than covering three Italian cities—Florence, Rome, and Venice—the duo opted to go in depth only on Florence and just mention that the Renaissance was taking place in those other cities as well. They decided to focus primarily on the transition from medieval art—which was confined to religious subjects and also unsigned—to that of the Renaissance, when artists began signing their names. The unit’s version of Question Four is, “When is it okay to boast?

Bassett and Shiffman hope the unit can serve as a template for others—and ultimately, they hope to get funding to create an entire K-8 curriculum based on their method, which also incorporates writing assignments designed to develop writing skills and deepen content knowledge. (Their approach to writing borrows from The Writing Revolution, which I co-authored.)

Of course, there’s still the question of whether any of these initiatives will boost student achievement in ways that can be measured. So far, only SHEG has been evaluated that way: A quasi-experimental study with eleventh-graders found it improved historical thinking ability, retention of factual information, and reading comprehension. That’s encouraging, but the document-based approach was being compared to “business as usual.” It’s possible something else could work even better—and work at the crucial elementary level too.

If I were a betting philanthropist with an interest in history education, I’d put my money on the Four Question Method.

This post originally appeared on Forbes.com.