How Students Learn History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005) / Chapter Skim
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4 “They Thought the World Was Flat” Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School History
4 “They Thought the World Was Flat” Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School History
Pages 179-214
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From page 179... ...
Bain For at least a century, educational critics and school reformers have pointed to high school history teaching as the model for poor and ineffective pedagogy. Consider, for example, the introduction to a series of nineteenth-century books on teaching written by psychologist G
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From page 180... ...
Given the demands on history teach ers and the intellectual challenges students face while learning history, how might high school history teachers use the ideas found in How People Learn to construct history-specific instructional environments that support students as they work toward deeper historical understanding? As a veteran high school history teacher with over 25 years of experience, I begin by showing how I cast traditional history topics and curricular objectives as historical problems for my students to study.
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From page 181... ...
However, much as high school history teachers might wish to frame their instruction around the historical problems arising from compelling interests, gaps, puzzles, or mysteries, they must deal with a different set of constraints from those faced by historians. History teachers are charged with teaching their students a history that others have already written; thus they typically begin with course outcomes in hand, determined by curricular mandates (i.e., district or state)
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From page 182... ...
Yet the knowledge base summarized in How People Learn suggests that these are critical to effective teaching and learning. Given the form of most standards documents, history teachers must offer the intellectual and historical context necessary to provide meaning and coherence across dis crete objectives.
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From page 183... ...
Unifying problems, if well designed and historically interesting, can provide a larger frame to help students develop meaningful connections across activities, lessons, units, and courses. Second, in creating instructional problems, teachers also must pay attention to the multiple facets of historical knowledge -- history's facts, concepts, and disciplinary patterns of thinking.
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From page 184... ...
In my high school history courses, I often met this challenge by "problematizing" historical accounts -- history's stories, interpretations, narratives, and representations. Focusing on historical accounts gave me material to create a robust set of problems that stimulated, organized, and guided instruction over an entire course.
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From page 185... ...
It helps move school history beyond reproducing others' conclusions to understanding how people produced those conclusions, while considering the limitations and strengths of various interpretations. By making historical accounts our essential historical problem, we can help students develop familiarity with historical writing; identify ways in which people have interpreted past events; recognize, compare, and analyze different and competing interpretations of events; examine reasons for shifts in interpretations over time; study the ways people use evidence to reason historically; and consider interpretations in relation
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From page 186... ...
Moreover, a focus on multiple, shifting accounts does not mean students will hold all accounts to be equally compelling or plausible; rather, like historians, students must develop tools to evaluate and access competing stories of the past, considering evidence and argument while learning to judge what constitutes sound historical reasoning. In systematically ques tioning historical interpretations over the course of a school year, we can help students understand that accounts differ, and that those differences lie in the questions authors ask, the criteria they use to select evidence, and the spatial and temporal backdrop people use to tell their stories.
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From page 187... ...
Their everyday and commonsense uses of the word "history" blur the distinction between the past and accounts of the past and reinforce typical conceptions that history is but a mirror of the past. A crucial instructional move, therefore, involves creating a language to help students break out of their ordinary, customary use of "history" to make fundamental disciplinary distinctions.
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From page 188... ...
In subse quent activities, the terms served as intellectual "mindtools" to guide student thinking, helping and, at times, forcing students to analyze their everyday uses of the word "history." Thus in building on students' nascent historical thinking, I tried to push them to develop more refined and nuanced histori cal knowledge and skill while framing a historical problem large enough to inform our entire course.
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From page 189... ...
Ellen Except some scientists, right? With some gentle questioning on my part, the students collectively told the standard and widely accepted story of Columbus, an Italian sailor who received funds from the king and queen of Spain to go to the east by sailing west.
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From page 190... ...
. I used these nineteenth-century historical accounts simply to sup port students' preinstructional thinking about the flat earth, intending to return to analyze the accounts later in the unit.11 I asked the students to read the accounts and to look for places where the accounts supported, extended, or contested their thinking about Columbus and Europeans.
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From page 191... ...
This story of the pre-Columbian belief in the flat earth therefore provides a wonderful opportunity to explore both the details of life in fifteenthcentury Europe and larger issues concerning the relationship between historical accounts and the events they attempt to represent. Columbus, most historians today argue, was hardly alone in believing the world was round; indeed, according to recent historical accounts, most educated or even partially educated Europeans believed the world was round.12 The elite, for example, did not resist Columbus because they thought he would fall off the earth's edge; rather, they thought he had underestimated the size of the earth and would never be able to sail so far in open water (a quite reasonable concern had there not been an unanticipated land mass upon which Columbus could stumble)
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From page 192... ...
The first involves probing students' thinking about the historical problem they are studying and making their thinking visible for all to see. History education entails helping students learn to think historically.
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From page 193... ...
The above class discussion is an example of a formative assessment whereby I tried to probe the thinking of the whole class. I asked students to weigh in on the problem, had them spend time documenting their thinking by writing about it in their journals, and then collected their thinking on the board.
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From page 194... ...
This observation leads to the second key feature of history teach ing demonstrated here: asking students to explain how they know what they know about the historical event. Merely asking students to retell a historical story or narrate an event is insufficient for high school history students; rather, teachers must press students to document their understanding, and to explain the evidence they are using to draw conclusions or to accept one historical account over another.
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From page 195... ...
As I orchestrated the class discussion, I intentionally prodded students to consider the story of the flat earth as a specific historical account that may or may not be supported by evidence and, like all historical accounts, one that emerged at a particular time and place: So, did fifteenth-century people believe that the earth was flat? What evidence do you have?
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From page 196... ...
.. at noon on June 21 vertical sticks cast no shadows.On the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the shadows of temple columns grew shorter.
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From page 197... ...
If the two sticks cast shadows of equal length, that also would make sense of a flat Earth: the Sun's rays would then be inclined at the same angle to the two sticks. But how could it be that at the same instant there was no shadow at Syene and a substantial shadow at Alexandria?
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From page 198... ...
" In thus problematizing the Columbian account and framing these ques tions, I sharpened the larger historiographic questions we were using to structure the entire course and the specific curricular objectives for the unit under study. In investigating these questions and analyzing the shifting and competing interpretations of exploration and explorers, high school history students also worked toward mastering the key content objectives for this unit of history.
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From page 199... ...
However, we are cautioned by How People Learn and by scholarship on the challenges novices face in employing expert thinking to look beyond the trappings of the activity and consider the supports students may need to use the problems and resources effectively as they study history. DESIGNING A "HISTORY-CONSIDERATE" LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: TOOLS FOR HISTORICAL THINKING A central feature of learning, as How People Learn points out, involves students "engag[ing]
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From page 200... ...
There is a danger, however, if teachers uncritically accept the historian's practices as their own and confuse doing history with doing history teaching. History teachers, curriculum designers, and assessment architects need to be cautious when attempting to transplant activities from a community of history experts to a body of student novices.
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From page 201... ...
Experts differ from novices, as How People Learn explains, and this is an important point for history teachers to bear in mind. Students learning history do not yet share historians' assumptions.
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From page 202... ...
History teachers regu larly face the dilemma of reducing the challenge of the historical tasks they ask students to tackle or simply moving on, leaving behind or frustrating a number of students. Instead of making such a choice, teachers can keep the intellectual work challenging for all their students by paying careful atten tion to the design and use of history-specific cognitive tools to help students work beyond their level of competence.
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From page 203... ...
Here I refer to visual prompts, linguistic devices, discourse, and conceptual strategies that help students learn content, analyze sources, frame historical problems, corroborate evidence, determine significance, or build historical arguments. In short, these cognitive tools help students engage in sophisticated historical thinking.
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From page 204... ...
Thus, having equipped each student with a particular set of questions to ask classmates, we reread the accounts of Columbus and the flat earth (Box 4-1) : Teacher Does anyone have any questions for their classmates about these sources?
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From page 205... ...
And students raised a number of questions that could not be
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From page 206... ...
Initially, the designed cognitive tools (e.g., group reading procedure) and the teacher carried most of the intellectual load that enabled students to participate in the activity.22 As How People Learn explains, history teachers need to design student-, content-, and assessment-centered learning environments to support stu dents' historical study.
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From page 207... ...
" Also, we can reconsider texts and lectures as possible suports -- historyspecific cognitive tools -- to help students think historically, and not just as vehicles to transmit information. Teachers can design and use lectures and textbooks strategically to help students frame or reframe historiographic problems; situate their work in larger contexts; see interpretations that might support, extend, or contest their emerging views; work more efficiently with contradictions within and among sources; and encounter explanations and sources that, because of time, availability, or skill, students would not be able to use.
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From page 208... ...
It was in the period be tween the third and fourth centennials that the flat earth became a key feature of the story, popularized in no small part by Washington Irving's 1830 biography of Columbus.24 Things had changed quite significantly by 1992. For example, in its ex hibition to remember ("celebrate" and "commemorate" were contested words by 1992)
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From page 209... ...
Helping students develop such historical literacy requires that history teachers expand their understanding of history learning, a task supported by the ideas found in How People Learn and the emerging scholarship on historical thinking. Such research paints a complex picture of learning that helps teachers rethink the connections among students' preinstructional ideas, curricular content, historical expertise, and pedagogy.
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From page 210... ...
To borrow lan guage from my case study, How People Learn expands and challenges our thinking about learning history, and thus assists teachers in marshaling the effort and understanding needed to enact a more sophisticated and effective historical pedagogy. We should harbor no illusions about the challenges awaiting teachers and students engaged in such history instruction.
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From page 211... ...
Jonassen uses the word "mindtools" in relationship to comput ers and technological learning environments, seeing these as "intellectual part ners with the learner in order to engage and facilitate critical thinking and higher learning." The tools I discuss in this chapter, while not electronic, serve as supports to help students engage in historical thinking, and thus fit the spirit of Jonassen's description.
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From page 212... ...
, Know ing, teaching and learning history: National and international perspectives.
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From page 213... ...
. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school.
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