Beyond Names and Dates 1
Beyond Names and Dates:
Teaching Students to Employ Historical Reasoning
Matt Kelley
Capstone Essay
Peabody College, Master of Education program, 2008
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Abstract
This essay explores several obstacles that a student brings into a high school history
classroom. Since the main goal of history is to develop abstract reasoning, it is
troublesome that a student’s cognitive development could impede this end. In addition to
barely having developed what Piaget refers to as formal operation, the student’s previous
history training, as well as other classes, have led to a complacency with reading texts at
face-value. As an adolescent, the learner will be, to a certain degree, egocentric, and will
judge historical figures and events from his or her own perspective. Several researched
methods are explored to alleviate these issues, including such tasks as developing specific
historical skills within Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, creating
representations that guide students toward the teacher’s level of reasoning, and discussing
paths of reasoning as a class during the lesson. These ideas are applied to a European
History class, in a hypothetical attempt to demonstrate their applications.
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Beyond Names and Dates:
Teaching Students to Employ Historical Reasoning
Introduction
Think of the worst history class you have ever had to sit through, or at least one that you
remember would fall into the general category of “bad.” The odds are strong that the defining
feature of this class was rote memorization of barely connected facts. You were expected to read
a textbook that listed events, names, and dates; then your teacher would revisit these facts in a
similar order, focusing upon some more than others; finally, you were required to show that you
could recall these facts on command. There is a reason that your class was so intolerable: people
do not learn history in this way. The problem is that history teachers do not realize that they
themselves did not learn this way either, because they probably already had the reasoning ability
to connect these facts together, or developed it independently.
Even if they were taught specific strategies, it’s easy to forget them over a period of time.
On a personal note, I used to proctor a Writing Lab in high school in which I helped my peers
write papers for history classes. At the time, I was well-versed in the rudimentary rules of
composition, and could easily give advice that I did not always need to follow myself. Like in
other academic disciplines, you must follow the rules strictly until you know the correct manner
in which to break them. However, when first year college students ask me for advice now, I tend
to forget to tell them to constantly reference the thesis whenever a point is made. I forget this
because it is not only unnecessary in high level history scholarship, but it is also a very inelegant
way to express your point.
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Similar to my experience with writing, history teachers may not recall the best methods
of how to learn history on the high school level – they can absorb facts and connect them to
broad trends instinctively. They read every text with skepticism. Their minds are fully capable
of abstract historical reasoning as a result of physical development as well as training in higher
education. However, history teachers are not teaching future history teachers, but students of
every possible disposition. Just as students with learning disabilities can succeed in a classroom
if specifically taught the strategies that many students know instinctively, one can see most
students of history as having a historical learning disability of sorts, in that they need to be taught
to think like a historian in order to produce the desired results. The focus of this paper will be on
how the regular secondary school history teacher can help students develop the reasoning skills
that are the true goals of history education.
This paper will begin by looking at the learner, and what issues may impede proper
learning if not addressed by the teacher. Only by understanding how a student thinks and learns
can a teacher move the student from his or her initial abilities to the level that constitutes success,
for the student and by extension the teacher and school. This will be followed by a survey of
methods to alleviate these issues in the learning context, which have been developed by scholars
using researched-based studies. These first two sections show that this essay is relevant to any
history classroom in a secondary school, and as such contain most of the value of this work.
However, it is necessary to apply these ideas to a realistic scenario, and so the final section will
be more personal. Since I will be teaching an Advanced Placement European history course in
the coming autumn, I will apply this study to my own plans for this class. Many of these ideas
could be applied to any history class, but they are compiled with a secondary school European
history class in mind.
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The Learner
The first section of this essay will focus on the learner, in terms of what he or she brings
into a high school history classroom before any instruction. In order to address this, however,
this study must pin down one of the central aims of studying history in the first place. According
to Robert V. Daniels (1972),
The purpose of history courses is not encyclopedic factual knowledge, but understanding
and an ability to think historically. […] The study of history means acquiring the ability
to think imaginatively, to organize information, and to use facts in order to discover and
appreciate significant ideas. (p.47)
One might be hard-pressed to find a history teacher who would disagree that thinking
historically, which includes making comparison, exploring causation, and recognizing patterns,
is the major goal of history education.
However, when one looks at the secondary school student, there are some barriers to
teachers helping to facilitate these skills. Of the many valuable insights Jean Piaget’s study into
human cognitive development, the most relevant here are the four stages of development. Piaget
tells us that a child is not able to fully grasp abstract concepts and employ deductive and
inductive reasoning until early adolescence (Woolfolk, 2007). Roy N. Hallam, who performed
studies to apply Piagetian principles specifically to history, concluded “that systematic thinking
appeared later in history than in math or science” (Wineburg, 2001, p. 38), and is more likely to
occur by the age of sixteen (Chaffer & Taylor, 1975), which easily puts that development in
question when thinking about a high school European history student. The students may have
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only begun to develop comfort with “formal operations” (Piaget’s term for the highest level of
thinking developed in the fourth stage), and probably have no familiarity with implementing
them in a historical context; this is problematic when the main goal of a history class is to do just
that. It also does not help that it is likely that most of the history classes before high school are
taught by merely exposing children to facts (for this paper to be necessary, one has to assume
that most teachers are not following the same advice already). M. B. Booth challenges the
rigidity of Piaget’s focus on biological cognitive development’s role in attaining historical
reasoning, stating that “not only can fourteen- to sixteen-year-old pupils think adductively, but
also that learning history can make a significant contribution to their cognitive and affective life”
(1983, p. 113). This gives a history teacher hope for overcoming biological limitations, as well
as inspiration for the importance of history education. However, overcoming these limitations
requires an emphasis on social interaction, which will be explored later.
Students will likely bring an excessive reliance on rigid chronology—learned from
previous years of fact-based history education—with them into the classroom. Part of the
reason, according to Frederick Drake and Sarah Drake Brown, is that students already have a
sense of narrative in mind:
Students perceive 'official history' to be what the teacher (and/or the school and textbook
authorities) dispense to them. This learning of 'official history' knows not ideological or
national borders. It occurs in the United States and other nations where students engage
in the ritualistic study of politically palatable views of the past. (2003, p. 474)
This causes an issue when learning primarily from a textbook. Sam Wineburg performed a study
in which historians with varying specialties and high-functioning high school students reviewed
excerpts from several different historical sources, including historical fiction and classroom
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textbooks. When asked to rank the sources in order of trustworthiness, the historians ranked the
textbook dead last, while the students ranked it as the most reliable (Wineburg, 2001). This
overconfidence in texts as representations of incontrovertible proof is partially due to the
previous education in history, as well as to the recent development of abstract cognition coupled
with lack of instruction in applying it to history. However, the students in Wineburg’s study
were clearly toward the end of their high school education, and had had several history courses
and even had taken their SATs.
Although much attention is paid to the usefulness of teaching history with primary
sources, and teaching students how to read these sources, these same principles are rarely applied
to textbooks which are themselves worded matter-of-factly. Hazel W. Hertzberg (1985) offers
insight as to the nature of history textbooks themselves:
The lack of available synthesis is fundamental to the poor quality of many texts. They
tend to be intellectually thin, paying insufficient attention to long-term historical
development and to the reality of conflict. […] They rarely give more than one
interpretation, although there is practically no important development about which there
are not at least two well-founded interpretations. (pp. 36-37)
Primary documents themselves are of course necessary to developing historical thinking, but one
needs to do more than merely expose students to them. Drake and Brown (2003) propose an
explicit approach to teaching methods of reading primary documents that guides students to
develop skills that historians already use, which mainly revolve around questioning the
background of the author, the bias of the author, the historical context at the time of writing, and
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how to relate these bits of information to the emerging narrative. This will be explored further in
the next section.
Another issue brought up by Jean Piaget is that students at the early part of stage four of
cognitive development experience adolescent egocentrism. Because of this,
Adolescents do not deny that other people may have different perceptions and beliefs; the
adolescents just become very focused on their own ideas. […] Because they can reason
from general principles to specific actions, they are often critical of people whose actions
seem to contradict their principles. (Woolfolk, 2007, p. 36)
This compounds the problem that all human beings, regardless of age, have when studying
history: what Henry Steele Commager refers to as present-mindedness: “Our instinctive habit of
looking at the past through our own eyes, judging it by our own standards, recreating it in our
own words” (1980, p. 44).
Sam Wineburg (2001) also explores an aspect of all encounters with history that is
relevant here. He claims there to be a tension between the familiar and the strange. People are
attracted to aspects of the past to which they can directly relate to their own experiences, as well
as the attributes that make it seem surprising and amazing. To paraphrase the British comedian
Eddie Izzard, “History I find fascinating because it’s so real…in a kind of long-ago, can’tbelieve-it kind of way” (1996). The pull of the familiar in history, Wineburg tells us, “entices us
with the promise that we can locate our own place in the stream of time and solidify our identity
in the present” (p. 5). For these aspects, the Piagetian adolescent egocentrism may be useful, as
teachers can strive to show relevance in the past. On the other hand, in viewing history as only a
means for understanding themselves and their surroundings, students may “discard or just ignore
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vast regions of the past that either contradict our current needs or fail to align tidily with them”
(p. 6). The pull of the strange has limitations as well, as students who fail to see the relevance
may see the strange, distance aspects of history as “a kind of esoteric exoticism” which “may
engage the attention of a small coterie of professionals” (p. 6.) but will have little pull to many
students. This has students and teachers walking a tightrope – the social constructivist school of
cognitive development, led by Lev Vygotsky, tells us that students build on current knowledge
that has been constructed through socio-cultural interactions in their own lives (Woolfolk, 2007,
p. 346). However, Wineburg stresses that the strange, distant past is essential to making history
familiar and applicable:
It is this past, one that initially leaves us befuddled or, worse, just plain bored, that we
need the most. […] The sustained encounter with this less-familiar past teaches us the
limitations of our brief sojourn on this planet and allows us to take membership in the
entire human race. Paradoxically, the relevance of the past may lie precisely in what
strikes us as its initial irrelevance. (2001, p. 7).
So students may indeed be able to attach some aspects of history to themselves immediately, but
the biggest benefit, as well as the most difficult to bring about, come from embracing the strange
and changing it into the familiar.
Learning Context
This section will explore the best methods to address the concerns of the learner outlined
above, beginning with a method that is simultaneously both a concern and a method. One of the
main reasons that students have trouble learning large amounts of facts and then employing
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complex thinking is that most teachers have it backwards – one should start with the big ideas
and then teach how the individual facts connect to those ideas. This is a major theme in
Understanding by Design by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (2005), who define big idea as “a
concept, theme, or issue that gives meaning and connection to the discrete facts and skills” (p.
5). It should not be hard to see how this applies especially to history, as this work has already
discussed the main goals. As Daniels (1972) puts it, “In short, a person should never try to
memorize a fact if he doesn’t know its significance; and if he understands its significance, it is
almost impossible to forget the fact” (p. 48). McTighe and Wiggins (2005) use the term
“conceptual Velcro” (p. 66). For students of history, the teacher must take great pains to
describe essential concepts and patterns before asking students to engage the facts and details.
For example, before learning about the myriad events that led to the formation of a unified
Germany and Italy, the teacher must first discuss the concept of nationalism and how it formed
in the wake of Napoleon’s shattering of previously-held power structures.
The next problem to be addressed is the need to develop complex thought in students that
have little to no background in such, and who are more than likely just beginning to be mentally
capable of such thought. Peter N. Stearns (2000) identifies three distinct tools of the historian,
and creates a set of exercises to gradually help his classes develop them. The first is comparison,
which Stearns addresses by “identifying concrete exercises that helps students accomplish this
reconceptualization of data, repeating these exercises, and gradually increasing their complexity”
(p. 427). He began by assigning homework assignments that asked students to find similarities
and differences for specific topics from the text. After repeating these for two-thirds of the class,
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he then expanded them to include essays, discussions, and other methods of analysis of the
categorized data. The second historian skill he addressed was learning how to deal with change
over time. He introduced the same types of activities, only much later in the course. This was
because the main point is the same—the only difference is that you are comparing data-sets from
across time instead of across geography. The third analytical tool is the recognition of causation,
although at the time of publication his results were not significant.
A hallmark of Stearns’ study is that is involves another social constructivist idea from
Lev Vygotsky, the zone of proximal development. This can be explained as “the area where a
child can solve a problem with the help (scaffolding) of an adult or more able peer” (Woolfolk,
p. 346). Stearns begins with rudimentary activities that exercise the desired skills, evaluates and
guides the students’ products, and increases their difficulty, eventually adding in new elements.
Robert B. Bain (2000) also follows Vygotsky’s ideas of an expert facilitating learning through
assistance, albeit in a different manner. Bain believes that, while engaging students in historical
projects is helpful, since the end goal is to change the way the students think, then the historical
thinking should be made explicit at all steps in the process. By this, he means that the thinking
of all of the players in the classroom should be discussed during lessons, and so
by exteriorizing the thinking of students, past actors, disciplinary experts, and teachers,
we create and shape a disciplinary specific zone of development with beginning points
(student thinking), historical content, and process goals (historical actors/event and
historians’ habits of mind), while encourages pedagogical reflection. (pp. 335-336)
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Bain also believes in Vygotsky’s idea that learning occurs within a social construct. “With social
assistance, learners can perform many more competencies than they could independently;
through social assistance the higher functions emerge and are subsequently internalized” (p.
336). This process involves having student externalize their own thoughts, explaining and
exploring what different historical figures thought, helping the students be critical of texts with
the same questions that a historian would use—all within cooperative framework.
Sam Wineburg (2001) and Suzanne Wilson also make conclusions that line up with
social constructivism when they engaged in a Wisdom of Practice study of eleven history
teachers. Their resulting paper focused on two very effective teachers, John Price and Elizabeth
Jensen, with very different styles of teaching—Price dominates the classroom with his electric
personality, while Jensen is nearly invisible most of the time, instead choreographing the
learning of the students. The common thread of both teachers is that they employed various
representations of the subject matter (such as analogies, stories, demonstrations, debates), each of
which
attempted to build a bridge between the sophisticated understanding of the teacher and
the developing understanding of the student. […] An instructional representation
emerges as the product of the teachers’ comprehension of content and their understanding
of the needs, motivations, and abilities of learners (p. 170).
Wineburg and Wilson state that the best way for a teacher to develop sophistication in their
students’ thought processes is to reflect inward on what the concepts and skills to be learned, and
then to turn outward to empathize with the students’ lack of understanding in constructing these
representations.
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This study also addressed the fallibility of textbooks in the classroom, as the two teachers
employed the texts in similar ways. As Wineburg and Wilson (2001) state, “Sometimes the
textbooks entered the fray of conflicting interpretations; at other times, they acted as foils for the
teachers’ favored interpretations; at still other times they served as resources to help students
follow the story line of history.” The textbook in each of these classrooms was viewed more as
an account, one possible representation of history among many others, rather than the end-all and
be-all factual tome. Wineburg’s essay “On the Reading of Historical Texts” (2001), cited earlier,
also addresses the problems of students not viewing textbooks with skepticism. He uses the
metaphor of a courtroom to explain the different ways of reading textbooks—historians were like
the prosecution, questioning the testimony, finding contradictions, and trying to understand
motivations; students were like the jurors, listening passively to the testimony, questioning
themselves, but unable to address the witnesses directly (p. 77). To illustrate his point,
Wineburg quotes Robert Scholes:
If wisdom, or some less grandiose notion such as heightened awareness, is to be the end
of our endeavors, we shall have to see it not as something transmitted from the text to the
student but as something developed in the student by questioning the text. (p. 84)
The goal is to get the students to read more like historians, whether the text is a primary source
or a class textbook.
This questioning of the text could be one aspect of what Hazel W. Hertzberg (1985) calls
participatory learning. She says that “if history is to have deep and lasting meaning to students,
they must make it their own” (p. 36). Making history one’s own is a crucial way to address the
Piagetian adolescent egocentrism; a feeling of ownership over your education makes it more
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personal, more self-involved than merely doing what the adult in the room says. Veronica BoixMansilla (2000) poses the thought that students should be taught to properly apply historical
knowledge to present contexts. While this can prove to be troublesome, she says that “teachers
may scaffold students to make such connections by giving them multiple supervised
opportunities to do so, identifying students’ difficulties, and orienting their efforts” (p. 392).
Note the clear attention to Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.
While most of the above methods for historical reading can be applied to all texts, Drake
and Brown (2003) specifically address ways to address primary sources in a way to develop
sophisticated historical reasoning. They separate primary source documents into three
categories: 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-order. 1st-order documents are those that the teacher considers
utterly essential, 2nd-order documents are those that relate to the 1st-order document, and 3rdorder documents also related to the 1st-order document, but are ones which the students find
themselves. The idea is that the 2nd-order sources will both corroborate and challenge the
original source, and the students will be asked to also make connections themselves between the
3rd-order and 1st. This gives students a chance to evaluate what they are reading in terms of the
bias, validity, and historical context of any document; eventually they will be doing this without
being prompted by the teacher. At this point, the teacher has succeeded in guiding the students
toward thinking like historians.
Though this work has already shown how Sam Wineburg’s (2001) ideas about focusing
on the familiarity of historical subjects can be useful for egocentric adolescents, it is also
important to cultivate students’ exploration of the strange and distant aspects of history.
Becoming comfortable with the strangeness of history will teach us the inadequacy of our own
perspectives. Wineburg worries that “if we never recognize that our individual experience is
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limited, what hope is there of understanding people whose logic defies our own, whose choices
and beliefs appear inscrutable when judged against our own standards?” (p. 110). It can be
argued that in order to embrace the strange, one must force it to become familiar. When a
student accepts that his own personal judgments do not apply to a certain historical figure, the
next step is to try to put that figure’s actions and words into the actual historical context. By
understanding how that figure could have behaved in that manner, with no connection to the
present, the student is able to bring that figure into closer association with himself, and to inject
both the figure and himself in to the greater set of humanity. This, in sense, could be seen as
making history one’s own, as mentioned in the previous paragraph. This way of addressing the
strangeness of history will develop complex thinking, appeal to the geocentricism in the student,
and also usher him or her into a post-adolescent frame of mind.
Curriculum and Assessment
The rest of this study will take on a more personal tone, as I will be linking the theories
mentioned above to my own practice. As stated in the introduction, many of these ideas can be
applied to any class that attempts to study the history, but they are specifically tailored for a
European History class. This is made all the more personal because I actually will be teaching
AP European History in the upcoming autumn, and I plan on implementing these methods.
Rather than give a quick synopsis of pre-Renaissance history, I will spend 1-2 weeks going over
the history of the Greeks and Romans, with a day or two for the medieval period. For the sake of
clarity and simplicity, in this essay I will mainly address the influence of Greco-Roman thought
upon the Modern Era of Europe.
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The influence of Greco-Roman thought will be my first big idea, which will put the
events and people of the Renaissance into context. Most history students know that the word
renaissance means rebirth, and possibly that it refers to the rebirth of learning; however, I will
emphasize that it is the rebirth of classical learning. Certain facts, like the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks, will be attached to this main idea, as the resultant diaspora of Greek scholars led to
an intellectual phenomenon throughout Europe. The emerging art, philosophy, scholarship, even
architecture came from a resurgence of the classical spirit.
For much of the year, I will ask the students to complete exercises not unlike those
Stearns advocated. Mine will ask students to draw comparisons between Roman and American
law, Greek sculpture and Renaissance sculpture, and many others that will increase in difficulty
and decrease in guidance. Despite the inconclusive results for Stearns, I also plan on
implementing activities and discussions based on exploring causation, specifically with relation
to the Greco-Roman influence on modes of thought, like the Enlightenment and the subsequent
era of revolutions. Also, I will utilize Bain’s method of externalizing historical thought.
Whenever conclusions are drawn, students will be forced to explain their reasoning; my own
assertions will be followed by my reasons and the alternatives; all historical figures and their
motivations will be put into a realistic context.
In regard to the texts of the class, ongoing qualification of their value, bias, and purposes
will occur as a class. Students will be asked to compare similar documents that come from
difference sources but address the same issues. When reading the main textbook, we will call
into question the alternative interpretations of passages, particularly when there is a possible
connection to the classical world that is not explored. Injecting connections to Classical era
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during discussion of the reading will patch up discrepancies of the text, and further facilitate
critical reading.
The goal of these methods is to develop a complex historical frame of mind for each of
the students. In assessing, I will base my grading of each individual assignment on the ability of
the student to correctly apply comparisons and to delineate causation, but my long-term informal
assessment will be based on how well the student increases his or her ability to employ
sophisticated reasoning that is divorced from his or her own identity. I will also assess how well
students can express their own thoughts, and how easily they catch fallacies therein.
My teaching style will more than likely resemble those of John Price, for I have noticed
in my student teaching that I tend to command the attention and interest of the students. Like
Price, I plan on engaging the students not only in the above discussions, but also in group
activities that call on them to debate and discuss significances together and to take stands. This
will hopefully give the students the social framework necessary to learn adequately, as well as a
sense of ownership of their education.
To address the familiar side of European history, I will first have students draw parallels
between their own society and that of the classical world. The next step will be to codify the
influence of Greco-Roman thought upon the Renaissance, and then the following movements
such as the Enlightenment, which in turn influenced the American Revolution. These
connections will make the Europe addressed in the curriculum more relatable, as well as help the
students see a more complex relationship between the events in European history. A major goal
will be to make the strangeness of European history become more familiar by helping students to
understand the situations and influences that affected the lives of those in history.
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To understand the nature of European thought, and how this related to American thought,
will help the egocentric student find value in a history that helps explain his or her own values
and identity. Douglas D. Alder and Matthew T. Downey (1985) assert that understanding
European identity also has benefits for students who are not of European descent: “They are
involved in the culture of the West, as well as that derived from their other ethnic roots, and may
to a greater or lesser extent share its values.” Understanding European identity from its roots
could be as essential for these students as it would be for an emigrant to Hong Kong to study the
world of ancient China. I would argue that the lessons learned in understanding the underlying
currents of European civilization could be applied to learning of any people, from the Islamic
cultures of the middle ages to the Aztecs of a Mexico long gone. Regardless, knowing the roots
of Western Civilization will give a more sophisticated view of the history learned in this class.
Conclusion
At this point is should be clear that the learners do not show up in the secondary school
history classroom with all of the skills and abilities needed to understand or even appreciate
history, and that in fact is the history teacher’s job to impart historical reasoning. The first issue
is that a high school student has probably only just begun to develop the cognition necessary for
abstract thought. As such, the student is also going to be very inwardly focused, basing most
judgment on his or her own thoughts and ideas. This lack of development, coupled with
previous misconceptions of learning, will most likely lead the learner to read textbooks as though
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they were sources of indisputable facts, rather than accounts from certain points of view. This
student will also be pulled by the familiar aspects of history and be put off by the stranger
aspects. Several scholars pose solutions to these problems, such as actively working to develop
historical tools in the minds of students, making historical thinking explicit, creating
representations of historical ideas in ways that bridge teacher and student understandings,
facilitating critical reading of both sources and textbooks, and participatory learning in a social
environment. To illustrate their connection to realistic practice, I applied these ideas to my own
future class, and showed how they could easily fit with any previously-conceived syllabus if a
little flexibility is employed.
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