What does historical thinking look like?

Mmm . . . I get this a lot. Especially over the last few months as we’ve rolled out the new proposed social studies standards document for Kansas.

The current document is all about content – with specific indicators that must be taught because they will be on the state-level multiple choice test. And we’ve done a great job over the last decade or so of training our teachers to only worry about whether or not their kids have memorized the tested indicators. The pendulum swung way over to foundational knowledge at the expense of critical thinking.

Since beginning its work, the writing committee for the proposed standards has concentrated on creating a document that balances out the need for foundational knowledge with the need for historical thinking skills. You can’t have one without the other.

But because the system has been so focused on specific historical data points, many teachers – especially the ones that have entered the classroom in the last five or six years – are struggling with the idea of what this historical thinking stuff looks like.

I’ve shared some ideas about this before but the pendulum is swinging back. There are more and more very good resources springing up around the Interwebs that can help. So to help anyone who is looking for some examples of what historical thinking looks like, check out these sweet resources:

Kids don’t hate history, they hate the way we teach it

About 15 years ago, I had the chance to drive James Loewen around for a couple of days. He was in town for a two day workshop and afterwards had to get to Kansas City for a flight. As his chauffeur, I got the chance to pepper him with all sorts of questions. And much of what I wanted to know revolved around his most recent book at the time, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

I was especially curious about the first few sentences in the book:

High school students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it “the most irrelevant” of 21 school subjects, not applicable to life today. “Boring” is the adjective they apply to it. When they can, they avoid it . . .

Once I got him started, Loewen went on to describe the incredible amounts of money being made by movie producers and book publishers who focused on historical topics. At the time, the viewing and reading public was fascinated with movies such as Dances with Wolves, JFK, Saving Private Ryan, and Gone with the Wind and books like Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and David McCullough’s John Adams.

Recent examples would be the recent movies Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty – or books like Unbroken and Killing Kennedy.

He was very clear about it:

Kids don’t hate history. They hate the way we teach it.

Tip of the Week: Text messages from the past

A couple of weeks ago, while catching up on a massive backlog of RSS feeds, I ran across a handy tool that seems perfect for helping you integrate Common Core ELA stuff into your instruction.

Created by Russell Tarr and shared out on the incredible Free Technology for Teachers blog (do you think Richard Byrne ever sleeps?), the Classtools SMS Generator does a great job of recreating the look and feel of an ongoing text message conversation. Kids can immediately relate to the idea that two people would use this sort of medium to share information back and forth.

Google Story Builder – one more cool tool in your toolkit

Just over two years ago, Google used the Super Bowl to highlight a very cool tool they had created called Search Story that used their Search feature to, well . . . tell a story. I spent a few minutes sharing how you might be able to use Search Story to help kids summarize all sorts of information and to discuss historical people, events, and ideas. I thought about how you could use it to create hook activities or have kids create end of unit type products.

The bad news? Google is no longer supporting Search Story.

Sigh.

But . . . they’ve created a replacement. Google’s latest fun tool called Story Builder is up and running.

3 infographics tools that you and your students should be using

Yesterday was a good day.

Any time that I can spend with social studies teachers, talk history content, and share ideas about instructional best practices has got to be a good day. That was yesterday.

But I noticed something. A lot of what we were doing revolved around visual things, not just text. We always think about social studies being a text-based activity. Documents and text books handouts and lots of paper. But much of what we did yesterday involved images and maps, Google Earth and videos.

Part of it is that I truly am a visual learning and so my brain naturally tilts in that direction. But good instructional practice and brain research is telling us that using visuals is a great way for content to connect with kids.

A recent addition to the visual toolbox we have access to is the infographic. So what’s an infographic?