I’m about to head back to the classroom to get ready for my 18th year of teaching high school students. This time of year puts me into a frame of mind to look back at older lessons and see what I want to tweak and revise. I have a notion to give myself some extra work this year and not just look at my civics and economics lessons for the classes I will be teaching students this year, but also to look at what I did in the years right after the worst of the pandemic when I was teaching students US history. I’m thinking I might package some of that material and post it here on my site. Maybe some teachers will find it useful. Maybe it’ll spark an interesting discussion or two. At the very least it will give me an opportunity to reflect on my work and I hope that will help make me a better teacher.
The reason I want to do this with my US history assignments is that I decided to teach the class by going backward chronologically. We started by talking about what is happening in the US right now, and then each unit went back a few years and tried to talk about some of the decisions and actions that led to the things we had already learned. I had been thinking about this approach for years and I figured, if the disruption of a global pandemic isn’t an opportunity to try an outlandish idea, what is? So I figure this is probably the class where the stuff I have done is different enough from other resources that it’s worth talking about.
Here are some of the reasons that I took the plunge and went with a reverse chronological approach.
FOCUS ON SKILLS: I think this is true for all subjects that we teach students in K-12 education, and I’m certain that it’s true in history: there is more to cover than we can ever hope to cover in one year or even four. But if we can help students develop certain historical thinking skills, we can help them develop a toolbox that they can continue to use for the rest of their lives. The specific content is useful and interesting (to me, at least) in its own right, but its most important function is to give us a space to practice using the skills.
What does teaching about more contemporary history topics have to do with this? The further back in time you go, the more abstract things get to students. (Anyone who has tried to explain to a 2020s teenager what it was like to grow up in the 1980s without a cell phone has an inkling of what I mean here.) Language in the primary documents is going to be a little different. The rhythms of daily life are not the same. What was a contentious issue then doesn’t even raise questions today. So by using more familiar materials, and then gradually showing how the past was different, students can put more of their intellectual energy into building the skills rather than translating the past into the present.
The historical thinking skills I tend to emphasize include:
- establishing and understanding chronology;
- identifying and explaining cause and effect relationships;
- placing primary and secondary sources into context;
- using evidence from sources to support conclusions;
- considering how a source reflects the specific perspective of the creator(s) of that source.
LEVERAGE STUDENTS’ CURRENT INTERESTS: When I chose themes for the year, I tried to pick things that I saw students engaging with in their art projects and other activities, from technology to immigration to LGBTQ+ issues and so on. I was trying to set up a framework that would help them tell a more robust story about the world they were engaging in. Now, it’s absolutely true that in many cases, historians can tell a story about the way our modern world operates that stretches back centuries, but I feel like the closer-to-the-present stuff is often more accessible and easier for students to build their making-connections skills.
LEVERAGE MY LIFE EXPERIENCE: The thing about growing older as a teacher is that there is an ever-growing range of material that exists as lived experience for me and Stuff for the History Books for my students. And when you start teaching students about US history from 1600 or 1865, the odds you get to cover a lot of the 1990s and 2000s are pretty low. When I was in school in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a common joke that US history classes would start in colonial or pre-colonial times and then race to try to get through World War II by the end of the year.
Now, that wasn’t great even when I was a kid – I learned relatively little about the Black civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, post-1960s feminism, and a host of other topics compared to, say, the US Civil War or the Gilded Age. But back then I could still pick up references to the 1960s and 1970s in popular media and I was able to pick up some things from context to cover some of the gap.
Now that gap is even wider – if a US history course wraps up around the 1960s, there’s no room to talk about the rise of AIDS, the public introduction of the Internet, the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, or a bunch of other things that feel enormously relevant to me but are unknown to my students.
Absolutely, some of this is me getting older and metaphorically waving my fist at the clouds and saying “Kids these days!” along with “I’m still relevant!” But I don’t think it’s a bad idea to teach my students about things that, when they have additional questions, I have a lot of tools in the toolbox to help answer those questions.
INCORPORATE NEWS LITERACY: This part is getting a little harder as many news institutions put their archives behind paywalls (often for understandable reasons). But my curating a set of sources that were reporting on events in real time or close to it, I help introduce my students to some of those institutions and help them get practice at gathering information from a text journalism source.
INCLUSIVE TEACHING: I know teachers can and do discuss the 1600s and 1700s without only focusing on white men. But I do appreciate being able to have students learn about Congress by reading about someone like Patsy Mink or about the intersection of culture and commerce by reading about the development of Black musicians like Philadelphia’s own Gamble and Huff in the 1970s.
I taught students US history with this approach for three years, until I was reassigned to teach them about civics and economics. I would definitely enjoy using this approach again if I ever return to the subject, because I think I was reasonably successful at achieving these goals and I believe I would improve the course with further practice. But if that never happens, I enjoy the teaching I do now as well.
Despite all these reasons, there are definitely reasons to reconsider this approach, and some potential stumbling blocks if you take it on. I wasn’t the only one teaching students US History at my school, so if someone transferred between my class and a colleague’s, that person could have a bumpy ride. And if a 12th grade teacher was counting on all of their students having an identical store of background knowledge, well, I kinda wrecked that hope.
I also had to make sure I didn’t assume students already knew things that I didn’t cover. For example: if I’m going to teach students about what Congress did in 2010 before I ever get a chance to teach them about the drafting of the Constitution, I better make sure I explain what Congress does and how it works at the start of the year.
There are also people in the historical studies field who would probably criticize me for the way I’ve talked about using the study of history as a way to understand the present, rather than viewing the people of the past as people with their own lives and their own ways of seeing the world that we should try to understand and respect in their own right. I have a fairly instrumentalist view of knowledge and learning that connects with my philosophical roots in classical US pragmatism, and I know those views are nowhere close to unanimously shared. So some things that I have set out as priorities might not resonate with other educators. (I should also emphasize that even if I study the past as a way of understanding the present, the study is only going to be useful to the extent that I try to understand the people and events of the past as fully as possible, rather than assume that everyone in the past was essentially running a dress rehearsal for whatever thing I might be thinking about today.)
So I would not call this approach to teaching US history a no-brainer can’t-fail approach. But I think some teachers might find it to be a useful structure. So my goal over the next few months will be to post some of my lesson materials here on Not News, and see if it strikes up any useful conversation.