This post is by guest author Sarah Bassett, who is a first year first-grade teacher.  My first year of teaching has struck a balance between exciting, overwhelming, and invigorating. As a first-grade teacher, I am responsible for teaching every subject in a self-contained classroom. This means that, unlike middle or high school level teachers, I don’t have the luxury of wrapping my brain around one single subject.  Before school started, I was given a large binder filled with curricula for every subject I would teach. My math curriculum came with two teacher manuals that outlined eac ..read more

We recently heard from an elementary teacher who admitted to skimping on social studies instruction in her classroom. She explained that she knows it’s important, but “I just don’t know how to do it.”  This is a common problem. Elementary teachers have lots of ideas and models for teaching math and reading. That’s not surprising, since these subjects get the lion’s share of teaching time, and are what most states test. There are lots of elementary math curricula, and most teachers have an image in their minds of what a math lesson looks like. We demonstrate addition, and have students pra ..read more

Happy New Year to all our readers! We wish you all the best for 2024. In this post we are looking back to one of our highlights for 2023: a visit to a fifth grade classroom that was using 4QM curriculum. In this post I’ll describe what we saw there and explain how the curriculum made it possible. We’ll be writing even more curriculum in 2024, and it will all follow the same basic structure that made this fifth grade classroom successful. The visit took place during the 2023 national social studies conference, which was in Nashville in early December. We had a great time at the conference; we s ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of giving a workshop with our friend and colleague Art Worrell, the history curriculum leader for the Uncommon Schools network and co-author of a new book on secondary school history teaching. We were working with a group of social studies teachers in Indianapolis, and we opened the day with a lesson simulation that took the participants through all four questions of the Four Question Method as though they were students. Art is a master teacher, and he designed a really engaging lesson about the Stono Rebellion of 1739. You may not have heard of it, but it was one o ..read more

We often hear from schools and teachers that we work with that one of their main goals is to increase or improve the quality of student discourse. This is indeed a worthy goal: we want history and social studies classrooms to be active places where students are doing the intellectual work of our discipline, and often that work is best done in conversation with peers or with a teacher or both. There are not many teachers who disagree with this goal — but there are many teachers who don’t know exactly how to achieve it. The Four Question Method can help. MEANINGFUL CONVERSATIONS If our goal is s ..read more

Is the Four Question Method applicable to civics education? Gary and I get this question a lot. As history / social studies people we’re often in contact with civic education advocates and organizations, and as a small organization interested in growing we’re sometimes advised to make a pitch for ourselves as civics educators. As a friend of mine put it to me over drinks a few weeks ago, “There’s a lot of money in the democracy space right now.” We’re not the sort of people who would misrepresent ourselves for money, but I do actually believe that learning history with the Four Question Method ..read more

One thing we all learned during the COVID pandemic is that school matters. Test scores fell after the year of interrupted schooling in 2020-21, and anyone who was in the classroom during the 2021-22 school year can testify to the fact that students who were not in school the year before missed a lot of learning about positive school habits and behaviors. I suppose it’s good news, in a way. Most of us who work in schools are motivated at least in part by a desire to make the world better, and it’s nice to know that our work actually makes a difference in what young people know and can do. LOW H ..read more

We just had a consultant come to my school to do a review of our social studies program. We got some useful feedback, which will help us to set our agenda for professional development and materials acquisition.  I noticed something strange, however. For classroom observations, they used a rubric, naturally. That rubric defined “rigor” as student engagement with primary source texts and artifacts. In other words, that’s what they expected to see in a high-functioning social studies class.  Jon and I believe very strongly that students in social studies classes should engage with meani ..read more

I watched a very good teacher ask her students a silly question the other day. The lesson started with a background reading on World War II propaganda in the US. The reading contained information about the Office of Wartime Information (OWI), which FDR established by executive order in 1942 to coordinate the country’s propaganda campaign. The class read the brief, informative article aloud and the teacher clarified and checked for understanding. She then gave groups packets of sample propaganda posters and asked them to identify common themes.  The lesson was a classic Question Two (What ..read more

Teachers of history and social studies on all grade levels know they want students to do more than just memorize facts; they want students to practice thinking about history as well. This is a valuable and important goal. Humans remember what we think about, so actually engaging intellectually with history will help students to remember more of it. And as citizens of a democracy, we want our students to be able to grapple with history, politics, and social and civic questions actively and critically. Active thinking in social studies class is good practice for active citizenship.  Curricu ..read more