The 7 Things All Good Lessons Have in Common:

A Checklist for History Teachers

Last month I finished a semester of teaching the social studies methods course to would-be secondary social studies teachers. And before summer gets too far along, I figured this might be a good time to review some of the things I did and share them in the hope that they are useful for readers of this blog.

While this post is written from materials designed for new teachers, I have found the checklist I describe a useful reflection tool for any teacher, myself included. As I dig through old lessons when I write this blog, I ask myself whether or not my lessons fit my own checklist for what makes a good lesson. I came up with this list after years of evaluating student teachers. The 7 items on the list reflect things I saw student teachers do or forget to do. These were the things that helped make a lesson succeed, or the things that made the lesson miss the mark.

As you review and revise the lessons you taught this year, try asking yourself whether or not your lesson meets this test. And if you think I have left important things out of this test/rubric/checklist, or whatever you want to call it, do leave a comment.

Also, keep in mind that when I say, "All" good lessons should have these things, we all know that sometimes a lesson is a work day in the library or getting straight into groups to finish a 3 day project, or something like that. So I don't mean that you have to do all 7 of these things on days like that.

Here's my 7 point checklist for what all good lessons should have:

#1: All good lessons, like a good paper, should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

So right out of the gate, I know I'm cheating a little bit because this is really 3 things. Sort of. Together, they make the point that a lesson cannot consist of doing a bunch of random things until the bell rings. A good lesson must be PLANNED. And it should have an introduction, which sets up the main body of the lesson, and the whole thing should be wrapped up in a conclusion. Does that mean all lessons have to fit into a 40, 45, 50 or 80 minute period? Of course not. But the bell will ring at the beginning and end of each period. So even if you are planning a 2 day (or longer) lesson, you need SOME kind of intro and conclusion for each day.

The beginning, or intro: In the educational literature, some folks call the beginning of a lesson a "hook," others describe it as a "set induction" or an "anticipatory set." While each term has subtle differences, the point is that good lessons have a thoughtfully created introduction. Ideally, it should pique students' curiosity and get them excited about what they are going to do today. It should also remind students about where they've been and where they are going. (More on this in number #3, below.) See this link for a brief, but effective general explanation.

There are practical reasons for a good beginning or introduction, too. Diligent teachers have usually spent a lot of time creating a lesson, so they know what their lesson is about. But they forget, sometimes, that their students have just come in from a rough math test, or an argument with their best friend, or lunch, or a million other things. Do your students remember what you did yesterday? Do they have any clue that today you are reviewing the factors leading to the American Revolution? The answer is that most do not. So a good lesson should have a clear beginning that reminds them about what is going on, makes them forget about that math test for now and gets them to focus on history.

How do you do that? Well, I spent the better part of a 2 hour class on that this semester, so I really should write a separate blog post on this (note to self). But in case you want ideas NOW and I forget to write a post about this later, you can always do something like have students respond to an intriguing quote, or a piece of art or music, or a visual like a map, chart, political cartoon or photograph. They can do this by writing in their notebooks, adding to an online journal or blog (or twitter maybe?), or simply discuss with a partner.

The middle: This whole blog is about stuff that goes in the middle. Points #4, 5 and 6, below, are also more specific about what happens in the middle.

The end or conclusion: This is the number one thing missing from over half the lessons I observe from student teachers. In all fairness to them, most student teachers have a conclusion in their lesson plan, but they often run out of time. That, of course, is the difference between a lesson plan and an actual lesson, as all teachers know. (More on this in point #7, below.) 

But when teaching methods this semester, I found that students didn't always know what should be in a conclusion. There is more to this than I can fit in this post, but the short answer is that the conclusion should "conclude." It should tie up the lesson into a sort of package that addresses #2, below. It could refer back to your introduction, or sum up what you did in the body of the lesson. But don't just end because the bell rings. Ideally, you are sharing the burden of concluding the lesson with your students, eventually handing it off to them entirely. If the teacher is the one always summing up, we know the teacher will have learned the material. The key thing is to get our students to do it.

A few links regarding conclusions:

• Here is a link to a bunch of ideas for ending a lesson compiled by Ann Sipe of Grandview School District in Washington. I don't necessarily endorse all of these ideas. Some of them just don't work for my personal teaching style. Others are better suited for elementary school. But there a lot of suggestions to get you started if this you're looking for ideas on ending lessons.
• Also, check out this post, "Teaching Like We Write--Introduction and Conclusion in the Lecture." I came up with the idea for #1 on my checklist long before I read this post. And this post is specifically about coming up with conclusions for college lectures. But there is still useful material there for any teacher and any kind of lesson, not just lectures. I have linked to this blog post before, so you may have already seen this.

Your lesson might have a spectacular introduction and conclusion, but the most important part of a lesson is really #2.

#2 All good lessons should have a point.

This should go without saying, you may think. But think a little harder. Can you give an "elevator speech" for every lesson you teach? More importantly, can your students? Does your lesson clearly address an essential question or an important concept or idea? While it is true that some ideas are far too big for one single lesson (federalism, sectionalism, Civil War, industrialization, immigration, etc.), each lesson within a unit should build to some larger point. (e.g. you might have a few days about immigration but one of those days would focus specifically on the problem of assimilation.)

The point of "the point" is that there should be some reason why you are teaching this lesson. Something which addresses the number one question that all of our students ask,

Why do we have to know this???

The pre-service teachers I work with typically teach at least a few lessons in the semester before their student teaching. They sometimes tell me things like, "My cooperating teacher wants me to do a lesson on ___________ " and then they fill in the blank with a random topic, such as the legislation of the New Deal or comparing the North and the South before the Civil War or the five pillars of Islam (not all my students are in U.S. history). And then they want to know where they should start. 

And realistically, that's what a lot of us do. We know what we did last year, and yesterday, and so what comes next is comparing the North and South. But we should--every year--ask ourselves why do students need to know about the similarities and differences between the North and South? What is the point? How does this understanding help us better comprehend both the onset of the Civil War as well as its outcome? Do any of these differences still exist? In what way(s) does studying this topic improve the quality of our students' lives?

Did I lose you on that last one? Agreed, it's a little "out there." After all, we all know adults who live happy and successful lives who may not realize how many miles of railroad track the North had compared to the South. But thinking about the "bigger" questions behind the main topic of a lesson can help us consider why it may have mattered that the North had more railroads than the South in the first place. And then we can turn the question around and point out that the British had far greater resources than the colonists during the Revolution, and yet in that case, the advantages did not result in a British victory. Nor did the superior weaponry the United States had compared to the Vietnamese. (FYI, the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, David and Goliath, has a great chapter on the Vietnam War that touches on this very point. It also good stuff on the Civil Rights movement and things that make you think about education in general. A good summer read.) So your lesson about differences between North and South can lead students to thinking about war and winners and losers in general. And how big guys beat little guys but not always. And that is an idea that students can really sink their teeth into.

Many of us went into teaching to make a difference in our students' lives. And, as I pointed out in an earlier post about my high school chemistry teacher, we can make a difference even if our students don't love history the way we do.

If we ask ourselves the same questions our students are wondering--why do we have to know this--our answers will help us make our lessons more meaningful. Easier said than done, I realize. One of the ways to think about the point of each lesson is to ask ourselves how it connects to the larger unit of which it is a part. Which brings me to #3...

Vietnam: thoughts on lesson ideas

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I didn't study anything about the war in Vietnam until college. Like all too many American students, my high school history education stopped abruptly with V-J day.

But my first exposure to Vietnam was in middle school, when part way through the school year, we got a new student in class.  Our teachers introduced him and explained that he was from Vietnam. We didn't know where that was, and he couldn't tell us much, because he didn't speak much English. Despite his poor grasp of English, he seemed to understand all too clearly that at least some kids made fun of his odd-sounding foreign name and funny accent. 

One day his mother came to class as a guest speaker. She spoke English just fine. And she told us about the family's harrowing experiences escaping from Vietnam after the war, and their eventual journey to the United States.  I remember watching some of my classmates--the ones who had teased this boy--squirming uncomfortably in their seats.

Political cartoon by David Levine.

The Vietnam War is like that. It makes us squirm in our seats. Not only is it a story without a happy ending, it has left more than just the scar on Johnson's presidency, as depicted in the famous cartoon on the left. Not even counting--for a moment--the actual casualties of the war, this conflict that lasted over twenty-five years was responsible for an increasing skepticism and cynicism about U.S. foreign policy, distrust of the government in general, and the presidency in particular, from which we have yet to recover.

Funny that the seventies is known the "Me" decade, isn't it? When we think about the Vietnam War that ended in the 1970s, it's all "US, US, US"--pun intended. Our study of the conflict is very much from the American perspective.

That makes some sense. We are, after all, American and teaching American history. But widening our perspective might not be a bad thing to do. For starters, students are often surprised to know that in Vietnam, the conflict is referred to as the "American War."

Try this experiment with your students: have them search on Google the term "Vietnam War Casualties." Of the nine sites that showed up on the first page of Google results when I tried this, only three (Wikipedia was one) included Vietnamese casualties. Or even before that, try Googling "Vietnam." If you do a search on any other country, you will get news, tourist information and the like. You will get that if you enter "Vietnam," too, but you will also a few sites just about the war. That is not true of any other place on earth. Only googling "Iraq" and "Afghanistan" come close.

So I think before we teach anything about Vietnam, we might want to point out this American, war-centric perspective. And share the casualties. From both sides. (Note: this link is a great resource for all things Vietnam War related.)

A few years ago, I stumbled across the book, History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History which I mentioned in an earlier post about the Annexation of the Philippines. There is a chapter on Vietnam that includes excerpts from textbooks from Vietnam, France and Canada. For an excellent online source about the Vietnamese perspective, see this page. It's well worth reading the whole thing, but then scroll down to the part where it mentions the overall key points that are taught in Vietnam. I have excerpted the first point below:

It was a war against American invasion

In Vietnam, the war is called as the “Resistance War Against the United States (to protect the country)” (chien tranh chong My cuu nuoc). It is always taught that the U.S. was another colonist power and imperialist just like the French and that Vietnam is not a civil war but instead a war against American invasion.

This is an important concept for students to grasp and worth introducing at the beginning of your unit. It is complex, and you would probably want to revisit this interpretation as you go through the unit. But it speaks volumes about how differently both sides saw the war. We need to consider the Vietnam War from these different perspectives. Was it a proxy war, a civil war between North and South Vietnam, a colonial war of resistance, an effort to stop the spread of communism? That depends on what side one was on, and there were more than two. (I can feel a new idea for a lesson coming on...."Read each of the quotations below. Which perspective from this list best describes the author's understanding of the war?")

In my next post I will share a few lesson materials on Vietnam, but in the meantime, I will conclude with a few basic points that I think students need up front before they can start critically examining the period.

1. Where is Vietnam? Make sure students can find it on a map. Understanding that it was a nation few Americans could find on a map when we first became involved is key, too. Understanding Vietnam's location in relation to China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines is worthwhile, too.

2. War was never declared, so why do we call it a war?  Remind them: only Congress has the power to declare war, as stated in Article I, section 8, clause 11. You could have a whole lesson on this, and later in your unit students will likely encounter the War Powers Resolution of 1973. But I like to at least mention this at the outset and remind them that the precedent had been set in Korea.

1975 Political Cartoon - this particular copy of this cartoon, 

coincidentally, is the copy owned by President Obama that 

will be displayed in the Obama library. 

3. Vietnam was America's longest war.  Students associate Vietnam with the sixties. Understandably. But make sure they know that while the U.S. first sends troops in 1965 and "advisers" before that, the roots of the conflict in Vietnam begin much earlier. Vietnam was a matter of discussion by Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. And Ho Chi Minh was at Versailles back in 1919 trying to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson. (FYI, the link is to a the Wall Street Journal's commemoration of World War I. Bookmark this site for your World War I unit--wish I had known about it sooner!) Just like the Civil Rights movement doesn't begin overnight with Brown v. Board, the Vietnam War doesn't start with Kennedy or Johnson.

4. I also like to set up the unit by introducing a few overall, essential questions raised by U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There are many, but the three I like to focus on throughout the unit are below. They are adapted from historian George C. Herring. I post them up on the board and refer back to them as we go.

•  Why such a huge commitment in an area of so little apparent importance? In other words, why did we get involved in Vietnam in the first place? Why did we continue?
• Why, despite an enormous military arsenal and spending $150 billion, did the world's most powerful nation still fail to accomplish its objectives?
• What were the long term consequences of this failed foreign policy for the U.S. government? for public confidence? for later foreign policy? For good measure, either to introduce the unit or conclude it, you could introduce the concept of the Vietnam Syndrome. The cartoon below is useful for that, though pretty challenging. There is a lot of background knowledge students would need to understand it. An easier one, and one of my personal favorites, you can see here. It's by cartoonist Daryl Cagle and dates from March 2003. This is a theme to develop further when you get to the Gulf Wars and --if you make it!--to the present day.

There are a few other good cartoons and a thought-provoking article about Iraq replacing Vietnam in our national psyche which you can see in this article from the Huffington Post.

Cartoon above found here. 

For more on Vietnam see my next post which includes a few things of mine and links to some other great resources. Find that here.

Some Thoughts on Class Participation, Role Play and How to Approach World War II in a U.S. History Class

At this point in the school year, it can be an uphill climb to impact any significant change in the culture of your classroom. You and your students have likely long settled into your roles. But there is still a good month and a half or more of school left to go, and it is our responsibility as the grownup in the room to keep fighting the good fight.

I am thinking specifically about classroom participation. We all would like a classroom environment in which every student's hand is waving in the air, every kid eager to participate. But the sad truth is that many classes have a handful of students who regularly participate and....well, and that can often be it. In my work evaluating student teachers, and currently I am teaching pre-student teachers in the methods class, I often harp about the need to pay attention to the kids. It is hard for beginning teachers to do that, I understand. They are so busy trying to figure out what they are going to do, that it is hard to really see what the students are doing. And they are so grateful when a student raises his or her hand, that they rarely use the power of "wait time" to see if anyone else is going to throw a hat in the ring.

I think about this often while looking back on my own middle school self: I was that quiet kid who NEVER wanted to raise her hand. There was a boy named Warren in lots of my classes who was an active class participant. For alphabetical reasons, I was often right behind him. And sometimes when the teacher would call, "Warren," I got a pit in my stomach feeling because "Warren" rhymes with "Lauren" and I was terrified thinking that the teacher had called on me.

So how do you get the Laurens to participate?

There has been a ton of research on this topic, which I'm not going to get into here. Suffice it to say that there are techniques that involve using classroom blogs, polls, or online discussions (See Edutopia's guide to online discussion) which allow students to participate without the "scariness" of having to speak out loud. Or techniques like the ones described by Doug Lemov (check out this excerpt about "cold-calling, wait time and other ideas) that can boost participation. (See also this interesting article about a university professor's success with small group discussions, fyi.)

In today's post, I'm going to offer another technique: role play. One of the advantages of a role play activity is that students are somewhat freed from having to be themselves. Sometimes the self is a tough role to play for adolescents. If you assign them the role of a historic figure, they don't have to worry as much about what other kids (or you) will think of their own ideas, as they are playing the role of someone else.

Hence my idea about role play. In a lesson on the U.S. and the world in the 1930s, what if students were each assigned a role, some fictional, some real, and then I had a list, so instead of calling on Lauren who is shy or Warren who may monopolize class discussions, I could call on Eleanor Roosevelt? Or an American World War I veteran? Or an Italian immigrant?

What I also like about this technique is that it forces students to grapple with the Problem of Presentism. We know there will be a World War II. We know the U.S. will join and that Nazi Germany will be defeated. But in 1933 or 1936 or 1939, nobody knew that. What they did know, our students forget because it was on the test from the last unit or two: World War I was terrible, with mixed results and the U.S. was in the midst of a terrible depression. So we need to remind students to think about the events of the 1930s from the perspective of those who lived through it.

One of the problems posed by World War II for U.S. history teachers is that the period 1935-1941 is an enormously complex time filled with lots of important and intersecting events. Take a look at this list of "vocab terms" from the end of a chapter of a typical U.S. history book:

Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1937 and 1939
cash and carry
Arsenal of Democracy
Lend-Lease
Ludlow Amendment
Panay incident
Selective Service Act

If you add to that key events from abroad...rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, Mussolini and the invasion of Ethiopia, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Spanish Civil War, the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Sudetenland, the policy of appeasement, the Anschluss, Kristallnacht, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet pact, etc., etc., etc....You will overwhelm your students and they will learn nothing.

There are two issues as I see it. First, is what should be covered in a United States history class vs. a world history class. And once we made the decision to focus on the war from an American perspective and save the rest for the world history teachers, how do we tame the content beast that remains?

My answer, as has hopefully become familiar to regular readers of this blog, is to focus on Essential Questions and recurring themes. If you read my earlier post on idealism and realism in U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. annexation of the Philippines, you probably already know where this lesson is going. That is my intention with my students as well. I want them to see the connections between the Spanish American War and World War I and World War II. Those connections center around these essential questions:

In what circumstances should the U.S. intervene in world affairs? When should we be isolationist? When should we intervene? And what are the criteria for deciding?  

So I begin my unit on World War II by setting the stage: the U.S. is still in the midst of the Great Depression, and FDR has key legislation he is trying to get through Congress. He will be up for reelection in 1936, and again in 1940. The infamous "Court Packing Plan" of 1937 has exposed Roosevelt to significant criticism. And meanwhile, there is very troubling news coming from Europe and Asia.

I then assign students each a role. I have created 25 different roles for students here. At the beginning of this document is your "cheat sheet." This is what you use to call on #16, Eleanor Roosevelt or the fictional #23, Raymond Hewitt. If you have more than 25 in a class, you can either double up or come up with a few more. You will note that some are fictional and some are real and I have noted that for the students. If you are on a 1:1 model, you can assign students roles through Google Doc or something like that. Otherwise, you will have to cut and paste the role from the previous handout onto this one for each student in your class, which is more of a pain, but certainly doable.

Class begins with my favorite Theodor Geisl (aka Dr. Seuss) political cartoon so we can review the concepts of "isolationism" and "interventionism" they learned when studying World War I. (Though point out that the cartoon is from 1941 and you are going to backtrack).

I handle the "troubling news from Europe and Asia" with this brief PowerPoint. Part of my reason for keeping it brief is to tame the content beast, but part of it is also deliberate: not all Americans are paying super close attention to what's going on abroad. Some are, some less so. Many would be familiar with at least the headlines. (And I am de-emphasizing European and World history in order to focus on U.S.). But again, they don't know as we do know what is going to happen and therefore how significant it is some of these events will be in hindsight.

Throughout class, you can conduct discussions, short or longer, where students discuss their role. Ask them how their character would feel about supporting various pieces of legislation (e.g. Neutrality Acts, Lend-Lease). They don't need to memorize all this legislation for the test; but they will get a sense of what kinds of things FDR is proposing to "bring the country" along with him. Ask students how they might react to the news from abroad, based on their character. Ask them how they would react to FDR's speeches such as the Quarantine speech in 1937. (Especially if you live in the Chicago area, check out the occasion for the speech as described in this Tribune article.) By the end of these discussions, students should have a better sense of the diversity of American public opinion, the importance of it and the need to respect it if you are president running for re-election and trying to pass your New Deal legislation. Take polls, either through a show of hands (low-tech) or on polldaddy.com or surveymonkey.com, where you can sign up for free as a teacher. For more details, and links to additional primary sources, see my write up of this lesson.

And you can end your lesson with this quotation:

History never looks like history when you are living through it. It is always looks confusing and messy, and it always feels uncomfortable.

— John W. Gardner

One last point, I've been neglecting lately to explicitly connect my blogposts to specific Common Core standards. (I confess, I keep hoping that my motto of "high standards that meet any standards" will suffice, as I get tired of navigating the poorly designed CCSS website.) But my newest interest is the overlooked Common Core Speaking and Listening standards. Until the time when I can post my own ideas on these standards, check out this great blogpost about them from Erik Palmer, whose webpage pvlegs.com is on my new must-read list and this one from Dave Stuart's blog, teachingthecore.com, and note that the above lesson ideas would meet the Speaking & Listening standards #1C. See here for more info on the 8th grade version of those standards.) Also, if students spend time looking at Roosevelt's speeches, they are meeting CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.2 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.9-10.2 or CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RH.11-12.2, depending on the grade level you teach.

Biography and History, Rockefeller and Carnegie: Telling Stories to Grapple with Big Questions

As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "All history is biography."

Whether or not the above quotation is accurate, it is true that history is about people. As as my Dear Friend and Mentor used to tell me, whenever I came running into his office at 3:04 pm panicking about how I should teach Topic X the next day, his response was always, "tell them a story."

Fortunately, for those of us who teach U.S. history there are a lot of good stories. And today, as I ponder how to teach about the rise of big business in the U.S., the obvious personalities are Rockefeller and Carnegie.

One interesting way to begin a lesson on big business in the late nineteenth century might be to to ask students which list of names on the left looks more familiar. Most students will have heard of at least some of the names on the right, while they are likely to be stumped by the presidents. This can be a useful way to introduce the question, where was the center of power in the late nineteenth century? (see the last political cartoon at the end of this post)
And the follow up questions suggests their influence: how do we know these names? (Trust me, they probably don't know them because they learned about them in an earlier U.S. history class.) If they have heard about them, it is because there are still foundations and banks and universities named for them. (Keep in mind the demographics of your students here. It may be more likely for middle to upper class students to know the names on the right than lower income students.)

Whether your students have heard of these businessmen or not, you now have the opportunity to introduce them to some pretty interesting characters.  But how do we use biographical information in class? How should we tell stories? And how do we avoid the problem I like to call "The Problem of Andrew Jackson's horse"? A friend of mine, explaining why he never liked history, claimed that his teacher tried to make it interesting by telling lots of irrelevant stories which meant he left high school knowing little about history but knew odd bits of random information like the name of Jackson's horse (Sam Patch).

I am likely as guilty as the history teacher in question of peppering a lesson with anecdotes in hopes of a good laugh, a smile or to get students' attention by "making it interesting."  If this is all we do with biographical information--throw it into lectures--then yes, it is probably useless.  

But a recent glance through the book, Why Don't Students Like School by education psychologist Daniel T. Willingham stopped me cold at the title of chapter 3, "Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I Say?" According to Willingham, the human mind is especially adept at understanding and remembering stories. He says that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as "psychologically privileged" because our memories actually treat them differently than other types of material. 

I cannot do justice to this chapter here (but if you want to check out other of Willingham's many articles which are useful to teachers, click here).  But the gist of it is that telling stories helps students remember information. He really means more than just tell a few anecdotes about Carnegie and Rockefeller. The key, he explains memorably, is that we remember what we think about. Sounds so obvious, doesn't it? So if our stories can engage students' attention and get them to think about something, they will remember it.

This leads to a new problem. We teach a lesson chock full of all kinds of important information about, let's say the rise of big business in the late nineteenth century, and we sit down to grade our students' work, and we note there's not a whole lot of substance, but they seem to remember the amusing little anecdote we told about how Rockefeller raised turkeys and lent some of the money he raised to a neighbor. 

The problem here is that we have neglected to connect the story to something meaningful. We need to tie the anecdote to something meaningful about Rockefeller and business. What is important is not the turkeys, but the fact that Rockefeller had a eureka moment when he realized the possibility of making money without doing any work at all: through investing.

So yes, by all means provide your students some interesting biographical information about Rockefeller and Carnegie. They are both fascinating characters, very different from each other, and their reach is still felt today. But connect it to something more meaningful.

The classic way to teach the topic meaningfully is to pose the subject as "Robber Barons or Captains of Industry"? (Do a quick Google search and you'll see what I mean; tons of lesson ideas with these terms.) The implicit question is whether or not the big industrialists and businessmen of the late nineteenth century earned their fortunes at the cost of the poor, or did they help develop the U.S. into an economic powerhouse? The answer, of course, includes both perspectives and any good lesson must help students see that.

But another way I have done it, usually after students have also studied the perspective of labor and some of the big strikes of the period, is to pose the question, "Do the ends justify the means?" In other words, do the economic achievements and subsequent philanthropy of these men justify whatever illegal, immoral, or at-great-cost-to-the-workers methods they used to get there? Here, too, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. But there are lots of opportunities here to ask tough questions, engage students in contentious debates, and bring the topic into the present. How? Check out the two resources below.

For grappling with the question of "do the ends justify the means?" 

• Check out this recent article in the New Yorker, "Was Carnegie Right about Philanthropy?" The article poses the question, "Does philanthropy by the most affluent among us make up for the negative consequences of inequality?" There is a list of the top 50 most generous donors of 2013. Mark Zuckerburg and his wife were #1. The article quotes Peter Buffet, son of Warren Buffet, who describes philanthropy by the super rich as "conscience laundering." Isn't that a fascinating way to put it? If I had the time, I might edit this article to use with students. But I also might simply read aloud a few passages of it as a way to begin a discussion. The article also points out that most philanthropic spending does not directly fight poverty. And check out this really cool ngram viewer from Google that shows the use of the term "new gilded age" in search engines that was linked to in the article.

• Below is a wonderful, short video that I was introduced to by one of my student teachers last semester. (Thanks!) Ironically, it was created by Evan Klassen who had his own rags-to-riches immigrant story like Carnegie. The video visualizes the income gap in the U.S. and Americans' perceptions of that gap. It is just over 6 minutes and could be shown in class. It works well for middle or high school students, though you may need to pause it and explain a few things for middle schoolers. For more info on income inequality, check out this map and info from the Washington Post about income inequality across the world and how the U.S. compares.

For more info on Carnegie:

• the Carnegie Corporation website - useful for finding out about Carnegie's legacy today; click here for a timeline of Carnegie's life. Also has some brief biographic info. (But keep in mind this will be a pro-Carnegie site).
• biography.com - has some links to videos that may be useful in class.
• The New Tycoons: Carnegie

For more info on Rockefeller:

• The New Tycoons - Rockefeller

For info on J.P. Morgan: The New Tycoons: Morgan

On the industrialists in general:

• Here is a lesson from edsitement on Edsitement on the classic topic of Robber Baron or Captain of Industry? Even if you don't use the lesson, it has links to useful materials. You can find lots of other lesson plans and resources by entering in "robber barons" and/or "captains of industry" into a search engine. That's how I found this one.
• Here is a useful in-class assignment that will help students understand how Rockefeller used his power to get rebates and drawbacks from the railroads. I have edited it only slightly from a handout in my files that I think probably came from some textbook company. 
• Here is a lesson from my files (adapted from work of other teachers) that addresses the inadequacy of government efforts to regulate big business. It is a useful segue to the theme of Progressive reform, when the government actually does reform business. I would use it as an in-class activity to do as a class, or in small groups with full class follow-up. It is designed to go along with a textbook (any U.S. history textbook will do). Students also might also need help with the question about what an attorney general does. And as long as we are talking about telling stories, you can use this as a "cliffhanger" to lead into the next unit--will the government get with the program and actually pass legislation that will limit the power of the trusts? Tune in next week as we look at President Roosevelt, the Trustbuster....
• Here's a lesson to connect gilded age entrepreneurs to contemporary ones. 
• There are some great resources at intellectualtakeout.org which presents definitely presents a pro-Captain of Industry look. (The section of the site presents the topic as "The Myth of the Robber Barons.") The website claims to be non-partisan, but a look at the "about us" page does mention an anti-government regulation leaning. But there are some links to primary sources, political cartoons, videos and interesting charts and graphs.
• For the opposite perspective, you can look at this lesson on the Homestead Strike from the Howard Zinn Education project.

And don't forget to use some of these classic political cartoons with your students:

 

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Seneca Falls, the Women's Movement, and Tying It All Together with Essential Questions

What gets me really excited about teaching history is when I flip through my files, notes, and old worksheets and suddenly get an epiphany about how it all connects together. It is not clear who first said, "history is just one damned thing after another," but the quip could not be more apt to describe how history class can seem to our students if we don't do a better job of showing them these connections.

The period of the 1820s through the Civil War can be especially prone to this problem: Andrew Jackson, nullification & states' rights, Indian Removal, the invention of the cotton gin, Clay's American system, the Missouri Compromise, Second Great Awakening, abolitionism, Seneca Falls, and on and on. The content is extensive.

But as I observed a student teacher's lesson on the cotton gin, and then wrote my post on the market economy, and then about slavery, and then Indian removal, and then opened my folder about the women's movement and Seneca Falls convention in 1848, I came across this scribble on some old notes of mine:

shift from colonial economy ----> industrial economy----> concept of "separate spheres"

And I remembered how all these topics fit together and how important it is to SHOW students that. Or ideally, have them figure it out for themselves.

Using essential questions helps. I like to post a "question of the day" on the board every day. If you do this for all your lessons, you can them have students try to link them all together. History will then be more like "one thing leads to another." In other words, we have to explicitly teach students the historian's tool of CAUSE AND EFFECT. (Although the particular example I'm discussing in this post is more relational than causal, I think.)

There is the risk of oversimplifying, of course. What causes something else to happen is a complex process and not always clear. But helping students understand that one event in history can impact another is worth teaching, even at the risk of sometimes oversimplifying.

Let me elaborate on that. It occurred to me the other day that as I use essential questions to shape lessons and units, they can also be used to shape an ENTIRE SEMESTER.  I have a strong commitment to teaching U.S. history as a narrative, even as I work hard to reveal the messiness and complications of the narrative and alternative points of view.  So, when thinking about the first half of U.S. history, the narrative can follow a path of creating a democratic nation, with an emphasis on economic liberty that will be torn apart by Civil War and have to put itself back together again. An oversimplification? Probably. But keeping a central story line can help us avoid the problem of coverage. We cannot cover everything in U.S. history. So if we focus on Big Ideas, a central narrative, essential questions--or whatever you prefer to call it--we can arrange the curriculum in a way that allows students to make these connections.

One teacher I spoke to recently had a little sign that read "Civil War" on it, and all throughout first semester, he occasionally waves it up in the air when something comes up that shows the splintering of North and South. Is this too simplistic? Maybe. Does it overemphasize the "irrepressible conflict" view of the Civil War? Perhaps. But we can't argue with the fact the Civil War DID HAPPEN. So pointing out to students where we can see signs of the Civil War all the way back in the events of the 1770s or 1790s or 1830s can be really effective in helping students see the big picture. Too often they cannot see the forest through the trees.

So how to connect some of the topics of the antebellum period? As a summative exercise after some of these lessons, I might use a drawing like the one below. I think you could use this in a variety of ways. I would NOT hand it out to students. But I might use an old fashioned chalk board and start with one of the circles. And you could pass out index cards to students that had the phrase of the other circles. Other students would be in charge of the arrows. See if the students can create something that looks like this drawing, either on the board, or in their notes. Or on ipads.

So why is this post all about these connections? What about the women's movement and Seneca Falls?

One of the dangers with focusing too much on the Civil War is that we can overemphasize political history and leave out other good stories. But the story of the women's movement is going to continue into second semester. Eventually, you are going to get to the 19th amendment and the 1970s and ERA, right? And how can you teach those things if you don't establish the back story? (Another reason why I love backstoryradio.org! You've got to check this out. I learn so much from these podcasts!)

But the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 fits beautifully into an antebellum unit. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton getting dissed at the World Antislavery Convention in London. The connections between rights for African Americans and women. (Which will come up again and again, right? The connection between the passage of the 15th amendment and the suffrage movement and then again in the 1970s, when the women's movement follows the civil rights movement).

Lesson Ideas and Materials

And then, of course, you have Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. (See this article that claims Lincoln never said that line about the little lady who started the big war. Isn't it a bummer when we find out those great lines were never actually said? e.g., Jackson, "Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" is another one. Sigh....)

My former colleague (and one of the hardest working teachers I know) Janet Mark was the one who helped our whole U.S. history team do a better job of integrating the study of American women into U.S. history. She introduced me to using an excerpt from chapter 9 of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a way to combine the concept of separate spheres, slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act. I have adapted some of her excellent materials below:

• In class activity for teaching the concept of separate spheres and the cult of domesticity.
• See here for questions on UTC you can use with students. I like having them discuss the questions, rather than write them out for homework. To get them to read it ahead of time, I would ask them to turn in at least three examples or underline examples in the text of separate spheres. There are lots of them in this chapter.
• See here for commentary on chapter 9 of the book from the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center.
• Resources on the cult of domesticity from the National Humanities Center.
• And don't forget Stowe's famous sister, Catherine Beecher. You can build a fascinating lesson around a discussion comparing Catharine Beecher's views and those of Angela Grimke and the ideas embedded in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Use this document with students. You could spend an entire period on this, as it raises the fundamental question of whether men and women are different from each other. Each author argued deeply in support of women's power and influence, but from a completely different place. Beecher fundamentally believes that women and men are naturally different from men. This argument is a precursor to the Supreme Court's decision in Muller v Oregon in 1907.  And the argument goes a long way towards explaining why the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments was not widely supported, and why women would not get the right to vote until 1920. (For more on this, see the last resource in this post.)

Teacher Materials for Using the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments:

• See here for a  side-by-side comparison of the Declaration of Independence to the Declaration of Sentiments.
• See here for a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments that I like because I have numbered each of the grievances for easy reference.
• See here for a similar version that I have edited and abbreviated for middle school students and/or students with lower reading skills. Note that it is still rather complicated, but you can either go over it and explain the confusing parts, or I would propose that students can still get the basic idea even if they don't understand every word.
• See here for a worksheet students can use to take notes and understand the document. Adapted from Janet Mark.

Other places to visit on the web:

• Not yet a brick-and-mortar museum, the National Women's History Museum has some good resources, though they have had some negative press about their level of scholarship.
• The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center - has teacher resources, lessons, primary resources, and sponsors a writing competition for students writing on issues of social justice.
• Stephen Railton, an English professor at the University of Virginia has created a multimedia exhibit about Uncle Tom's Cabin and its place in American Culture. There are some impressive resources to be found here. Check out this page for information about how abolitionism led to the women's movement. And look here for a letter from Angelina Grimke to Catharine Beecher on what was wrong with the idea of colonizing freed slaves in Africa.
• Indiana and Purdue Universities have created a site devoted to Abolitionism.
• For a short, readable article about the use of essential questions in the history classroom, see Heather Lattimer, "Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom," Social Education, 72, (6) 2008, pp. 326-329. If you are a National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) member, you can access it online in their publication archives.
• It may be worth a membership to NCSS just to read this article in their publication archives: Dave Neumann, "A Different Way of Viewing History Teaching: Balancing Competing Intellectual Challenges," Social Education, 74 (4), 2010, pp. 184-188. I thought of it because I recall he uses the topic of whether men and women are fundamentally different as a hook in a lesson on women in the antebellum era. But the whole article is worth reading because he discusses three fundamental challenges in the teaching of history. For each of the three, he refers to the antebellum period. The three include (1) the problem of understanding the past in context while making it relevant in the present; (2) the problem of scale: historical trends become significant as part of larger trends, but gain texture and interest when examined in detail; and (3) exceptional individuals shape history in important ways (e.g. Frederick Douglass) but the experiences of most people differ from those exceptional people (e.g. most African Americans in the 19th century).

A Method for How to Plan a Unit Using Essential Questions: Colonial America

One of my pet peeves as a teacher is when I see a syllabus for U.S. history that only lists the title of the unit as "Chapter 4." And then under each day, you see things like "section 4.3." To me, this suggests a unit planned according to a textbook. Even very good textbooks are flawed and they should never be used as the guiding force in planning. And really, what kid is going to be excited about the fact that tomorrow's lesson will be on Chapter 4, section 4.3?? Give your unit and each lesson a title. Not only does this make things sound more interesting, but they probably will be more interesting because you have now put thought into what the unit and lesson are really all about. It will also help students see the structure of the course more clearly and therefore better understand the context for each day's lesson. 


A unit in a U.S. history course ought to focus on a few essential questions. And what one teaches Monday should logically lead to what is taught on Tuesday, and so on. What is taught in the unit as a whole should carry through themes or questions raised in earlier units and/or introduce problems or issues that will be developed in later units. It is okay to skip part of the textbook. (Indeed, it is okay not to use one at all, but that is subject unto itself.)
For me, it has always been easier to figure out what needs to be included in units on the wars because there is a clear sequence of events. And I have found it harder for periods that are broad like Colonial America (200 years of history in 2 weeks!) Industrial America (too much going on: railroads, big business, labor, immigration, urbanization, the last of the Indian wars, the rise of Jim Crow, oh my!), or the Progressive Era (so much legislation revolving around so many issues: women, prohibition, trust-busting, federal regulation—how to avoid the unit becoming a slog of filling in charts of all these laws?!).

So here’s my suggestion:

Take a cue from a literature: foreshadowing and themes. DON’T cover everything in your textbook about the colonial era. Instead, choose themes which “foreshadow” what will happen in the next unit and/or later on in the year. The reason for teaching a particular topic should never be because that is what comes next in the book. It should be because that what logically follows in this grand story you are teaching. Does this mean you will leave out important information about what life was like in Colonial times? Yes, of course. Does this mean you will probably skip having students copy information out of the textbook about the differences between proprietary, royal and charter colonies and put the info into a chart? Yes, thankfully! But remember, you can't EVER hope to "cover" everything, nor should you even if you could. (If you did, you'd be lucky to make it to World War I by May!) And remember the most imporant question all students ask: why do we have to know this? Planning a unit like I am suggesting will help you help them answer that question.

Click here to see my example of this kind of planning for a unit on Colonial America.