The First "Half" of U.S. History: How to Get through Reconstruction by the End of the Year/First Semester

While Keeping in Mind How to Make It Meaningful for Students

This post is for all of you who struggle to get through Reconstruction by either the end of 1st semester (for those who teach high school and/or U.S. history in one year) or the end of the year (for those who, like me this year, teach the first "half" of U.S. history in one year in middle school.

My initial inspiration for this post was from a comment someone made on an earlier post of mine, Second Semester & the Importance of a Good Syllabus: How to Help Students Find Meaning in U.S. History and a post this January by Glenn Wiebe on his excellent blog, History Tech, What Should Your Kids Know?  In that post, he raised a question I was dealing with at the time, how much time should I spend on the War of 1812? And if we have to make choices as history teachers, how do we compare the significance of the War of 1812 to Reconstruction?

Last year, I spent approximately 5 days on the War of 1812.  A week.  Kind of a lot.  Part of the problem was I was interrupted by winter break.  (The post-winter break part focused on long term results of the war, rather than the war itself, and I used it as a segue to Andrew Jackson).  I spent 10 days on Reconstruction.  To me, this ratio seems a bit off, given the importance of Reconstruction towards an understanding of the Civil Rights movement and race relations today.

My point is not to debate the number of days one should spend on the War of 1812 vs. Reconstruction.  My point is that we DO need to think about what is most significant in the study of U.S. history and how best to incorporate it into our plans for the school year.  In Glenn Wiebe's post, he links to an article, "What Every American Should Know," from The Aspen Institute that raises the issues brought up by E.D. Hirsch in 1987 that helped fuel the flames of the "culture wars." (See also this article by Eric Liu in the Atlantic Monthly).  They are both worth a read, as they raise the most important question our students ask:

After reading these articles, think about what you teach.  To what extent are these things that every American should know? Why? If you can answer those questions, think about how that can transform your teaching, not to mention your crowded syllabus.  Consider the things that students really don't need to know.  Because you're going to have to make cuts.

I have said it before and I'll say it again, the only way to "cover" U.S. history is to make tough choices.  These are my guidelines:

1. You cannot, nor should not, try to teach everything.
2. The textbook can help guide you, but textbooks DO try to cover EVERYTHING, so you can't rely on the textbook to make all the choices for you.  This might mean that you skip whole chapters or even units in the textbook, replacing them with other resources.
3. You need to decide where you want to end and work backwards, so you don't find yourself cramming the Civil War into the last two weeks of school.  

The above are overall guidelines.  But there are many other things to take into consideration.  Most importantly, does your syllabus "tell a story"? Does each lesson lead logically to the next and does each unit lead logically to the next? Does each unit have a major topic/central issue/essential question? Or is just "Unit 4" because that's what comes next in the textbook? This is why you should read the articles I mentioned above.  This is what makes the difference between history that is "one damn thing after another" vs. history that helps students understand how our past shapes our world today.

In a few paragraphs, I will include a link to the calendar of what I taught every day this past school year.  It is different from the calendar with which I began the year.  That one contemplated less time on the American Revolution and the War of 1812, but more on the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Like all of you, I ran out of time and other things took longer than I thought.  You will also see in my calendar all our institute days, holidays and testing days.  These impact how and when we teach certain topics. For example, do you really want to start a new unit the day before a break? Perhaps it is better to add another day into the previous unit.  What do you teach on days when students will have been PARCC testing all morning?  Do you allow time for reviewing in class before a test?  And what does one teach on a day when half the class is out on a orchestra trip to St. Louis? Those are good days to either allow students "catch up" time to complete homework or to do something "extra"--like on May 20, when I did a lesson on Civil War music.

Sometimes you don't finish things because real life intrudes: I spent a good chunk of the day on November 16 discussing the shootings in Paris.  September 11th fell on a Friday this year, and so I decided to spend the day discussing that.  (See this post for those resources.)  Next year September 11 falls on a Sunday.  So maybe I will teach about it on the following Monday.  Or not at all.  Not sure yet.

So below is the link to my calendar, warts and all.  I include it in hopes that it might help others formulate a plan for the year.

Lauren Brown's 2015-2016 syllabus

Below are some other issues to consider when planning out the school year:  

• How are you going to start the year? I note that I spent 4 days on Columbus.  I chose to do that because I really liked the lessons, and they seemed to be a good way to introduce some overall themes we would come back to throughout the year.  But it was a bit of a time suck.  Perhaps I would reconsider this to buy more time later in the year.  Perhaps I could find a way to introduce those same themes using the content of the American Revolution instead. 
• What do YOU especially like to teach and what are you especially knowledgeable about? The best way to engage students is if you yourself are engaged.  I have a special interest in the problem of slavery in American history and my syllabus reflects that.  My syllabus also reflects areas of weakness.  U.S. policies and the attitudes of white Americans regarding Native Americans is incredibly important.  I have struggled for years about how to better include this in my curriculum with little success.  You will see in my syllabus that there is not nearly enough there.  Obviously, to do so, would require that I cut elsewhere.  These are cuts worth making, but I haven't figured it out yet.
• Sometimes I left things out because I couldn't figure out any meaningful way to incorporate them into a larger "story" or unit.  So while I mentioned Irish immigration a few times in passing, the whole topic of immigration in this first half of U.S. history was not something we covered.  Things like the Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, the Temperance movement and other reforms also hit the cutting room floor.  We did spend time on the reform movements of women's rights and abolitionism.  And students will spend time on immigration in 8th grade (the second "half" of U.S. history).  But just because the textbook mentions the Second Great Awakening doesn't mean that I have to.  Other times, I sort of "threw things in" that probably should have been left out.  For example, I spent January 14 on the Marshall Court.  In hindsight, I'm not sure that a day on the Marshall Court did justice (no pun intended) to the topic.  While it "fits" in terms of growth and expansion and how the decisions of the Marshall Court, I think in the future I would either need to spend a few more days on it in order to make it more meaningful, or cut it out entirely. 
• We have to consider the impact of things like parent-teacher conferences, standardized testing, field trips, the days immediately before and after school vacations, and our own personal lives.  One wouldn't know from looking at my syllabus why I have 3 Fridays in December titled "First Amendment Fridays."  This came about because, as I wrestled with the newness of classroom teaching after years out of the classroom, I occasionally struggled with figuring out how long it would take to successfully teach topics to 7th graders that I had been used to teaching to 11th graders (more on the specifics of that in this post for MiddleWeb.com).  So when I realized I was running out of time, I postponed some of the details of the First Amendment for after the Constitution test.  (This was also helpful when, toward the end of the unit, I fell and broke 2 ribs and had to miss a few days of school!) The advantage of this series of "First Amendment Fridays" also revealed itself as we got closer to winter break and my students got a little restless.  Having "fun" activities for Fridays in December made a lot of sense on a practical level.  The students liked it so much, I did the same at the very end of the school year with a series of "Fourteenth Amendment Fridays" and "The Fourteenth Amendment Today Tuesday" on the 2nd to last day of school.   
• Sometimes--perhaps especially so in middle school--things take more time because we also have to focus on skills, not just content.  I spent a lot of class time on the Mexican War because we did a DBQ from the DBQ Project on "Was the United States Justified in Going to War with Mexico?" Spending more time developing these skills earlier in the year would have made this project easier for my students.  It wouldn't necessarily save time, but it would better redistribute the time.

Additional resources:

• Eric Lui, "How to Be American: Why cultivating a shared cultural core is more important than ever--and why such a project serves progressive ends."
• whateveryamericanshouldknow.org - the website/project that developed from the essay above.  I haven't figured out how, but I think one could do something really interesting with this website with students...have students come up with their own lists? Find a way to do this as a summative activity at the end of each unit, or the year? If you have ideas, please comment.
• I have earlier mentioned how helpful I have found James Loewen's advice about how to plan out a school year.  You can read it for yourself in chapter 1, "The Tyranny of Coverage," in James W. Loewen's, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History.  It is well worth a read.
• An earlier post I wrote about the new APUSH standards that considers what we mean when our curriculum should cover such-and-such or so-and-so.

Also, see my previous posts about the challenges of unit planning:

• The Practical Problem of Coverage, or How to get past WWII by May
• A Method for How to Plan a Unit Using Essential Questions: Colonial America
• The New Nation: the Problems & Pitfalls of a Challenging Period in American History
• Seneca Falls, the Women's Movement, and Tying It All Together with Essential Questions
• How to Handle the Post-Civil War/Reconstruction Period
• Progressivism: Big Ideas for Beginning Your Unit
• The US Enters the World Stage: Shift in US Foreign Policy, 1890-1920
• How to End the Year...Making Sense out of the Seventies to the Present

Second Semester & the Importance of a Good Syllabus: How to Help Students Find Meaning in U.S. History

Whether you concluded just before winter break with Reconstruction or with Industrialization (or something else--I realize many schools do things quite differently), you will likely soon be facing the Progressive Era. Personally, I love the Progressive Era, but have never quite felt that enthusiasm bubble over to my students. And in my observations of student teachers, I have

sometimes seen the Progressive Era become little more than a dull march from one piece of legislation to another. Another opportunity for students to look things up in the textbook and fill out a dreary chart like the one at the right.

I am not saying these items aren't worthy of study. But if most of your unit is devoted to going from one piece of legislation or amendment to another, your students will learn little and remember even less.

I would make two suggestions:

1. Do NOT try to cover every Progressive reform that ever was. More on this in a separate post.

2. Consider the Progressive Era as the beginning chapter of the twentieth century AS A WHOLE.

Let's examine this second point for a bit. I will start with a digression based on something I read in Why Don't Students Like School by Daniel Willingham, an educational psychologist I mentioned in an earlier post. In chapter two, he discusses working memory. He provides an example. If given a list of letters like the one below, most of us will likely have trouble memorizing all of it.

XCN NPH DFB ICI ANC AAX

However, consider the same list of letters in the order below:

X CNN PHD FBI CIA NCAA X

Much easier, yes? Because you now have a context. You can apply meaning to what at first seemed like just a random list of letters (or alphabet soup--sorry, couldn't resist). Of course, if you've never heard of the FBI or the CIA, you are no better off. But memorizing something that is meaningful is much easier than something that is not. This is why giving students a chart like the one above about Progressivism is not terribly helpful. It is just a list of random things to them.

Students need more context to make the seemingly endless list of names, dates, places, battles, legislation, amendments, policies, presidents, leaders, etc. meaningful to them. Have you ever told anyone you were a history teacher? And then the person says, "Oh, I never liked history. Too many dates to memorize." To avoid falling in this trap, we must provide CONTEXT and MEANING.

This goes back to an earlier point I have made about the false dichotomy between teaching content and teaching skills. They are inseparable. As Willingham points out, in order for students to think critically and analyze text--key Common Core stuff!-- they "require extensive factual knowledge." (His emphasis.) Willingham provides an example from a study of junior high school students in which students were asked comprehension questions about a story about a baseball game. The study found that the students who did the best were the ones that knew a lot about baseball, even if they were classified as "poor readers" based on standardized test scores. Amazing, isn't it? So yes, skills are important here. But in this case, it was the background knowledge that some of those students had about baseball that made the bigger difference. 

That does not mean that our classes should become a long list of facts posing as background knowledge. Willingam continues, "Knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another." (Again, I urge you to read the book--it's one of the first educational psychology books I read where I am constantly learning things that I can quickly apply to actual teaching, and of history specifically.)

So how does this apply to us as history teachers? Well, going back to my point at the beginning of this post about the Progressive Era, it occurs to me that one of the reasons students might not find it as amazing a period as I do is that they do not have the proper context. In fact, most of the reforms that were so revolutionary in the early part of the 20th century are so ingrained that they just don't seem like that big a deal. Women got the vote? Big whoop. This is taken for granted today. And so few Americans even vote anyway. The fact that someone might have gone on a hunger strike to get the vote just seems kinda wacky to them. Graduated income tax? Yeah, they've been hearing their parents complain about taxes for years. Meat Inspection Act and government regulation in general? This is such an everyday part of our lives today. And that someone of the social class background of Theodore Roosevelt was such a key player in this? Students have little appreciation of the social dynamics of the upper class 19th century that it is hard for them to appreciate Roosevelt as the radical he was.

Clearly, part of how well we teach the Progressive Era will depend on how much students have learned about the tremendous and unbridled growth of the post Civil War period and the extent of the social problems in cities and among immigrants, farmers, laborers and the like.

And now another digression to help explain the title of this post.

One year I started "dressing up" my syllabi for each unit by selecting a pithy quote that summed up the major ideas of the unit. So the American Revolution unit syllabus would have a quotation from the Declaration of Independence. The Antebellum unit would have Lincoln's quotation about a house divided. You get the idea. I did it just because I liked it. It made it more meaningful for me.

But at the end of first semester, on one of our final exam review days, I gave my students a sheet with the quotes on one side (out of order) and the units (also out of order) on the other. They had to put the titles of all the units in order and match them to the appropriate quotation. I thought this would be a 3-5 minute introductory activity to get thinking about the "big picture" as a beginning to a review session.

It took them forever. They thought it was so hard. I couldn't believe it. I thought it would be super easy, maybe even too easy. I mean, it's not like they hadn't had a copy of every syllabus and read every quotation--not just on the syllabus, but usually as part of some other classroom work. How could they not know that the "house divided" quote went with the Antebellum unit? And that it came before the Civil War???

It struck me that what was so obvious to me: the logical order of each unit, that the antebellum problems associated with "the house divided" over slavery led to Civil War, etc. was not obvious to them. Clearly, I had done something very wrong. Had they really learned so little?

I see this kind of mistake over and over again when I observe student teachers. They know that today they are teaching about mobilization for war because yesterday they taught about Pearl Harbor. And that is maybe a more obvious example. But their students have not thought this all through. And, to complicate matters, they have just come from math class where they had to struggle with the quadratic equation, or a fight with a girl friend in the hall, or whatever. It falls on us, then, to help our students see "the obvious."

I spend an incredible amount of time planning my syllabus, deciding what I should teach first and what next or maybe reverse the order, leave out this, add in this, etc. If I am going to spend that much time making sure that what I'm doing makes sense to me, then shouldn't I make sure that my students are privy to this dialogue I have with myself?

To do that, I began more systematically explaining to students what they would be learning and why. So now, I would begin teaching about the twentieth century by providing students an overview of the whole century. No, not a big long lecture. But by explaining that there are two major "stories" that they will be examining over the course of the rest of the school year. As I see it, there are two main story lines or plots to the century: one that centers on domestic policy and the other on foreign policy. (Do you see the beginning of two final exam essay questions??)

The foreign policy story (which I will develop in a future post) begins with a look back at the nineteenth century in which our first object was to affirm our independence from Britain in particular  (e.g. the War of 1812) and Europe in general (the Monroe Doctrine). Once that was "settled," the next goal was to expand west. So our "foreign policy" centered on Native Americans and conquest in Mexico.

Now, in the twentieth century (which will actually begin in 1898 with the war with Spain), the goal will be to assert U.S. power elsewhere in the world to protect our interests and, with mixed results, to spread democracy and contain communism.  With the collapse of communism, our concerns now look toward the Middle East. So, you can see the units now, yes?

1. U.S. Imperialism and World War I

2. World War II

3. The Cold War

4. Vietnam

5. The Middle East

Our domestic policy also has a plot line.

In an earlier post, I shared this lesson on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. You could save this lesson to begin your Progressive Era unit, or remind students of it. The point is that we end the 19th century with an economy and population that has grown tremendously, but with a government that has not. There is little regulation of business, immigration, the environment, cities, or anything else. There is no safety net for workers, as labor unions have had little success.

We know that today we have a much bigger government and far more regulation than we had a hundred-plus years ago. The issue of Big Government is probably The Issue today and one of the key markers between Democrats and Republicans today. So you might start your unit--and your whole semester or second half--with a look at a few of today's issues.

And now we can start to see the units:

1. The Progressive Era (the first period in which the government starts to grow and makes efforts to improve the lives of everyday Americans)
2. The Depression and the New Deal (the Depression as the wake-up call after a series of other major depressions and panics in the late 19th century followed by the New Deal reforms.
3. The Civil Rights Movement and Johnson's Great Society (the reforms to deal with the problems not solved by Reconstruction, as well as other legislation to combat poverty)
4. The Reagan Revolution and Reaction (the reaction against big government, the rise of conservatism, and then the reaction against that with Clinton & Obama).

So when you put it all together chronologically, you'd alternate domestic units with foreign policy units so it looks something like this:

If each of the above units (except for the 1950s one--a few days for that, I'd say) is about 2 weeks, that gives you 18 weeks total. You have to play around a bit, of course, allowing for testing, spring break, end-of-the-year events, etc.  And you might want to add a few days for post-Vietnam era issues like feminism, Watergate and 1960s counterculture. Spend a little more on one unit, a little less on another. But at least you have a story line here. And before you start each "chapter" or unit, make sure your students know where you are in that story.

My main point is that we should be careful not to base our decisions about what to teach simply on what comes next in the textbook, but to create our own logical order. (Of course, textbooks have an order, but they "have" to include everything and you don't.) And then we must make those decisions visible to our students. Nothing frustrates me more than when I look at a syllabus of a teacher and see things like " chapter 23, section 3" as the heading for a particular day. Or hear a teacher say, "tomorrow we will move on to chapter 12." This tells students NOTHING about meaning. Nobody is going to go home and tell their parents, today we did chapter 12!

My other pet peeve centers on how textbooks (and as a result, many teachers) end their study of U.S. history with units on "Ford," "Carter," "Reagan," "Clinton." We certainly don't teach the nineteenth century going president to president. I suspect this has to do with a lack of clarity in the profession about the storyline I have outlined above. And I admit, it is a far-from-perfect storyline.

I also realize, as I wrap this post up, that using the term "storyline" at all could be controversial by suggesting that there is a certain way to tell the story of our country that might exclude other perspectives. I do not mean to suggest that at all. I am merely suggesting that to prevent history from being "one damned thing after another" (see my earlier post on this) we need to organize a CLEAR SYLLABUS that emphasizes CONNECTIONS which helps students recognize the BIG IDEAS and ask MEANINGFUL QUESTIONS. The answers to those questions, and how the story ends depends on our--and our students'-- interpretations.