Developing a Meaningful Understanding of History
By Kendra Corr

"Why do we have to learn this?" "This is boring!" "What does this have to do with me?" "I hate history!" If any of this sounds familiar, chances are you are a history teacher. Now, I should point out that there are many students who love history. They faithfully watch The History Channel and love historical movies. However, if your classroom experiences are anything like mine were, most kids just don't like history.

Students kept asking me, "Why should they know this stuff?" The answer was simple-students need to study history in order to become solid citizens, better problem solvers, and deeper thinkers. Sounds simple, right? But how do we accomplish this when textbooks and supplemental materials often do not make it easy to "hook" students? Promoting higher order thinking and showing students the connections between past and present is difficult when we focus on rote memorization and the regurgitation of information. It is very challenging to avoid the trap of either flooding the classroom with arbitrary facts, or facilitating activities that may be "fun" for students but have no meaningful result.

Engaging students can be tricky. An activity can be "fun," but what teachers need to ask themselves is whether or not it promotes a meaningful end. Games, simulations, debates, and role plays are all very helpful methods to get students' attention, but the activity must demonstrate a significant concept or idea in order to justify its use.

In order to be effective, social studies curriculum should focus on fostering higher order thinking. Rote memorization of names, dates, and places serves no purpose other than to make students really good at trivia games. Chapter review or vocabulary exercises can be useful, but only if paired with really meaningful examinations of the deeper and more complex ideas in history. For example, when I taught American Government, I often felt the pressure to make sure that my students could recite each Amendment to the United States Constitution. I drilled them constantly on the three branches of government, the powers of each and how checks and balances worked. I had to make sure that each student was prepared to pass the U.S. Constitution test. My constitution "boot camp" usually succeeded to a point as most students passed the test.

One semester, I threw everything out and started over because I felt like I never really taught them anything about the complexities of American democracy or even what democracy really is, beyond the textbook definition. Instead of searching for mnemonic devices to help students remember the Bill of Rights, I designed lessons and found materials that illustrated complex ideas such as "How does our government balance order and freedom? Why does government exist at all?"

I found that by allowing students the time and space to debate and discuss these ideas I was giving them an invaluable foundation for future studies. For example, once my students came to the conclusion that government exists to bring order to a society, they were able to look at the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution (which states what our government intends to do) on a much deeper level. I did not have to spend class period after class period drilling them on the language of the Preamble, because they had a frame of reference that gave them an understanding of the document before they ever laid eyes on it. I held my breath all semester. Would this work? Would they still pass the test? They did, and, better yet, they had a deep and meaningful understanding of our government and the ideas behind it.

For the next several years, I used this conceptual approach in all of my classes. By identifying and emphasizing the concepts, I was able to give my students a mental model that I could then fill up with content. It was uncomfortable for me at first because I found it difficult to "let go" of all the names, dates and events that I had previously focused so heavily on. However, I found that my students were able to retain important information better because those concepts gave them a strong frame of reference. By teaming this approach with inductive activities, I was able to give my students a sense of discovery, which made my lessons more memorable.

Sometimes we forget that history is really about ideas, not trivia, and focus too much on textbooks full of facts. When we can get past the urge to try to cover every word of the textbook, we become much more effective in the classroom.

By designing curriculum and selecting materials that engage students and demonstrate higher order thinking, teachers and administrators can change the way kids view history. Instead of seeing history as a bunch of random facts to memorize, they begin to recognize and identify patterns in history. This enables them to make logical predictions based on the past and become better problem solvers for the future. We can give our students a really meaningful understanding of history that translates into (at the least) an appreciation of the subject and (at the most) a love of history.

Kendra Corr is the co-creator and author of Theme Schemes, www.themeschemes.com , a series of reproducible Social Studies activity books.