The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Many teachers build history lessons on primary sources like letters and legal documents. But without context and historical thinking skills, students can’t make much meaning from them, say guests Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, co-founders of the Four Question Method for history instruction.
“Primary sources, for us, are ways to practice doing what historians do. 8th graders aren’t historians, 12th graders aren’t historians. So it’s the silly mistake that says, we need to do exactly what the experts do so that we become experts. We actually need to do what the experts did before they were experts so that they became experts, which means learn a lot of stories,” Shiffman says.
“One of our slogans is ‘Story First’. And everything flows from that,” Bassett tells host Barbara Davidson.
In the Four Question Method, history is taught as a series of narratives and events are explored in a coherent, chronological way. Question One is simply, “What happened?” In other words, what’s the story? Question Two is “What were they thinking?” and helps students understand and interpret the perspectives of people involved in the story.
Question Three is “Why then and there?” which targets explanation as a skill. For example, students studying the American Revolution can contrast the Canadian colonies, which stayed with Great Britain, with the 13 colonies that went to war.
“That asks kids to think in a more sophisticated way about the specific story and say, ‘Wow, stories like this, they happen sometimes and not others. Why then? Why there?’” Shiffman says.
Question Four is “What do we think about that?” and develops judgment, which Shiffman defines as “the capacity to generalize from your specific reaction to a case and to say, ‘Hold on. What are the general features of this case? And how can I make a rule to guide my own behavior in the world so that I know when to support the revolution and when not to?’ ”
Bassett and Shiffman describe visiting a Tennessee classroom using a 4QM elementary history unit where students were learning about the decision of a Lakota Sioux leader to surrender the U.S. Army.
“The kids in the room, they knew a lot. They knew the story, they knew about this guy, and they got to deliberate toward judgment about whether Chief Joseph made the right choice or not. They can do that in fourth and fifth grade, absolutely,” Shiffman says.
This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork, on behalf of the History Matters Campaign. Follow the History Matters Campaign on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X. Search #historymatters to join the conversation.
Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.
Episode Transcript
Gary Shiffman
Primary sources for us are ways to practice doing what historians do. 8th graders aren’t historians, 12th graders aren’t historians. So it’s the silly mistake that says, we need to do exactly what the experts do so that we become experts. We actually need to do what the experts did before they were experts so that they became experts, which means learn a lot of stories.
Barbara Davidson
Welcome to the History Matters Podcast. I’m your host, Barbara Davidson, President of StandardsWork and Executive Director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign
Today I’m sharing my conversation with Jon Bassett and Gary Schiffman, two former high school social studies teachers who have recently left the classroom. They’re building a history curriculum around principles in their groundbreaking book called From Story to Judgment: The Four Question Method for Teaching and Learning Social Studies.
During this interview, Jon and Gary unpack the four questions in their method and help listeners not just understand them, but also appreciate why these questions should shape curriculum design. I think you’ll really enjoy this episode.
Barbara Davidson
What do you wanna share with our listeners about, you know, what connects your background to History Matters and the History Matters campaign’s focus on elementary history instruction. So what are two high school social studies dudes doing here?
Gary Shiffman
So our story, our 4QM story starts when Jon hired me in 2002 to be a high school teacher. I was 39-years-old, I was an ex-academic. And I thought, I can figure out this high school history thing. And Jon wasn’t so sure, but he hired me anyway.
And to show my thanks for him taking a risk on me, I immediately started hounding him about: Why in the world would kids need to know all of that stuff in that textbook, in those standards, in those documents he gave me as a new teacher? I said: they gotta learn all this stuff in world history, ninth and 10th grade. Like, it’s too much stuff. It’s not interesting. It’s not relevant. I was a pain in the butt for him because I kept saying, you know, the thing he’s asking me to do doesn’t make any sense.
So that became an argument that went on for years, literally a decade of arguing about fundamental purpose. Like, what are we doing when we teach kids history?
Jon 8:29
Yeah, it was a very fruitful argument. He said that the kids didn’t need to know any stories about the past. They just needed to know underlying principles about the way the world works. I told him that underlying principles are boring and that kids need to know some stories about the world, the country, the community that they live in. And that’s the only argument with Gary that I’ve ever actually won. He’s won all the subsequent arguments. [laughter]
But basically, we set out to try to X-ray the discipline and figure out: what are we doing when we teach history and social studies well? And the first problem we tried to solve was the one Gary articulated, which is: wait a minute, wait a minute, I have all this stuff. How do I fit this stuff into a lesson, a unit, a course, in a way that’s not just a pile of facts and lists?
And so that was what led us to the idea of creating stories and taking your lists of content and shaping them into historical stories. And then ourーone of our slogans is story first. Everything flows from that.
Barbara Davidson
Love it. Okay, so I think we should probably quickly share the four questions of this four question method.
Gary Shiffman
So question one is: What happened? Which sounds ridiculously simple. ‘What happened?’ is the question you ask when you want to hear the story of something interesting. So when you teach history, there’sーlots of interesting stuff happened. And when you tell somebody about it, like, ‘oh my God, I can’t believe that happened!’ Yeah, that’s a great story, right?
So working backwards, what we figured out was what happened is like the err question. It’s the basic question that drives all social studies instruction. Big claim, but we think it’s true. If you ask a good specific ‘what happened?’, what you’ll get is a really good coherent story that leaves a lot of stuff out.
Jon Bassett
Question two asks: ‘What were they thinking?’ We slow down the story. We pause the story. We try to get into the heads of the people who made that story move in the way that it did, and we try to understand them on their own terms.
And when we do that, we’re practicing the skill of interpretation. We can’t talk to these people directly, so we have to interpret artifacts they’ve left behind, whether that’s text or an object or a pattern of behavior, and we try to understand the people in the story and figure out: ‘What were they thinking?’ So that’s question two.
Gary Shiffman
Question three asks us to step back from the specifics of the story. We’ve heard what happened, we’ve told the story of what happened, and we’ve gotten into the heads of some of the key players in the story. But all of that stuff is happening in a particular time and place. And the conditions under which it’s happening probably influence what actually happened in the story.
Some societies have revolutions, but they don’t have them all the time, and not all societies have them. You know, why did the Canadian colonies stay with Great Britain, but the 13 Colonies below them decided to stage a war of revolution? And that asks kids to think in a more sophisticated way about the specific story and say, wow, stories like this, they happen sometimes and not others. Why then? Why there?
Jon Bassett
So once you’ve done all three questions, you can get to question four, which is: What do we think about that? And that’s where you get to exercise the skill of judgment. And that’s where we ask students to say, okay, looking at the story and the players and the context and conditions, who do we admire? Who do we not admire? Who do we think did the right thing? Who do we think did the wrong thing?
Gary Shiffman
Questions one and two come first, questions three and four are more challenging and come later. And one way to think about it is simply density of knowledge. To come up with a good answer to a question about, under what conditions do societies have revolutions? You kinda need to know a bunch of stories, right.
Or take this one, a favorite one, which can be done in any grade. The great civilizations from the pre-modern world, from the ancient world that we study, Sumer and Mesopotamia and the Yellow River, they’re all river valley civilizations. And every kid who learns about them knows that. Why are they all by rivers? That’s question three! But it doesn’t make sense to askーask or answer it until you’ve actually learned about a bunch of them. Like, oh yeah, I see! I see the pattern. So that’s a level up.
Question four is interesting because a lot of people think it’s simpler than it is. Anybody who runs a debate in the classroom says: Truman, good or bad? And there’s yelling on one side and there’s yelling on another. That’s true, that’s a debate and that may be hot and engaging, but that is not judgment.
Judgment is the capacity to generalize from your specific reaction to a case and to say, hold on. What are the general features of this case? And how can I make a rule to guide my own behavior in the world so that I know when to support the revolution and when not to? Because that’s what’s at stake in judgment.
Jon Bassett
So the big insight of the four question method is that every good history or social studies lesson is actually focused on one of these four questions. And the clarity that’s achieved by understanding that these are the four questions that define the discipline, the clarity that’s achieved for teachers and students is just game changing.
Barbara Davidson
Could you comment on the extent to which you think thoseーthat progression, it’s one of the things that I think is so impressive about the four question method. And I, I note that it sounds a little bit like historical thinking skills. Am I right about that?
Jon Bassett
You’re dead, right. You’re dead, right. The first problem we tried to solve was: How do we get all this giant content list into a coherent unit or a coherent course?
The second problem that we set out to solve was: How do we take those lists of historical thinking skillsーwhich are long and difficult to understand and disconnected from contentーhow do we make those actually real in the room? Because you know, we all agree that we don’t just want kids to tell a story back. We want them to be able to think about the story. Gary likes to say, we take the story apart and put it back together.
And each question has a thinking skill associated with it. And if you can do good narration, interpretation, explanation and judgment, you will find that in doing that, you will sweep up all those other historical thinking skills that the college board or New Visions or, you know, everybody has all these historic ーthese lists of historical thinking skills. They’re really only four: narration, interpretation, explanation and judgment.
Barbara Davidson
So let’s push on this a little bit more. You all are in the throes of writing a curriculum and you’re, I think, just beginning to do that at the elementary level. So, do you find that young people are really able to get into the mindset of people from the past?
Gary Shiffman
Yes [laughs] they absolutely can. So, we’re high school guys and we just finished an eighth grade curriculum, which we beta tested widely in classrooms. But even before that, you know, a mind expanding experience for us was a brilliant young woman named Emma Colona, who reached out to us. She was the curriculum director for elementary and middle school at a charterーa charter school in Texasーin Tennessee.
And she said, “My kids can do history, I know they can. But we don’t have a way to make them do it. And so I’m really interested in what you guys do. Can you help us with curriculum?”
And we ended up writing units for her. And every single one of those units had question ones, twos, threes, and fours. They had lessons on narration, interpretation, explanation, judgment. And kids could do it.
We took Natalie Wexler, actually, for a demonstration of one of the lessons, and she saw kids have a discussion about Chief Joseph, who was a Lakota Sioux leader, who hadーwas faced with a terrible decision, about whether to fight what would almost certainly be a losing battle, and he decided he would not. And the kids in the room, they knew a lot, they knew the story, they knew about this guy, and they got to deliberate toward judgment about whether Chief Joseph made the right choice or not. They can do that in fourth and fifth grade, absolutely.
Jon Bassett
You know, one thing about that, and thinking about especially elementary teachers, I had a conversation with an elementary teacher once who was like, “You know, I know social studies is important, but I just don’t know how to do it.”
And, you know, I think that’s something that we can help with. And I think there’s a lot of people who are coming around to this, that like, oh, you know what you can do? You just need to teach kids to ask and answer these four questions. Oh, I can design activities around that. They’re elementary teachers.
But, you know, we’re moving away from, you know, Social Studies is we’re going to make stovepipe hats out of construction paper, because Abe Lincoln wore a stovepipe hat. You know, that’s an arts and crafts activity, that’s not social studies. And I think that that stuff is starting to fade.
And another example of this, you know, is my daughter teaches first grade. And she had the experience that I think a lot of early grade elementary teachers have, which she got what she called the list curriculum. One of her social studies units was American symbols: the flag, the Liberty Bell, the eagle.
She’s like, “What do I do with this?” And we talked it over, and she was like, “Oh, all these symbols come out of the American Revolution. I’ll make it into a unit about the American Revolution.”
So she’d storified the unit. It went great. You know, kids are playing Red Coats and Patriots on the playground and telling their parents what’s going on at the Boston Tea Party at dinner, you know. And so, you know, you give people, like, a list of American symbols, it’s boring. But story of the American Revolution? Yeah, first graders can do that. Absolutely.
Barbara Davidson
So I want to shift to one of my pet peeves. You all have heard me talk at length about my concern that a lot of the social studies curriculum that we’ve been looking at lately seems to put this outsized emphasis on teaching through primary sources, almost as if using the primary source is the purpose of the exercise.
So do you guys have thoughts about the best use of primary sources and I think particularly with young students?
Jon Bassett
I was once asked to give a demonstration lesson for a job. And these were 10th graders who were going to read the Articles of Confederation and annotate them for context. And I was like, why would we read the Articles of Confederation? Thatーand how do you annotate for context? It didn’t make any sense to me.
And so there’s stuff like that all over the place. You see this also in curricula that will have a class period, and they’ll give kids six primary source documents to deal with in a class period. It’s like, well, you can’t deal with any of them very seriously if, you knowーif you have that many in that little time, you’re teaching kids to skim and fake it.
Gary Shiffman
We read documents because they’re meaningful artifacts. Why do we want to do that? Because we have a question called, question two, what were they thinking? We can’t call them up and chat with them. You know, we can’t know the people of the past any other way than using those documents.
But built into our method is the idea that you need to know the story before you get to the document. If a curriculum begins with the primary source, the first question you have to ask yourself is: What story do the kids already know? What are you presuming the kids already know to make that an interesting document so that they can ask question two? They must already know that person and what story they were involved in, otherwise it makes no sense.
By the way, what experts do is what we want our kids to do, but the way you acquire a skill is not the way you deploy it when you’re an expert. Musicians don’t sit down and play Rachmaninoff when they’re just introduced to the piano. That takes years of practice. What you have to do is learn your scales, learn where the notes are, right?
Primary sources for us are ways to practice doing what historians do. 8th graders aren’t historians, 12th graders aren’t historians. So it’s the silly mistake that says, we need to do exactly what the experts do so that we become experts. We actually need to do what the experts did before they were experts so that they became experts, which means learn a lot of stories, primarily. And then practice withーin a scaffolded wayーinterpreting documents when appropriate.
Barbara Davidson
Love it. So, is the four question method something that any teacher can learn about and utilize in their classroom, even though they may not have access to this curriculum that you are writing? What’s the application of the method to the teacher in the classroom today?
Gary Shiffman
So ideally our answer to your question would be, we have a curriculum and we would love to share it with you. However, we knowーthe reality is that we’re two guys and we have some help and we’re writing curriculum, we’re getting there.
But before we get all the way there, there are some things you can do. And the first one is the simplest of all, but if you take it seriously, it’s transformative. Tell stories in class. Tell the kids they’re true and teach them how to tell them back. Take every list you have, turn it into a story. Give them ways to do it. We haveーin our book, we talk about storyboards and because, and ‘because-but-so’ sentences and lots and lots of ways, rich ways, fun ways you can get kids to tell the story back. If you do nothing other than that, you will see miracles happen in front of you. That’s the advice for now and we’ll catch up with you and write curriculum.
Barbara Davidson
Brilliant. I love it. I’ve ended each episode with a question. What gives you hope about the future of social studies instruction?
Jon Bassett
I think there are more and more people who are coming around to the fact that, oh, you know what, kids can actually learn knowledge. And if we put knowledge first, that will lead to good outcomes, and that will actually help literacy.
You know, I think that there’s still a lot of holdover from the early 20th century idea that, you know, children are only interested in things close to them and then further and further out. But that, you know, I mean, if you’ve ever seen a four year old get excited about dinosaurs or Pokemon, you know that that’s demonstrably false.
And so, you know, I think there’s more and more people who are coming around to the idea that, oh, you know, history does matter in all the grades, and we should foreground knowledge and embrace that. So I’mーI’m optimistic about that.
Gary Shiffman
Yeah, I’m optimistic for the same reason. What Jon is saying, I mean, it’s like there are things now that seem so apparent, but my favorite one is motivation. If you don’t have fun activities, the kids won’t be motivated. Have you never felt joy in knowing something? Have you never felt joy in demonstrable progress in acquiring a skill? Of course you have! Every human being has done this. Why would we think children wouldn’t enjoy that? They want to know things. They wantーmy kidsーone of my kids went through a stage of knowing everything about the Kardashians. She loved that novel.
The point is people love to know things. And it feels like that’s just more ofーit’s in the air now. It’s in the culture. And I hope there’s no putting it back in the bottle.
Barbara Davidson
To learn more about Jon and Gary’s work, you can visit 4QMteaching.net. We linked to their website in the show notes.
This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. You can learn more about our work at knowledgematterscampaign.org.
To catch all of the History Matters Podcast, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.