November 12, 2024 — Barbara Davidson and Kristen McQuillan
It’s time to get serious about social studies. Our current climate of disinformation and distrust has eroded many Americans’ sense of common cause. Meanwhile, a weak and disorganized approach to teaching history, civics, and geography has left young people ill-prepared for the challenges ahead.
Calls for reform are coming from across the political spectrum, and new insights from researchers and social studies teachers nationwide suggest some reason for optimism that change may be on the horizon.
The most recent NAEP test results show how little American students know about history, civics, and geography. As they have in the past, political conservatives reacted with alarms and calls for stronger instruction in shared freedoms and ideals to safeguard the nation’s future. However, this time the center-left Progressive Policy Institute also joined the chorus with its report on the importance of teaching students what it means to be an American. Critics on all sides have linked spotty civics and history education to young people’s growing skepticism of our institutions.
Meanwhile, the publication of two long-running research efforts on history and social studies provides a ready roadmap for overhauling curriculum and instruction nationwide. These studies detail how individual social studies teachers are substantially in charge of what and how they teach—and how, for the most part, they’re going it alone. While every state has academic standards on the books, less than half review curriculum for alignment or publish tools to guide decision-making by districts or schools. Most teachers fill the breach by curating content from the Internet, and a broad majority say that new tools and professional development are “very much needed.”
The Case for Change
It won’t be easy to change how we teach an already controversial subject that continues to get short shrift when it comes to teacher preparation and instructional time. But we believe it can be done, and that those efforts should start in elementary school. To be successful in high school history and civics courses, students need lessons that foster critical-thinking skills and explicitly teach history and civics content from the earliest grades.
At the Knowledge Matters Campaign, we’ve spent the last six years visiting reading classrooms at innovative and highly effective elementary schools as part of the Knowledge Matters School Tour. Much of what we’ve learned is applicable to social studies as well.
First, kids are innately curious. They want to know how things work, where they come from, and how we got here. Second, teachers are more successful when their schools provide high-quality curriculum and aligned professional development—a commonly missing element in social studies and other subjects. Third, knowledge-building curriculum and instruction rooted in the science of reading are changing the game for students growing up in poverty. In these classrooms, students are growing vocabulary and content knowledge while they learn literacy and critical-thinking skills.
Curriculum as Keystone
This social studies moment is a familiar one for us. A decade ago, educators and reading advocates also faced a fractured literacy curriculum landscape with poor results. Teachers were working overtime to create or supplement materials, while instruction was disconnected from what research shows works best.
As a field, we began to connect the dots, emphasizing explicit instruction in foundational skills and the important role of background knowledge to reading comprehension. Educators and community leaders worked to transparently review and adopt new evidence-based, content-rich reading curricula with public input and support. Today, states and school districts across the country are supporting a wide-scale shift to the use of high-quality instructional materials and aligned professional learning that help teachers and students thrive.
Social studies curriculum developers, state and district leaders, and teachers can reflect on what’s happened in reading as they look ahead. Social studies content can be contentious and changing curriculum can be hard. But we’ve seen communities come together and make tough, evidence-based choices, and we’ve also seen what happens when we fail to teach history and civics in a meaningful way. Can we really afford to shirk from these challenges?
Curiosity and Challenges
Envision an elementary-school social studies classroom where students build knowledge and understanding about a carefully planned sequence of related topics over a school year, stoking curiosity and confidence as they become experts in the content. The structure of elementary school handicaps such an approach in two ways. First, K-5 teachers are typically certified generalists who may not have deep knowledge of the subject. Second, daily class schedules prioritize instructional time for reading and math.
Adopting a high-quality curriculum can address both issues. Teachers can close gaps in their content knowledge or pedagogy through strong instructional materials and aligned professional learning. In addition, a curriculum that provides rich learning opportunities in history and civics doesn’t mean compromising on literacy instruction since history and civics content provides abundant opportunity to practice reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.
A Central Role for Stories
High-quality curriculum can also correct an over-reliance on expository texts. Virtually any social studies topic can be explored through letters, news articles, primary texts, and narratives. Students love stories, and cognitive science tells us that information presented through narrative texts, which feature causality, conflict, complications, and character, is more easily mastered. Expository texts may have their place, but it’s in conjunction with engaging, rich stories that animate the topic at hand.
In addition, research has shown the power of reading different types of topically linked texts, which build knowledge along with critical thinking and analysis. When students read conceptually related texts, they build vocabulary and knowledge at a rapid clip, and new information attaches readily to the knowledge they’ve already built. Better yet, these new words and ideas are transferable—that is, kids can apply words they learned in social studies, like “treaty” and “urban” to new topics, later on.
A Worthy Challenge
Changing long standing beliefs is hard—but history shows us it’s not impossible. It also illustrates the costs of waiting to do the right thing.
In 1847, a Hungarian physician named Ignatz Semmelweis urged his fellow doctors to wash their hands before delivering newborn babies, suspicious that surgical cross-contamination was spreading infection in his hospital. He was soon fired, and it wasn’t until two decades later, after Louis Pasteur’s controversial germ theory gained firm ground, that British surgeon Joseph Lister—of Listerine fame—successfully convinced physicians to sterilize their instruments and wash their hands between patients. In the intervening two decades, far too many people died, needlessly, to protect the status quo.
We’ve learned so much about the impact of high-quality curriculum and aligned professional development on literacy instruction over the last decade, as well as the rewards of putting past practices aside. With shared urgency and momentum to improve social studies, there’s no reason to wait—and plenty of reasons to move forward right away.