Using Essential Questions to Improve a High-School History Course

In this thoughtful 2008 article in Social Education, teacher educator Heather Lattimer (University of San Diego) says that all too often, despite their charisma and talent getting students involved in classroom activities, “teachers are the ones doing all the thinking in the classroom.” To counteract this tendency, specifically in social studies and history classes, she recommends using essential questions for each unit. Here’s why:

• Essential questions get to the heart of the discipline. They address the big ideas, pose dilemmas that puzzle historians and social scientists, and bring startling incongruities to students’ attention.

• Essential questions have more than one reasonable answer. A provocative and multi-layered question often raises more questions, naturally recurs throughout the year, and gets everyone looking at the material from multiple perspectives. 

• Essential questions connect the past to the present. Students are more likely to make these connections if teachers provoke reflection with questions like these:

• When is violence justified?
• Who should have access to the American dream?
• Are the benefits of progress worth the costs?
• Can we have both liberty and security?
• Is it better to work together or alone?

Such questions address fundamental concerns that each generation should ponder anew.

• Essential questions enable students to construct their own understanding of the past. They get students doing the “thinking work” to make sense of history and relate it to their own lives and current events.

• Essential questions reveal history to be a developing narrative. “Too often,” says Lattimer, “when history is taught as a collection of facts, students view history as ‘fixed and stable, dropped out of the sky readymade’ (Bruce VanSledright, 2004)… Engaging students in the study of history through the use of essential questions allows them to become apprentice historians.” 

• Essential questions challenge students to examine their own beliefs. Getting students to confront the messy facts of historical events through the lens of a good essential question “cultivates puzzlement” (Sam Wineburg, 2001) and pushes them beyond simplistic beliefs (for example, that Lincoln was good and the South was bad, or vice-versa). 

• Essential questions prepare students for democratic citizenry. That includes the ability to examine multiple perspectives, ask good questions of their own, dig for additional information, debate with peers and teachers, look for root causes, and change their minds.

Here are guidelines that Lattimer developed as she worked with Mike Paredes, a California teacher of U.S. history:

• Carefully select a question that will bring to life the issues of the time and place under study. For example, for a unit on the 1920s, the essential question was, Should there be limits on personal freedom? 

• Introduce the unit by building connections to students’ own concerns. Paredes raised a series of personal-liberty issues affecting teenagers (dress codes, curfews, drivers’ license restrictions, limits on alcohol and drug use) and had students take a stand for and against and explain their reasoning. This raised key issues in the unit: balancing personal safety with the rights of others; governments acting like parents; and the difference between free speech and hate speech.

• Dig deeper through the use of historical case studies. Paredes had students learn the details of the changing role of women in the 1920s, Prohibition, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Each case study raised additional essential questions:

• Should women be free to vote? To pursue interests outside the home?
• How does greater freedom for women affect the rest of the family?
• Should alcohol be prohibited? Can it be restricted for some and not others?
• Does a ban on an intoxicant cause more problems than it solves?
• Should people be allowed to express their opinions even when those views are racist?
• What happens when allowing personal freedom for some restricts the freedom of others?
• Whose freedoms are more important?

The case studies shone a bright light on the unit’s questions and deepened students’ understanding of the complexity of events.

• Use primary source documents to help students understand multiple perspectives. Reading 1926 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony by women who had been physically, emotionally, and financially abused by their binge-drinking husbands jolted students from their initial scorn about the wisdom of Prohibition. 

• Require regular reflection on the larger question in light of new information. Through informal discussions, Socratic seminars, and journal writing, Paredes kept students thinking about the deeper questions as new facts and ideas unfolded. Lattimer tells how one student moved from total certainty about the need for unlimited personal freedom to genuine confusion in light of the readings on the ravages of alcoholism, the dilemma of patriarchal men faced with the increasing liberation of women, and the violence that could be caused by the KKK’s words. 

Lattimer says the effective use of essential questions “led to significantly greater student engagement, much more consistent attendance and homework completion, and a 15-point increase in standardized test scores.” More importantly, students voiced genuine appreciation for what they had been through. In the end-of-year course evaluation, one wrote, “This class made me think more than any other class I’ve ever had. I learned a lot about history, but I learned even more about how to think about history.”

“Challenging History: Essential Questions in the Social Studies Classroom” by Heather Lattimer in Social Education, October 2008 (Vol. 72, #6, p. 326-329), http://bit.ly/XNcXZD

From the Marshall Memo #470