Kappan
Phi Delta
service | research | leadership
Professional
Development
Discussion Guide
for the December 2010/January 2011 issue
By Lois Brown Easton
Using this guide
This discussion guide is intended to assist Kappan readers who want to use articles in staff meetings
or university classroom discussions.
Members of Phi Delta Kappa have permission to make copies of the enclosed activities for use in staff
meetings, professional development activities, or university classroom discussions. Please ensure that
Phi Delta Kappa and Kappan magazine are credited with this material.
All publications and cartoons in Kappan are copyrighted by Phi Delta Kappa International, Inc. and/or
by the authors. Multiple copies may not be made without permission.
Send permission requests to [email protected].
Copyright Phi Delta Kappa, 2010. All rights reserved.
The Juggler’s Brain
By Nicholas Carr
Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 4 (December 2010/January 2011): 8-14.
OVERVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Key Sentence: Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have
the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: The Net seizes our attention only to
scatter it.
KEY POINTS
• The Internet engages almost all of our senses, commands our simultaneous attention to multiple
stimuli, and provides immediate feedback.
• The Internet fundamentally alters our mental makeup as we process the multitude of signals coming
to us.
• We gain skills such as better “hand-eye coordination, reflex response. . . the processing of visual cues
. . . recognition of patterns. . . .” and nimbleness in multitasking, but we lose “our ability to think
deeply and creatively.”
• The Internet leads to a “weakening of our capacities for the kind of ‘deep processing’ that underpins
‘mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection’”
(Greenfield 2009: 69-71).
FULL VALUE
The author writes, “What you see is a mind consumed with a medium. When we’re online, we’re often
oblivious to everything else going on around us. The real world recedes as we process the flood of
symbols and stimuli coming through our devices.”
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian educator and philosopher with a focus on communication theory. He
is known for his statement, “The medium is the message.” In 1967, he co-authored The Medium Is the
Massage with Quentin Fiore and said he used the word “massage” to emphasize that the media — from
type to photographs, from radio to television and movies — affect (or massage) the senses and the
meaning derived from the senses.
Although he died in 1980, before the Internet had had much impact on society in general, 10 years later
Wired magazine declared him “patron saint.” Clearly, his concept of the impact of media on
understanding would apply more to the Internet than any other medium McLuhan had written about.
DEEPEN YOUR THINKING
Choose one or more of these individual inquiry topics for thinking and writing.
1. Think about your own use of the Internet. To what extent do you multitask as you use the
Internet? To what extent do you use hypertext? To what extent do you respond to visual (text or
pictures) cues that are ancillary to your main purpose for using the Internet?
2. Think about students’ use of the Internet on the computer or on their phones. To what extent do
they engage in some of the actions in question 1?
3. How does the Internet command your attention? How does it reward you? How does it provide
feedback? How does it distract you?
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4. Compare yourself at their age to students today. What skills do today’s students have? What skills
do today’s students lack?
5. What evidence do you have that young people today think differently? To what extent do the ways
that students think today influence their ability to learn?
6. To what extent are today’s students’ thinking abilities affected by their use of the Internet?
EXTEND YOUR THOUGHTS THROUGH ACTIVITIES FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
Activity #1
With your colleagues, try this experiment.
1. Give colleagues this topic to write on: The Internet affects the way students think in science, social
studies, mathematics, and literature. Have them start writing.
2. Then project on a screen the home page from a news station such as MSNBC or CNN, with the
sound on. Click on various stories and then go back to the home page.
3. Simultaneously, have another colleague play some downloaded music from a smartphone or iPod.
4. Simultaneously, have another colleague make a fictitious call to someone, talking loudly on his/her
cell phone.
5. After a few minutes of this experiment — or when participants request its end — have your
colleagues talk about their capacity to write deeply and coherently about the assigned topic.
6. Have your colleagues engage in a discussion about how today’s students would be able to manage
the essay with all the other inputs.
Activity #2
Choose one of the following quotes from the article and discuss as a group, using a round-robin protocol.
1. The author’s title, “The Juggler’s Brain.”
2. “It also turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social or intellectual
nourishment.”
3. “Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes.”
4. “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”
5. “Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire
together.”
6. “We have to remember what it is we are to concentrate on.”
7. “Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the
Internet.”
The Round-Robin Protocol
1. Have participants sit in two parallel lines or concentric circles facing each other:
XXXXX
YYYYY
OR
2. Have pairs start their discussion with each other using the first topic above. They should
agree/disagree with the statement, provide examples for each other, explore details related to the
topic, etc.
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3. Then, have one of each pair move to the right (for example, the X people or the people in the
inner circle). The other one in each pair remains in position but greets a new partner.
4. The new pair should summarize their discussion on the first topic and then discuss the second
topic.
5. Repeat the process, with the same one of each pair (X or inner circle) moving to the right, with the
other one in each pair remaining in position so that everyone has a new partner.
6. Have new pairs summarize the first two discussions — briefly — and then move to the second
topic.
7. Repeat until you have discussed all of the topics or have run out of time.
8. Ask participants to share “ahas” from their discussions.
APPLICATIONS
This Kappan Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind
(Supporting and Sustaining Teachers’ Professional Development: A Principal’s Guide, by Marilyn Tallerico.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005: 54-63):
• Active engagement
• Relevance to current challenges
• Integration of experience
• Learning style variation
• Choice and self-direction
As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs
above?
This Professional Development Guide was created so readers could apply what they have learned to
work in classrooms (from Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student
Achievement, by Robert J. Marzano, Deborah Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD,
2001).
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note-Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with
them?
More thoughts? Go to PDKConnect.org to discuss this article with others. (First-time users register
at pdkintl.org to set up a user name and password.)
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The Policy and Politics of Rewriting the
Nation’s Main Education Law
By Jack Jennings
Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 4 (December 2010/January 2011): 44-49.
OVERVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Key Sentences: Renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 2011 will be particularly
challenging. The issues are difficult and the politics tricky.
KEY POINTS
• In 2012, Congress plans to rewrite the ESEA (the baseline Elementary and Secondary Education
Act), particularly “the comprehensive amendments made to ESEA in 2002 by the No Child Left
Behind Act.”
• However, the possibility of deadlock is strong — with issues, the political climate, and the major
players likely to disagree to the point of making revision impossible.
• Among the issues are these:
° Goals and accountability measures (Obama’s Blueprint for Reform vs. NCLB’s 100% proficiency
by 2014);
° Common standards;
° School improvement (measuring failure á la NCLB or success);
° Teacher evaluation and pay;
° Competitive or formula-driven grants; and
° The proper federal role (local, state, and federal control of education).
• The political climate is influenced by the change from a Democrat-controlled to a Republicancontrolled Congress and reasons the new Congress might or might not support a revision of ESEA.
• The major players likely to disagree are teacher unions; representative groups such as the National
School Boards Association and the principals’ organizations; the National Governors Association
and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which wrote the common standards and want state
control; other organizations such as national civil rights groups and the Business Roundtable; and
“new” influential groups such as Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, the New
Teacher Project, New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform, and the KIPP
Academies.
FULL VALUE
According to the Education Commission of the States (ECS), “the federal government plays a smaller
role in K-12 education — in terms of both funding and decision making — than states or local districts, as
a result of the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes that powers not specifically
given the federal government are the responsibility of the states or the people.” According to ECS (citing
Terry Astuto and David Clark in the Encyclopedia of Educational Research), “education has remained the
domain of state and local governments throughout the history of the United States for a few reasons,
namely:
• The Founding Fathers did not trust centralized government.
• A tradition of local control of schools has been established.
• Persons elected to the executive and legislative offices have not succeeded in reversing the passive
federal role in education established in the Constitution.
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However, ECS acknowledges that “the federal government’s role in education policy making has, by
stages, grown in the last 50 years.” Here are some examples of the influential federal role in education:
• Authorization and reauthorization of ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act) from 1965
to the present;
• The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA);
• Title IX;
• The establishment of the U.S. Department of Education and the office of Secretary of Education
(the Carter Administration in 1978);
• The establishment of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) and the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and several regional labs.
DEEPEN YOUR THINKING
Choose one or more of these individual inquiry topics for thinking and writing.
1. How does the federal government influence the work you do in education?
2. What has been your involvement in terms of NCLB and ESEA, in particular?
3. What are your thoughts about NCLB’s target of 100% proficiency by 2014? About AYP? About
measurement of student growth over time versus measuring a whole system’s achievement of
targets?
4. What do you know about President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform, released by the U.S.
Department of Education in March 2010? Race to the Top? The Teacher Incentive Fund?
5. What do you think about common standards?
6. What has been your experience with competitive grants? With formula grants (which award on
the basis of need)?
7. What are your predictions regarding the possibility of rewriting ESEA in 2011 or 2012?
EXTEND YOUR THOUGHTS THROUGH ACTIVITIES FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
Activity #1
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary (www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/) the carrot and stick represent “the use of both reward and
punishment to induce cooperation.” The phrase dates from 1876 when it described “the
traditional alternatives of driving a donkey by either holding out a carrot or whipping it
with a stick.”
Federal, state, and local policies can be understood as either carrot or stick — or both.
Work with colleagues to name as many carrot or stick policies (or both) that you have in
your own setting. Star the ones that have been effective.
CARROT
Federal/State
District
STICK
Local
Federal/State
District
Local
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Activity #2
In 1956, an “anthropologist” described the curious culture of a people named the Nacirema. He
described, for example, the mouth-rite ritual, the listener role, the face-scraping ritual for the males of the
society, and the people’s hero Notgnihsaw.
(These people are, of course, Americans — spelled backwards whose rites include brushing their teeth,
consulting psychiatrists, shaving their faces, and revering George Washington — spelled backwards.)
Indulge in a bit of creativity with your group. Imagine that you are an anthropologist in Washington,
D.C., in 2011 just as Congress is beginning its debate on rewriting ESEA. What would you observe?
REFERENCE
Miner, Horace. “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema.” American Anthropologist (June 1956).
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema. This work is in the public domain worldwide because it has
been so released by the copyright holder.
APPLICATIONS
This Kappan Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind
(Supporting and Sustaining Teachers’ Professional Development: A Principal’s Guide, by Marilyn Tallerico.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005: 54-63):
• Active engagement
• Relevance to current challenges
• Integration of experience
• Learning style variation
• Choice and self-direction
As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs
above?
This Professional Development Guide was created so readers could apply what they have learned to
work in classrooms (from Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student
Achievement, by Robert J. Marzano, Deborah Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD,
2001).
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note-Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with
them?
More thoughts? Go to PDKConnect.org to discuss this article with others. (First-time users register
at pdkintl.org to set up a user name and password.)
PD 6 Kappan
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Pressuring Teachers to Leave:
Honest Talk About How Principals Use
Harassing Supervision
By Sara Ray Stoelinga
Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 4 (December 2010/January 2011): 57-61.
OVERVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Key Sentence: Harassing supervision is a result of a complex web of factors that includes: 1) a
teacher evaluation system that doesn’t systematically identify low-performing teachers and a teacher
removal process that isn’t readily understood by principals, 2) principal training programs that generally
don’t build principal expertise in hiring and teacher professional development, and 3) high rates of principal turnover.
KEY POINTS
• Principals cite “the management of teachers — recruitment, hiring, evaluation, professional
development, and removal” — as significant roadblocks to school improvement.
• Harassment strategies include increased supervisory visits, transfer to a different subject or grade
level, transfer to a less accessible class, or mandatory professional development.
• A variety of studies establishes that around 75% of principals engage in harassment to persuade lowperforming teachers to leave, many wishing for some other way to ensure that students learn.
• Increasing accountability pressures, ineffective teacher evaluation systems (often labeling lowperforming teachers as Excellent or Superior), and the extremely low rate of removal force principals
to use harassing strategies.
• Principals are often unprepared to recruit, hire, and develop teachers; furthermore, principal
turnover leaves new principals with teachers they didn’t hire and don’t know how to help.
FULL VALUE
In 2008, the Interstate School Leader Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) revised its 1996 document
Standards for School Leaders. They were adopted by the National Policy Board for Educational
Administration (NPBEA).
The 2008 standards were developed for use in their entirety or as a template by states and districts for
developing their own standards. They are seen as guiding standards and focus on policy. States and
groups such as the NAESP (National Association of Elementary School Principals) are developing guides
to practices that relate to the standards.
“ISLLC 2008 organizes the functions that help define strong school leadership under six standards.
These standards represent the broad, high-priority themes that education leaders must address in order
to promote the success of every student. These six standards call for:
1. Setting a widely shared vision for learning;
2. Developing a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff
professional growth;
3. Ensuring effective management of the organization, operation, and resources for a safe, efficient,
and effective learning environment;
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4. Collaborating with faculty and community members, responding to diverse community interests
and needs, and mobilizing community resources;
5. Acting with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner; and
6. Understanding, responding to, and influencing the political, social, legal, and cultural contexts.”
Source:: http://www.wallacefoundation.org/SiteCollectionDocuments/WF/Knowledge%20Center/
Attachments/PDF/ISLLC%202008.pdf.
DEEPEN YOUR THINKING
Choose one or more of these individual inquiry topics for thinking and writing.
1. What have you heard about or experienced in terms of principal harassment of low-performing
teachers in order to persuade them to leave a school?
2. In your experience, why have principals needed to harass low-performing teachers in order to get
them to leave?
3. In your experience, how common is principal harassment of low-performing teachers?
4. What could be changed to help principals work with low-performing teachers rather than
persuade them to leave by using harassment strategies?
5. What are your district’s policies regarding recruitment, hiring, evaluation, professional
development, and removal of teachers?
6. How do you feel about this principal’s description of a decision to harass a teacher in order to
make him leave: “I hate being this guy, this terrible person who is putting this teacher in 1st grade when
he is an 8th-grade teacher. On the other hand, I hate what he is doing to kids more. To protect students and
give them what they need, I have to move poor teachers like him out regardless of the personal toll on him or
on me.”
EXTEND YOUR THOUGHTS THROUGH ACTIVITIES FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
Activity #1
Reread the “Full Value” section above. Working with colleagues, describe some principal practices that
illustrate the standards in practice. Here’s an example:
Standard: Acting with integrity, fairness, and in an ethical manner.
Practice: The principal describes performance expectations to teachers and provides feedback on how
well they have achieved these expectations, including concrete examples based on observations.
Which standards lead to practices related to this article? To what extent should the standards be more
specific about issues raised in this article?
Activity #2
This article is rich with examples of situations and quotes from principals. Working with colleagues,
imagine the other side of each situation described in a quote. In other words, what would the teachers
referenced in the quote say about the situation. What remedies might be considered other than
harassment to get the teacher to leave? What would have to be changed in the school or district for these
remedies to work?
You may find the following template helpful:
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Quote from Principal
Quote from Teacher
Possible Alternative
Remedies
District or School
Changes Necessary for
Alternative
“After 23 years in room
101, across from the main
office, Mrs. Albany
returns to start a new
school year to find that
she has been assigned to
room 411, four flights up
in a building with an
elevator that rarely works.
Climbing stairs is difficult
for Mrs. Albany, and her
schedule requires that she
walk up the stairs several
times throughout the day.”
APPLICATIONS
This Kappan Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind
(Supporting and Sustaining Teachers’ Professional Development: A Principal’s Guide, by Marilyn Tallerico.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005: 54-63):
• Active engagement
• Relevance to current challenges
• Integration of experience
• Learning style variation
• Choice and self-direction
As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs above?
This Professional Development Guide was created so readers could apply what they have learned to
work in classrooms (from Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student
Achievement, by Robert J. Marzano, Deborah Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD,
2001).
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note-Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with them?
More thoughts? Go to PDKConnect.org to discuss this article with others. (First-time users register
at pdkintl.org to set up a user name and password.)
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Editing Into Clarity
By Sam Wineburg
Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 4 (December 2010/January 2011): 67.
OVERVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Key Sentence: The act of editing myself into clarity was all about figuring out what I most wanted to
say.
KEY POINTS
• The author describes his attempts to get his 1999 Kappan article, “Historical Thinking and Other
Unnatural Acts” into print.
• He describes the reviews that were issued after its submission to Teachers College Record; these led
TCR to a split decision, ultimate rejection of the article, and its placement in a file drawer until he
could rethink what he had written.
• When he finally extracted it from his file drawer, he realized that his audience had changed; he
wanted to reach practicing history and social studies teachers.
• Working with Kappan editors, Pauline Gough and Bruce Smith, and with others helped the author
achieve clarity in his writing.
• The 1999 Kappan article became the title essay of his book, now in its 10th printing.
FULL VALUE
Joan Richardson, current editor of Kappan, instructs writers to “become a regular reader of the
magazine.” In addition, she writes: “We want manuscripts that explore issues of significance to K-12
education. We want manuscripts that present compelling arguments or information on those issues. We
want articles that are written so well that readers find it difficult to set them aside. We want articles that
compel our readers to action. That action may be as simple as calling the article to someone’s attention or
as large as improving classroom practice or becoming politically active to change a law or a regulation.”
Richardson, like many journal editors, wants clarity.
The “go-to-guys” in terms of clarity are still William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. In their 1939 classic The
Elements of Style, they recommend very specific usages, such as how to “enclose parenthetic expressions
between commas,” as well as describe general strategies for achieving clarity. For example, Strunk and
White suggest in their 71-page guide that a writer “choose a suitable design and hold to it.” They
admonish writers to go beyond their own order of ideas to create an organization that works for readers.
They describe planning as a “prelude to writing” during which the writer foresees “the shape of what is to
come” in order to “pursue that shape” (10).
Writers clarify their ideas when they follow other Strunk and White prescriptions, such as these:
• Use the active voice.
• Put statements in positive form.
• Use definite, specific, concrete language.
• Omit needless words.
• Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form [parallelism].
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• Keep related words together.
• Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end.
In applying these prescriptions, writers come to a better understanding of what they’re trying to say.
REFERENCES
Kappan Writer’s Guide. www.pdkintl.org/kappan/write.htm.
Strunk, William, Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
DEEPEN YOUR THINKING
Choose one or more of these individual inquiry topics for thinking and writing.
1. In what ways does writing help you clarify your ideas? Revision? Editing?
2. Have you or someone you know submitted manuscripts for publication? What was the result?
3. Having read Wineburg’s 1999 article from the Kappan, what do you think of the reviews it got
when it was submitted to Teachers College Record?
4. In the December 2010 online Professional Development Guide for the 1999 article, readers think
about words and phrases that Wineburg used in unique ways. What words or phrases from this
Introduction strike you as distinctive?
5. What trail of emotions led Wineburg from creation of the article he submitted to Teachers College
Record to its inclusion as the main chapter in a book by the same title (with 10 editions, to date)?
6. In what ways are concepts related to audience and purpose important to writing with clarity?
7. To what extent does Wineburg’s Introduction make you want to write for publication?
EXTEND YOUR THOUGHTS THROUGH ACTIVITIES FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
Activity #1
In the chapter “An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders),” Strunk and White (1939) challenge
the reader to consider variations on well-known quotes.
For example, Thomas Paine said, memorably, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Here are some
variations:
• Times like these try men’s souls.
• How trying it is to live in these times!
• These are trying times for men’s souls.
• Soulwise, these are trying times (53).
Explore with your colleagues why Paine’s quote works and why the others do not quite measure up. You
may decide that you like one of the variations better. Why?
Then, attempt to write early drafts of the following famous quotes:
“Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” (Alexander Pope)
“Man is what he believes.” (Anton Chekhov)
“Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.” (Adlai Stevenson)
“The price of greatness is responsibility.” (Winston Churchill)
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Activity #2
What are the premises of teaching and learning history in today’s schools? Referencing your state’s or
district’s standards, decide with your colleagues if current standards help students achieve the goals
Wineburg discussed in his 1999 essay. Consider how the standards could be implemented in a way that
would help achieve Wineburg’s goals for teaching and learning history.
The following template may help you record your discussion:
Current History Standard
Relationship to Wineburg’s
Goals for Learning History
How the Standard Could be
Implemented to Achieve
Wineburg’s Goals
APPLICATIONS
This Kappan Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind
(Supporting and Sustaining Teachers’ Professional Development: A Principal’s Guide, by Marilyn Tallerico.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005: 54-63):
• Active engagement
• Relevance to current challenges
• Integration of experience
• Learning style variation
• Choice and self-direction
As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs above?
This Professional Development Guide was created so readers could apply what they have learned to work in
classrooms (from Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement,
by Robert J. Marzano, Deborah Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD, 2001).
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note-Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with them?
More thoughts? Go to PDKConnect.org to discuss this article with others. (First-time users register
at pdkintl.org to set up a user name and password.)
PD 12 Kappan
December 2010/January 2011
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Historical Thinking and Other
Unnatural Acts
By Sam Wineburg
Phi Delta Kappan 92, no. 4 (December 2010/January 2011): 81-94 (digital edition only).
Originally published in Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (March 1999): 488-499
OVERVIEW OF THE ARTICLE
Key Sentence: To fully realize history’s humanizing qualities, to draw on its ability to, in the words of
Stanford University’s Carl Degler, “expand our conception and understanding of what it means to be
human” (1980: 24), we need to encounter the distant past — a past even more distant from us in
modes of thought and social organization than in years.
KEY POINTS
• This article, originally published in Phi Delta Kappan 80, no. 7 (March 1999: 488-499), arose from a
national policy debate about whether history should be part of the K-12 curriculum, and, if so, what
was worth learning in history and how it should be learned.
• The article goes far beyond the policy debate, which, mostly, addressed the extent to which names,
dates, and places should reflect the diversity of the United States.
• A deep tension exists between what is familiar and what is strange, with one of the problems being
the extent to which history education promotes understanding of the past through present-day
contexts and assumptions rather than the contexts of the past.
• The author presents several vignettes to make the point that understanding history is not a matter of
framing it in terms of current realities.
• “Textbooks present intriguing challenges and create a set of problems all their own,” such as
“objectivity,” the third person omniscient voice, and lack of primary sources.
• A mature study of history “engages the heart,” produces discomfort and humility, “inspires
incredulity,” raises questions, and results in genuine understanding of the past within its own
context.
FULL VALUE
Let’s go back to the time preceding the publication of this article.
According to National Center for History in the Schools, “the United States and World History
Standards were revised in early 1996.The revisions are responsive to the recommendations of two panels
of distinguished educators and public figures that were organized by the Council for Basic Education and
funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford
Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.”
In the preface to the 1996 National Standards for United States History, co-directors of the project note,
“In this most contentious field of the curriculum, there have been many who have wondered if a national
consensus could be forged concerning what all students should have the opportunity to learn about the
history of the world and of the peoples of all racial, religious, ethnic, and national backgrounds who have
been a part of that story. The responsiveness, enormous goodwill, and dogged determination of so many
to meet this challenge has reinforced our confidence in the inherent strength and capabilities of this
nation to undertake the steps necessary for bringing to all students the benefits of this endeavor. The
stakes are high. It is the challenge that must now be undertaken.”
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Here are four of the 16 criteria for the standards in the 1996 revision (see http://nchs.ucla.edu/standards/
dev-5-12d.html for the full list of criteria):
1. Standards should be intellectually demanding, reflect the best historical scholarship, and promote
active questioning and learning rather than passive absorption of facts, dates, and names.
4. Standards should be founded in chronology, an organizing approach that fosters appreciation of
pattern and causation in history.
5. Standards should strike a balance between emphasizing broad themes in United States and World
History and probing specific historical events, ideas, movements, persons, and documents.
6. All historical study involves selection and ordering of information in light of general ideas and
values. Standards for history should reflect the principles of sound historical reasoning, careful
evaluation of evidence, construction of causal relationships, balanced interpretation, and
comparative analysis. The ability to detect and evaluate distortion and propaganda by omission,
suppression, or invention of facts is essential.
DEEPEN YOUR THINKING
Choose one or more of these individual inquiry topics for thinking and writing.
1. Think back on your own K-12 learning experiences. How did you learn history? What do you
remember most in terms of content? What reasons were you given for learning history?
2. What characterizes the history curriculum in a school or district you know well today?
3. To what extent do today’s students learn history to avoid repeating mistakes from the past in the
present and future?
4. To what extent is the goal of learning history to make us comfortable with the past . . . or to make
us uncomfortable?
5. How would you characterize “historical thinking”? What makes it unnatural?
6. Which vignette — the one about the high school student, the teacher engaged in professional
learning, or the college history professor, the one about the young boy thinking about the
holocaust, the one about watching Schindler’s List — capture your interest and help you clarify
your understandings related to learning history? Why?
7. Why and how should history be humanizing?
EXTEND YOUR THOUGHTS THROUGH ACTIVITIES FOR GROUP DISCUSSION
Activity #1
The author uses a number of words and phrases in unique ways. Work with your colleagues to make
sense of any of these words and phrases from the article and apply them to another context.
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Word or Phrase
Meaning in Article
Application to Another Context
George Washington or Bart
Simpson
The familiar versus the strange
Esoteric exoticism
Sustained encounter with the less
familiar
“Hermeneutic naiveté”
Belief in “immaculate perception”
“All history is the history of
thought”
Know Caesar
Other people are other
Capturing otherness
Congenital blurriness of our vision
History as a “way of knowing”
“Prejudiced”
The “availability heuristic”
“Presentism”
“Specification of ignorance”
Latin contexere, means to weave
together
X educates (“leads outward” in the
Latin)
Unicorns and rhinoceroses
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APPLICATIONS
This Kappan Professional Development Guide was created with the characteristics of adult learners in mind
(Supporting and Sustaining Teachers’ Professional Development: A Principal’s Guide, by Marilyn Tallerico.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005: 54-63):
• Active engagement
• Relevance to current challenges
• Integration of experience
• Learning style variation
• Choice and self-direction
As you think about sharing this article with other adults, how could you fulfill the adult learning needs
above?
This Professional Development Guide was created so readers could apply what they have learned to
work in classrooms (from Classroom Instruction That Works: Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student
Achievement, by Robert J. Marzano, Deborah Pickering, and Jane E. Pollock. Alexandria, Va.: ASCD,
2001).
• Identifying Similarities and Differences
• Summarizing and Note-Taking
• Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition
• Homework and Practice
• Nonlinguistic Representations
• Cooperative Learning
• Setting Objectives and Providing Feedback
• Generating and Testing Hypotheses
• Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers
As you think about sharing this article with classroom teachers, how could you use these strategies with
them?
More thoughts? Go to PDKConnect.org to discuss this article with others. (First-time users register
at pdkintl.org to set up a user name and password.)
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About the Author
Lois Brown Easton is a consultant, coach, and author with a particular interest in learning designs
— for adults and for students.
She recently retired as director of professional development at Eagle Rock School and Professional
Development Center, Estes Park, Colo. From 1992 to 1994, she was director of Re:Learning Systems
at the Education Commission of the States (ECS). Re:Learning was a partnership between the
Coalition of Essential Schools and ECS. Before that, she served in the Arizona Department of
Education in a variety of positions: English/language arts coordinator, director of curriculum and instruction, and director of curriculum and assessment planning.
A middle school English teacher for 15 years, Easton earned her Ph.D. at the University of Arizona.
Easton has been a frequent presenter at conferences and a contributor to education journals. She is
currently co-president of the Colorado Staff Development Council.
She was editor and contributor to Powerful Designs for Professional Learning (NSDC, 2004 & 2008).
Her other books include:
• The Other Side of Curriculum: Lessons from Learners (Heinemann, 2002);
• Engaging the Disengaged: How Schools Can Help Struggling Students Succeed (Corwin Press,
2008) — winner of the Educational Book of the Year Award from Kappa Delta Gamma in 2009;
• Protocols for Professional Learning (ASCD, 2009);
• PLCs by Design: Helping Schools Help Struggling Students (NSDC and Corwin Press, in press).
Easton lives and works in Colorado.