In the previous post I described how I taught high school history and social studies over 60-plus years ago in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. public schools.

I said:

[W]hile teachers in the 21st century are far more prepared in academic content than teachers over a half-century earlier were and new hardware and software are available to teachers, the organization of the American high school remains the same as it was over 60 years ago. And because context has a powerful but not determinative effect on classroom practice, teaching high school social studies in 2024, I believe, looks similar to how I taught over six decades earlier.

What evidence do I have to say that how I taught decades ago remains similar to how history and social studies teachers teach today? Not much, sad to say.

To be frank, very few studies document how history and social studies teachers teach. Yes, of course, there are teacher surveys of the instructional practices they use in lessons. There are also occasional student surveys reporting how their teachers taught history and social studies. And professional historians have tried frequently to help social studies teachers vary their materials and pedagogy while honoring varied interpretations of the past. The American Historical Association recently published American Lesson Plan (2024), a study of how history is taught in the nation’s classrooms.

But the fact remains that the time-intensive labor of researchers directly observing what teachers do during social studies lessons–a gold standard, in my judgment, is rare among university historians and scholars of teaching practices. So no surprise, then, when I looked for recent studies where historians and educational researchers observed actual history lessons, I found very few done over the past two decades. Here is what I did find.

In 2001, Suzanne Wilson painted a familiar picture of teacher-centered instruction dominating history classrooms. She examined the available literature on teaching history. Often called dismissively by critics as “traditional teaching,” it is a mode of instruction that is recognizable to most readers above the age of 18 who have ever taken high school and university history courses. In one study, for example, 97 percent of students in high school social studies classes reported that their teachers lectured during lessons. Students memorized information (83 percent), and used the textbook weekly (89 percent). Other classroom studies have found similar outcomes (here).

Yet the consistent portrayal that researchers and reform-minded historians have constructed of secondary school classrooms is hardly monolithic. In my research on how teachers taught between the 1890s and the present, for example, I found teachers (I estimated 10-15 percent) who borrowed particular student-centered techniques and incorporated them into their largely teacher-centered repertoire.

Individual history teachers have described practices they invented for their classrooms such as interspersing lectures and worksheets with small group-work; other teachers assigned textbook pages for homework and then had teams of students use their laptops to research World War II and “Cold War” projects they chose. Such examples of pragmatic borrowing lighten the bleak picture that many researchers draw when describing past and current history and social studies instruction.

Another variation in classroom practice that researchers have noted is how some social studies teachers, including many who teach Advanced Placement history, use primary sources, critically examine documents for bias, and have students construct interpretations of events that differ from their textbook. They do this through lectures, guided discussions, small groups, individual work on computers, simulations, and novel mixes of these practices. In short, small bands of history teachers (about 10-15 percent) work within both the teacher-centered- and student-centered traditions to construct unique hybrids. They have departed from the traditional practices that researchers have regularly described as the typical history classroom and students and parents have labeled “boring.”

Nonetheless, prizing the past for cultivating a national identity, patriotism, and a faith in one’s nation remains deeply buried in the mission of tax-supported public schools, that is, to instill within students common civic values from which they can draw upon as adults. Beyond having the U.S. flag in every classroom and reciting daily the Pledge of Allegiance, textbooks and teacher lectures focus on the “founding fathers” of the Revolutionary period and heroes such as Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony to recoup from the past a legacy that all American students should know. In the hands of some legislators, textbook authors. and teachers, this view of the past comes close to an official narrative encased in state standards and teaching; it aims to inspire pride in the U.S. This approach uses the past to recreate the present to “tell ourselves who we are, where we are from, and to what we belong.” (pp. xi,xiii, 123)

This pride-driven approach, however, is not a single account of the past but many accounts. Historians prize objectivity in their different renderings of the past. They know well that objectivity is an ideal to be sought but seldom achieved; Scholars of the past try to produce impartial stories and analyses consistent with the evidence they uncovered. They explain events while exposing common beliefs about the past that often undermine “facts” cherished by those bent on instilling patriotism in children and youth. History, as many say, is an interpretation of the past, not a fax that yesteryear has wired to the present.

Professional historians since the late-19th century, then, have tried again and again to unbind teachers from a heritage-driven pedagogy of using one textbook and constantly asking students to recall names and dates. They have sought to make school-history more inquiring, more thoughtful, and more consistent with how historians do history. This mission has propelled historians to work closely with secondary school teachers since the 1920s but that interest has both flowed and ebbed over decades. It is now at ebb tide.

In light of the sparse evidence, thus far, of how history teachers teach, my observations of social studies classrooms in the years prior to the Covid pandemic, and the work of professional historians–awareness of the importance of history as a school subject is securely lodged in policymakers,’ historians,’ teachers,’ and parents’ values but has yet to alter substantially how teachers teach history in 2024.

And that is why I said in an earlier post and above: teaching high school social studies in 2024, I believe, looks similar to how I taught over six decades earlier.