Teaching Historical Thinking NOT Facts & Dates

Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer? by Bruce Lesh questions the way we teach history in our schools. According to Lesh, “Every major measure of students’ historical understanding since 1917 has demonstrated that students do not retain, understand, or enjoy their school experiences with history.” In classrooms, teachers usually lecture and students memorize. Teachers are giving students the answers when they would learn far more if they investigated the past in the way historians do. They need to learn to ask questions, seek evidence, and come up with explanations. Students who are “immersed in an interpretive study of the past” enjoy their experiences and remember them better. Lesh wants students to be able to try “on the shoes of historical actors.” With the Internet, students have access to many of the resources they could use in their investigations. This, of course, would mean restructuring most courses of study to focus on selected time periods since there is not enough time to cover all of the content in today’s history books.  Lesh’s book can be purchased as an eBook ($17.60) or in paperback ($22.00).