In the classroom(s) that I observe, I have found a number of interesting issues having to do with concept-based learning (or lack thereof). My main cooperating teacher starts class with a journal where students explain in a sentence or two what they learned from the class before or from their reading.  They also are asked to write down one question they had from the day before or the homework.  They are also allowed to ask “volunteer” questions on almost anything related to the social sciences.  When I heard students talk about they learned in the class before they are always “facts.”  No students, even in the AP classes, goes “beyond” the facts to some sort of deeper understanding.

In the days where I have watched the class, the teacher gave notes one day to introduce the topic and then students got out books and “worked on terms.”  This is a nice way of saying that students copied words out of books for about 40 minutes while the teacher graded other homework.  On another day, they watched a movie and filled out a chart that showed the similiarities and differences between two characters.  This could have been a movement towards deeper learning, but the students really just turned it in to show “proof” that they were paying attention to the movie.

I wish I could say that this teacher was alone, but in the vast majority of social studies classrooms I’ve been in, at both the junior high and high school levels, there is an extreme obsession with facts (and, resultantly, never ‘moving beyond them’).  In one junior high class, I asked what sort of writing they do.

“We used to do writing,” he answered. “We don’t write anymore because the standardized tests don’t test writing in history.  We teach to the test.  We made it easier on ourselves and lightened our grading load.”

In another junior high class (seperate from the one mentioned above), I tried to introduce two primary documents comparing a Muslim and Christian view of the crusades, and the teacher said that primary sources were “too complicated” for middle schoolers.  I had provided scaffolding for the students by high-lighting and defining important vocabulary words.  We read the document together in class and we talked about what these words meant, and we looked at how these two people saw the crusades differently.  I admit that the kids were a little lost when I started talking about bias, but I was more startled by the teacher’s comments to me after the lesson.

“These are junior high kids,” she said.  “They need something right in front of them. You are asking them to think about subjects that are too complex.  You have to line everything up for them from A to Z.  You can’t expect them to follow you.  This is the type of stuff you do in high school.”

I know, however, from viewing the high school in which I am part of, that primary sources is not even something they really look at in high school.  Even deeper thinking is something that teachers have a hard time teaching.

“It’s like pulling teeth,” another US history high school teacher said.  “I tried to have them do a press conference with major progressive leaders, but they don’t understand how to ask deeper level questions.  When I tell them to ask deeper level questions, they just think that means they should try to stump the candidate with obscure trivia.  So I stopped doing that.”

Instead they do book work.  I wondered why they would think that deeper level questions would be obscure trivia until observing another US history high school teacher who played jeopardy as a review game.  I had never seen the harm in jeopardy as a fun way to review until reading Erikson.  Jeopardy is the epitome of what conceptual thinking is NOT.  Jeopardy thinking is the type that sees a statement and immediately they know there is only one right answer.  This is never really true in life, and the fact that this teacher gives students points and praise for a jeopardy like trivia game goes to show how far trivia has replaced thinking in the public schools.