Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman, founding partners of 4QM Teaching, about their Four Question Method for teaching history and social studies. They discuss why so much history instruction fails to build lasting knowledge, the four questions that structure a well-taught history lesson (what happened, what were they thinking, why then and there, and what do we think about that), why “knowledge first” matters for both literacy and civic discourse, and how their approach could help address declining civics and history knowledge among young people.
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Episode Transcript
Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Thank you so much for joining us on the Show-Me Institute podcast. We’ve got John Bassett and Gary Shiffman. You guys are the founding partners of 4QM Teaching, which we’ll talk about later. But you guys were both, both of you have been classroom teachers, is that right?
Gary Shiffman (00:16): Yeah.
Jon Bassett (00:16): Yeah. So I was a classroom teacher for thirty-four years. I taught at a Catholic school in the South Bronx. I taught at sort of a medium-sized suburban school in Boston and then a large comprehensive high school outside of Boston, in Newton, Massachusetts. And that’s where I met Gary. And the story goes that I ended up hiring him in two thousand and one to teach in the department that I was chair of, and that kicked off a long and productive argument. Gary, you want to tell her about the argument?
Gary Shiffman (00:55): I guess, yeah. So I was a career changer. It was two thousand two, by the way. Historians, get that right.
Susan Pendergrass (01:02): And the argument continues.
Gary Shiffman (01:04): The argument continues. This is how we are. This is just it. So in 2002, I was an ex-political science professor. I didn’t get tenure at the University of California, San Diego, where I was teaching. I was a classroom teacher too, just had no idea what I was doing. Anyway, I decided I wanted to be a high school teacher, so I applied to lots of jobs, many, many jobs. I had a wife and two kids. My wife was employed, but we needed me to have a job, so I applied to a lot of jobs and I got exactly one job interview. And that was with John at Newton North High School. So I went in and did a demo lesson to show that I was qualified to take this job. And he asked me after the demo, he says, so tell me about the lesson you just taught. Reasonable question. And I said, can I tell you what I would do next time? And that got me the job. Because I had the inkling by the end of the demo, I didn’t really know what I was doing and I needed to learn. And he knew that going in, because I was a university professor without any real training in teaching, so obviously I didn’t know anything. And so he hired me. Well, John can tell you the story about why he hired me, but anyway, he hired me and I was there at Newton North for four years, and then I got the job of department chair, the same job he had, but I had it in a neighboring town, Brookline, where John happened to have gone to school and where my wife went to school, which is why we were living there. And so I got to be back in my hometown, Brookline, Massachusetts, chair of the department there, and I’d had that job for seventeen years. Well, I quit in twenty twenty-three to work on this.
Susan Pendergrass (02:41): Yeah, so here you guys are. And I think that you’ve started a nonprofit that we’re here to talk about today, but I think that a lot of our best ideas in education come out of the classroom, obviously. Teachers have a very entrepreneurial spirit oftentimes, if we can find ways to harness it, and I think it’s so great that you have. But at the Show-Me Institute, we have been talking in recent weeks about these polls that have been coming out that show that people are feeling more positively about socialism and less positively about capitalism. And some folks are very upset about it. We’ve had one of the pollsters on, Emily Ekins from the Cato Institute, to talk about their findings. And part of their poll found this growing interest in socialism, but also found that, I think, 40% of respondents didn’t know how many branches the federal government has. And a very high percentage didn’t know what we had just celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of, or which country we went to war with in the Revolutionary War. I mean, it’s just a really troubling lack of historical content knowledge. And then you ask this question, how do you feel about socialism and capitalism? And so people have been saying, do you think people even know what socialism and capitalism are? I don’t know, but I would guess probably not if they don’t know how many branches we have. And so, you know, then it’s like, what do you do? I’ve looked at the Missouri social studies standards. They’re pretty thin, and we don’t really report test scores, and there’s no real accountability. It’s not part of our accountability system. So I suspect kids are learning less and less about history, civics, government. And now you have stepped in to sort of address this problem. Is that right?
Jon Bassett (04:29): Yeah, I mean, I would say this is not a new problem, and we certainly would not guarantee that if history were taught well, everyone would reject socialism. I don’t know about that. But your anecdote about people not knowing who we fought against in the Revolution, we actually have an anecdote about that in our book. When I was teaching the American Revolution, and I was doing a bang-up job because I was teaching this great story, and I’m teaching the story of Lexington and Concord, and halfway through, these two girls in the back raise their hand and they say, wait a minute, Mr. Bassett, we’re fighting against the British? And I was like, my god. And so I think a lot of history, our big insight, we think, is that a lot of history is badly taught, because history teachers aren’t really exactly clear on what they’re doing when they’re teaching history well. And we argued for over a decade about what good history teaching looks like. And to make it both memorable and engaging, you have to be clear about what question is on the table in any given lesson or any given part of a lesson. And so that was our insight, that we’ve broken down into four questions that x-ray the discipline of social studies, and we think that it can both engage kids and make it memorable, but also provide insight into the structures of the disciplines themselves.
Susan Pendergrass (06:00): Okay, so let’s go through the four questions. How do you take these in order to teach a lesson about the American Revolution?
Gary Shiffman (06:07): Question one. What happened? It turns out that you cannot think about things you don’t know about. You could make stuff up, I guess, but you can’t think about it. And so if you take that question seriously, what happened? You think, all right, my kids need to know what happened. American Revolution. What happened? They need to know who was involved and what they did, right? They need to get that story in some way. And then to avoid the calamity in John’s classroom where the girls don’t know what’s going on, right? These are good kids. They want to know. They asked, right?
Susan Pendergrass (06:39): They needed that.
Gary Shiffman (06:41): They need to know, and they need to not just get the story, they need to tell the story back. So when we ask question one, we’re not just saying what happened, and we’re not just framing lessons around that. We actually have a methodology for doing that, for asking and answering that question. We call that skill narration. It’s a thinking skill. It’s hard. If you don’t think it’s hard, try it yourself. You’ll see there’s plenty to criticize about any first performance, right? So by focusing our method on question one, what happened, you’ve got to learn a story, you’ve got to tell it back, and there’s a rubric, there’s criteria for telling it back well. Now what we’re doing is not only getting kids up the chain toward real knowledge, but we’re actually working memory. I would say in answer to your last question, part of the problem is, we just wrote a blog post for the American Enterprise Institute. We were invited to submit a chapter on social studies. And our argument is we need a barn clearing in social studies the way they did it in early literacy, which was that scientists, cognitive scientists, psychologists who study learning know a lot about how human memory works. Unfortunately, many educational theories have no idea. So we’re trying to align our method with what we know about how human memory works. If you say nobody remembers anything from school, well, that was bad teaching. The problem is that the overall infrastructure for our field has not incorporated that science yet. We’re trying to incorporate the science. We want to incorporate the science, just like literacy. We need to clean house a little bit and focus on the activities that will actually create enduring knowledge, long-term memory, for kids.
Jon Bassett (08:19): Right. And so one of those is learning a story and telling it back. And so that’s question one. Everything starts from that. That story has some interesting people in it who made some interesting decisions that might seem strange or odd or consequential. Question two, we pause the narration and we try to dive into the heads of people who drove that story forward, and we ask, what were they thinking? So the guys who signed the Declaration of Independence, they took an enormous risk. You know, Ben Franklin, we must hang together or we will surely hang separately, right? And they pledged their lives, their treasure, and their sacred honor on a war against the world’s most powerful country. What were they thinking? This is question two, and this is the thinking skill of interpretation. So we read primary sources, we would read the declaration, and try to figure out, okay, what’s in the heads of the guys who wrote that and signed that? And then Gary was the guy who convinced me that question three exists. Gary, talk about question three.
Gary Shiffman (09:18): Sure. I just want to point out, question two deepens the story, because you’ve learned the story, you’ve learned what happened. Now we’re really going to know those characters well and know their thinking. It’s a post hole. It helps us remember the story, because now we’ve really spent time with Franklin or Jefferson or whoever, right? So question three is a stepping-back kind of question. And the question is, why then and there? So there have been anti-colonial rebellions for a long time. There have been wars of independence for a long time. There have been wars in general for a long time. But they don’t happen all the time, they happen sometimes, under some conditions. So I came from a political science department. I was a political scientist before I became a history teacher, and political scientists are weird. They’re a weird bunch, kind of like economists this way. They actually don’t care about the American Revolution. They care about revolutions in general. Under what conditions do revolutions occur? So you can marry that study, the study of the conditions under which stuff happens, to our study of narrative history. And you can do it very nicely, because once you know about a case pretty well and you know the people, the revolutionaries involved in that case, you’re only a stone’s throw away from, huh, does stuff like that happen all the time? So it turns out that Nova Scotia, a British colony, now part of Canada, was a fourteenth colony. Thirteen colonies rebelled. Nova Scotia was invited to join, and they said, thanks, but no, we’ll sit this one out. Jamaica was a British colony in the New World, and it turns out they also decided, nah, we’ll sit that out. How come? Why there, in the 13 colonies, but not in these other British colonies? And it turns out the pattern’s not that complicated. They needed British security, or the colonials were going to be killed because they were minorities, or vulnerable to whatever. There are lots of plausible answers to why Nova Scotia and Jamaica went one way and the 13 colonies went the other way. The point is to put on the table for kids questions like this, so they learn the thinking skill of what we call explanation. How do you consider changes or differences that might explain a different outcome in time? Like, once you know the British colonists in the 13 colonies were pretty happy being British until they weren’t, what changed? Or they were different from Nova Scotia, Virginia and Massachusetts were different from Nova Scotia. In what ways? And what you’re learning to do is what political scientists and economists do all the time. We should try to identify the factors that may make a difference in outcomes in the world. Turns out to be super fun with kids if you set the puzzle up right and you’ve got the question really clear.
Jon Bassett (11:48): And it’s also one of the things where, you know, we say all the time, you need to study history so you can understand the way the world works today. But we often don’t really cash that out. And question three cashes that out, because you can say, okay, why then and there for the American Revolution? Under what conditions do we get revolutions? Let’s look at some contemporary cases. And so we do that a lot in our curriculum. Question four is, what do we think about that? And this is where we get to exercise judgment. And we’ll focus in on a particular person or a particular policy, a particular decision, and we’ll say, well, was this the right thing or the wrong thing? Under what conditions is it right to do this thing? And we phrase the question with a “we,” not because we expect everyone to agree, we absolutely do not, but we are going to discuss this question in community, in a classroom community, and we’re modeling civic discourse here. So, you know, was the American Revolution justified? Some people think yes, some people think no, right? Why would you think that? What are your principles for justifying revolution? And then, under what conditions is it right to take up arms against your long-standing government? And so that’s sort of the payoff question.
Susan Pendergrass (13:04): And I saw that you’ve written about the same concept with Truman dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I can imagine would be a much more enriched conversation about judgment, right? Like, was it right?
Jon Bassett (13:17): Well, the reason it’s question four for a reason, which is that if you just go, well, Truman and the bomb, well, if we haven’t studied that very much, I’ll just give you an answer: well, you should never bomb civilians. Never? Yeah. But if you’ve done the whole story of World War II and you’ve done question two on Truman, and you know something about the underlying context and conditions, then usually you get, one of my favorite moments teaching question four was with this kid who was kind of struggling and asking it, and he’s like, that’s a hard question. There you go.
Susan Pendergrass (13:54): Yeah. Well, would you have said then, before, when what we need barn clearing about is that kids were given an original source document like the Declaration of Independence and told, what do you think? Like, were they going from here to here? Or what was the problem, that we were skipping some of these steps?
Gary Shiffman (14:17): Well, yes, we’re absolutely thinking about those steps. And teachers, so the dominant view of pedagogy was students need to talk as much as possible. Student discourse. And students need to talk, don’t get me wrong. We absolutely need to get kids to think out loud, to write their thoughts, to revise a lot. They need to be involved in their learning. Of course, that’s obvious. But if you give a kid a document that they find virtually impenetrable, because it was written hundreds of years ago by people with very different norms about English prose, among other things, who don’t know anything about the context, and you say, read this and now tell me what you think, think about how many of the four questions you just skipped. They don’t know what happened. You have to do what happened first. Second, it’s a very difficult document. When we do documents, when we ask kids to interpret a meaningful artifact from the past, we go very slowly. We’re going to take a piece of the document they can read in one sitting. Really read. We’re going to contextualize it, which means we’re going to remind them of the story they know that puts it in context. We’re going to have them establish the plain meaning. Takes a lot of time. It’s work. They have to know what those words mean. They have to really look at those sentences and understand the syntax. Does it sound like work? Yeah, it is work. Next, they’re going to interpret, and this is, we’re going to teach them, we’re going to give them guidelines for doing that. What is the purpose the authors were attempting to achieve when they wrote this document in this way? They could have written it a different way. They could have written nothing at all. What do we know, based on the context and the words they wrote? What plausible claims can we make, based on textual evidence, about what their goal was? Furthermore, what were their assumptions? Things they thought were true about the world that you see they must have thought was true, even though they didn’t actually say it. They assumed things about how the British would react. They assumed things about how their American audience would react. They didn’t say, I think the audience is going to react this way. This is inference. But you can teach kids to do that if you go slow and you’re methodical and you practice it over and over again, which is exactly how we design our curriculum. So now we’ve done the story first. We’ve really taken that document apart and gone slowly. And we haven’t even gotten to the “what do you think” part yet. That’s question four. That’s a different lesson. I don’t care what you think yet. I care what you think about what they thought. That’s question two. But when we get to planning our own little insurrections, or deciding they’re always a bad idea, whatever we decide, that’s a separate lesson, which has its own protocols for thinking and for doing it right.
Jon Bassett (16:50): Yeah, I would say, Susan, when you said, are we skipping steps? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a couple of the big ones, one of the big ones is knowledge first. And we have a slogan, we have laptop stickers that say “story first.” And a lot of teachers believe that. Or we sometimes work with teachers and we say, listen, kids have to get the story before they can think about it. And so we have question one lessons where kids get the story and they practice telling it back. And sometimes teachers tell us, well, if my administrator comes in and sees that my kids are just reading and taking notes on this story, or they see me lecturing and kids taking notes on the story, they’re going to tell me that’s low level and it’s not good pedagogy. And the problem is that it’s story first, not story only. And so knowledge first is just, we know this from cognitive science, but like Gary said earlier, that often doesn’t filter into the classroom. Another problem we see is document overload. And in history classes, people are told the kids have to do documents. So, we’ve seen lesson plans that call for middle school students to read four or five primary source documents from the 19th century in a single class period. And you can’t take it seriously if that’s what you’re doing. And so by having four questions and by having four lesson types, every lesson is just one thing. We’re going to learn the story today, kids. Today we’re going to dive into the heads of the signers of the Declaration. So we’re going to read a piece of that document slowly and carefully, the way Gary described. Today we’re going to look at underlying context and conditions. We’re going to work on a question three puzzle. That’s going to take the whole class period. We’re going to talk about what we think about that. Again, whole class period. Just the clarity of the questions and giving it the time it needs and respecting knowledge first. Those, I think, are the
Susan Pendergrass (18:57): Yeah, and I don’t want to belabor this point, but this is kind of why your stuff was appealing to us. But if you ask somebody what they think about socialism, and they say, is socialism free health care and free child care and rent controls, then yes, I like it. Because if you don’t know, if you don’t have any context for what it is, and I’ve had people say, well, are they learning about Stalin? And I’m like, probably not. I guess probably not, right? Because if you just associate it with what you’re hearing today, and the same thing with capitalism, well, I associate it with whoever, some of these very wealthy people who are around these days, maybe I don’t like that. And if you don’t have an underlying base of knowledge, then your opinion is just based on sort of what you see right in front of you right now. And that is skipping all of those steps. And I’m not saying anybody can’t have that opinion, that’s fine. It’s just that it’s coming from a place of not much underlying content knowledge. And I think that’s problematic. And I mean, we’ve seen similar things in reading, and I just wonder, what kind of happened? You know, we had A Nation at Risk in the eighties where they were like, we need to get back on track. And then we got kind of into whole language, and then we got into this interactive math, and then we got into like, history and how you feel about it. And now, is a pendulum swinging back where we’re like, science of reading and phonics? And we know, with all due respect to UCSD, Gary, like those kids don’t do math, can’t do math. And now we have a real problem with kids being able to do well on civics, like NAEP civics and history tests. So what happened? Did we just lower the bar too much? Or what happened, do you think?
Jon Bassett (20:36): Well, we squeezed history out, is one thing that happened. And the emphasis, you know, you mentioned in your intro that history’s not tested in Missouri. Okay, not tested. Then, if I’m a principal and my school is going to get a state rating based on test scores, it’s going to be math and literacy. And so we’re going to focus on those things and we’re going to squeeze out the other things. But
Gary Shiffman (21:01): And one of the reasons, by the way, we love Natalie Wexler, who is our patron saint. She wrote a book saying, look, people are in their classroom spending two hours a day teaching comprehension skills, which don’t really exist. How about teach some history? How about some knowledge? Teach kids stuff. Kids are sponges. Kids want to learn stuff. First of all, they want stories, right? Ever, I had two kids. I have vivid, wonderful memories of sitting them on my lap, reading them stories. When you finish a story, the first thing they say is, again. They want it again. They love dinosaurs and trucks and stars and Pokemon and whatever it is. They just want to know stuff. And if you go into school and you practice skills, my god, how stultifying, right? But it was driven by the misguided belief that if we can’t nail that literacy exam, we’re doing a bad job. But Natalie raises the question, what if the exam isn’t very good? You have flushed all the learning out of your system in pursuit of an exam that doesn’t actually tell you what you want to know.
Jon Bassett (22:05): Well, and the reason, that exam, it’s not that you can’t test, it’s not, we’re not against testing. The problem is that people lost sight of the fact that literacy is, at least in large part, it’s just knowing stuff. And so if you actually taught history and science well, that would improve literacy. Because literacy has two components. Can I sound out the word? And do I know what the word means? And it turns out that learning a lot of history is really good for that second part, because there’s just a lot of general knowledge that comes from history, and it literally builds vocabulary. But rather than saying, what are we doing today, we are vocabulary-building children? No, we’re going to learn some history. And then, as an ancillary benefit, that’s going to build some vocabulary.
Susan Pendergrass (22:55): So now you have this, 4QM, what are you hoping to do with it? Are you going to spread the word?
Gary Shiffman (23:01): We are hoping. We are hoping, Susan, thank you for helping us.
Susan Pendergrass (23:04): So how do you get this into classrooms? Honestly, we’ve talked about this a lot at the Show-Me Institute. Like, okay, we know we have a problem with content knowledge in these areas. We know the standards are not great. And they take the test, but that doesn’t count toward accountability. What do we do? Do we want better standards? Do we want better teaching? We kind of, to your point, we kind of know where to go with this science of reading thing, but we don’t really know where to go with this teaching history and social studies thing. So are you guys providing a pathway?
Jon Bassett (23:32): So I think what we’re trying to do is sort of do an end run around the institutions that currently dominate our field and are making what we think are pretty significant and long-standing errors. And so we’ve built a curriculum and we’re building more. We have a middle school U.S. history one curriculum fully built out, and then we’re selling subscriptions to that. We’re building a world cultures and geography curriculum, also for middle school, that’ll be completed within the next few months. And our idea, I think, is we’ve had success in schools and districts where there’s a mid-level administrator who’s like, things aren’t really great here, but I think they could be better. And they bring us in and we train teachers and we give them curriculum. And I think that’s sort of the current state of affairs, but Gary, you know, we have big visions. Gary wants to take on the College Board, and I think that would be great.
Susan Pendergrass (24:34): Yeah, yeah.
Gary Shiffman (24:35): Yeah. Well, so John’s exactly right. I mean, it’s interesting, I want to write a blog post in praise of middle managers. The unsung heroes are the people, they’re not the big bosses who have to deal with the public all the time. And then teachers are crucial, but individual teachers can’t change a system. But sometimes the middle managers can say, exactly as John said, I’ve got people who can teach, and I’ve got kids willing to learn, and I don’t have the right tools for them. If I got them the right tools and we all pulled in the same direction, things would get a lot better. And when those people step out and say, let’s try this, and they support it, and they don’t just throw… I mean, some administrators, of course, are going to say, I got your curriculum, what do you want, I got your textbooks, what do you want. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people saying, no, we have to see this through. It’s a project. I have to make people see that it’s valuable. And sometimes it comes from teachers who convince administrators. Those are the best cases, actually. Some teacher says, my god, this is great, we’ve got to do this. But in any case, when they all push in the same direction… So that’s one level. But the capstones of the system, if we could get training programs, if teacher education involved training in good curriculum, the logic of it, how to deliver it, if you really went to grad school and learned the four-question method and then became a history teacher, yay. And then at the other end, the College Board writes these exams, and they’re fine, everybody takes, all the high flyers take AP, some schools make all the kids take AP. AP has a thinking skills list that’ll make your eyes cross. And the reality is, mostly it’s telling stories. Tell this story. Every once in a while they throw in and mention this document when you do it. But what if the College Board actually took thinking skills seriously and aligned their content, as we have, integrated the content and the skills, you’d give harder tests, they’d actually be more meaningful.
Susan Pendergrass (26:30): And do you have results in test scores? I hate to always just go there, but do you have results that are concrete?
Gary Shiffman (26:37): We have no science to support our intervention. No, neither does anybody else, by the way. Let’s be, all the science that drives the science of learning was done in labs on college sophomores. It’s all memory, it’s all cog-sci and all,
Jon Bassett (26:51): I mean, there’s the Fordham study that found additional time on social studies improved literacy scores in elementary and middle school. But that doesn’t say anything about the four question method. No, I think, so no, we don’t have a nice randomized, you know, half the kids took the four question method, half the kids did it regularly. We have a lot of anecdotes. Our most gratifying response from teachers is a combination of, often we hear teachers say, that’s what I’m doing. And it’s like, we like to say we didn’t really invent the four question method so much as we observed it. And so it’s clarifying for teachers. Then the second thing that’s really gratifying is we have a video up on our website of a Texas teacher who’s like, yep, I started doing 4QM, it was really hard, it was hard for me, it was hard for my students, they were complaining. So I stopped. I went back to what I was doing before, and I did that for a few weeks, and I was like, this is terrible. And I’m going back to the four question method, and I stuck with it. And by the time my kids took the mid-year test in January, I had the highest scores on that test that I’d ever had, because the kids are getting primary source documents like, yeah, no problem, I know what to do with that. I identify it, I contextualize it, I understand the plain meaning, then I do my inference, because they’ve practiced the skill and gotten better at it.
Gary Shiffman (28:11): So
Jon Bassett (28:12): We think the fact that it’s hard at first is actually evidence that it’s a real thing, that it’s worth doing.
Susan Pendergrass (28:22): Yeah, and one thing that I saw in something you guys, somebody, one of you wrote was that ironically, as kids are doing more of, like, read a primary document, tell me what you think, and tell me what you think, tell me what you think, the willingness to engage in conversation around controversial issues has gone down, right? Because everyone’s got a strong opinion, and people don’t want to jump in and talk about, like, the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, maybe, or they don’t want to talk about, I think you mentioned race reparations. Why? What is the connection? They’ve been talking so much about how they feel about stuff, and then they don’t want to engage in conversations. Or do they not have facts? What do you think?
Gary Shiffman (29:01): I think it’s all of it. I think it’s knowledge and skills, both. But yeah, so your comment reminds me that there’s some obscure research on this. Read about people who read novels, and it’s impossible to disentangle all the factors, why do some people read a lot of novels. But apparently fiction can build empathy. And the idea is you’re just taking the perspective of lots of characters. In a well-written novel, when you get fully engaged, you have to think through the situation from a variety of points of view. And I do think that our question two lessons, they’re built around that model. You don’t have to like Jefferson or Franklin or King George or any of these people, but you need to try to understand what they were thinking. It’s called historical empathy. And I do think, one of the many pieces, lack of knowledge, social inhibition, the fear of being humiliated online, all of that stuff is real. But part of it is, if you don’t practice trying to understand what other people think, even if you don’t like them, how are you going to engage in civic dialogue? You’re just going to cartoon your enemies, right? You’re just going to stay in your silo. But if you have to… And by the way, so John hires me in two thousand two, I’m Jewish, I’m teaching in a school with a lot of Jewish kids, I’m teaching modern world history. And you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to try to understand what Hitler was thinking.
Susan Pendergrass (30:24): Yeah.
Gary Shiffman (30:25): And I go back to that because we’ve had pushback from people, like, that person’s kind of edgy. I’m like, excuse me, some of the most important teaching I ever did was telling my room full of students of all religions and ethnicities, including Jewish kids, we need to understand this because this is real. This actually happened. This is a real person. And none of us want this to happen again. But that’s a slogan. We need to understand how it happens and what the thinking looks like.
Jon Bassett (30:58): And one of the big insights of the method is, by separating question two and question four,
Susan Pendergrass (31:03): Right, that’s what I’m thinking.
Jon Bassett (31:05): it makes the whole conversation easier, right? Like, I’m going to ask, so in our, we have a document, from South Carolina in the Civil War, we have a document from a pro-slavery senator. We’re not going to read that because we think slavery is great. We don’t, we think it’s terrible. But we’ve got to understand what they were thinking. Right.
Gary Shiffman (31:28): That’s
Jon Bassett (31:28): Different question from, what do we think about that? So let’s practice on that. And then when we do get to a real question four, well, under what conditions is revolution justified? Or, one of my favorites, who gets a statue, right? I had a
Susan Pendergrass (31:44): I was just thinking.
Jon Bassett (31:45): four, Boston took down its Columbus statue. Was that the right decision or the wrong decision, right? And when you have practice understanding, working with empathy, and then we also frame our question four lessons really carefully and step by step. So, it’s not just throwing everybody in the mix. It’s so gratifying when you see kids who are able to disagree deeply and sincerely. And we always say the goal of a question four lesson is not to convince other people, it’s to understand each other. And so you want to build a border wall, I think that’s a bad idea, what are your reasons, what are my reasons, how do we talk about that? That’s, and the method helps to make those lessons much better and easier and safer for teachers, for students, for everybody.
Susan Pendergrass (32:43): And I think the key is putting that at the end, making that question four, not question one. Because I think a lot of times it is, “what do you think” becomes question one. And they can’t disentangle what they think with how other people thought. And I think that we really need to get away from that type of discourse. And no matter what, your timing is great, because I think you’re at a time when we are beginning to see that we need some new direction in this field. And I think your method looks great. So I appreciate you coming and telling us about it. Where can people find out more?
Jon Bassett (33:20): 4qmteaching.net.
Susan Pendergrass (33:23): You’ve been writing about it here and there. So I hope that people pursue looking into this, because I think it just makes so much more sense to me. And maybe we get some of the heat off the discourse.
Jon Bassett (33:36): More light, less heat.
Susan Pendergrass (33:38): More light, less heat. That’d be great. Thank you so much, Jon Bassett and Gary Shiffman. I appreciate it.
Jon Bassett (33:44): Thank you.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
