A conversation with David Maron, middle school History teacher.

One globe. One question. That’s what 6th graders faced in history last week. “It’s not a test,” David explained, “but it does launch a process that reinforces one of our guiding values in the history classroom, and that is to embrace that we all have incomplete knowledge.” As students worked in teams to figure out when their globes were made, David learned a lot about his students. The globe challenge drew out what students already know about geography, human history, and research techniques. But for David the challenge served a far greater purpose by getting students to “figure out what they don’t know and then work through that unknown.”

Allowing students to get comfortable with the truth that we all operate with incomplete knowledge – students and teachers alike – frees us to ask questions that propel deeper learning and lead to increasingly complex intellectual work. In David’s words “having incomplete knowledge is the learning process. I want 6th graders to see very early in the year that this is a group experience. History class requires us to be intentional and students need to understand that this learning environment is not about being in an individual learning silo; it’s about working together, making decisions and discoveries together, and moving forward together.”

After the globes, students were presented with their next challenge: accurately placing historical events on three timelines that stretched across the room and featured different scales. On one timeline, one hour was represented in ten inches. On another, one inch represented one year. On the last, one inch was 200 years. “There is always some math required to understand the proper sequence of events, but really scale is the lesson,” David explained. Each timeline stretched across the classroom and required students to see time in different ways. “Sometimes we can look at just one day in history and it can tell us so much that is so important,” said David. “But sometimes we have to zoom out to see how events affect and influence each other. And sometimes we have to zoom way out to get perspective on how long it takes human societies to evolve over time. What I want 6th graders to see right away is that all these perspectives are necessary to history, and we’re going to use all of them this year.” 

While the timelines and globes may feel like time travel, students will soon experience that zooming in and out in history class connects past events to each other, and also connects the past to themselves, and to the very human issues we face here and now in the present. “We start with chronometry and geography, with time and place,” said David, “because we have to work with the physical world to understand history. But this class is also social studies, with a focus on how humans act and relate to one another. And that’s where the past teaches the present.”