Lauren Brown—Social Studies Content at the Elementary Level

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] Justin Baeder:

I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Lauren Brown. Lauren spent about 20 years teaching US history in middle and high schools, and another eight years working at the university level with future social studies teachers. She now works as a consultant and writer on Middleweb and her own Substack. And on Substack, she writes about education with a special focus on why social studies, and history in particular, matter. Much of her work is about helping people see how good history teaching strengthens not just literacy, but our democracy as well.

[00:44] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:46] Justin Baeder:

Lauren, welcome to Principal Center Radio.

[00:48] Lauren Brown:

Thanks, Justin. Delighted to be here.

[00:50] Justin Baeder:

I'm excited to have you on this show. We've talked on The Teaching Show, one of my other shows where we talk about teaching practices, and we had a great conversation about kind of light touch interdisciplinary teaching and working with your colleagues. And I think one of the things that came up in that conversation was just the importance content knowledge, particularly in social studies. Where are we right now with elementary content regarding social studies as a profession? Where do things stand currently?

[01:19] Lauren Brown:

I'm optimistic that things are moving in a better direction. I am hearing all over the place about how important it is to include more social studies. I think the science of reading and the science of learning has augmented that discussion. People are starting to figure out that our reading scores have been pretty stagnant for a long time. They're not good. And the question is, maybe we need to start asking ourselves is not about how to teach reading, but what kids should be reading and what's the actual content.

[01:57]

And obviously, social studies is a great option for doing that. So I'm excited that people are talking about it more at some conferences that I've been to. That has been the emphasis. And I know the Knowledge Matters campaign has a new campaign, History Matters, and they've been amplifying that message as well. So that's kind of where I think things are. I'm optimistic, let's say.

[02:23] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, I've listened to some episodes of that podcast, and I'm very glad to see that they are doing that because I feel like it's correcting a longstanding trend in the wrong direction that I would trace back specifically to No Child Left Behind and its focus on reading and math and not on social studies that caused, especially at the elementary level, a narrowing of the curriculum to reading and math, the tested subjects. to the exclusion of science, which is my subject, and social studies, your subject. And I think we recognized as a policy issue that that was a problem. To squeeze out other subjects, you know, is not good for the teaching of those subjects. But what we've realized in more recent years on the reading front is that it's also bad for reading for students not to have content in those other content areas like science and social studies. Take us into some of the rationale and the research there

[03:15] Lauren Brown:

specifically related to reading yeah well first i want to say i'm glad you brought up science if i were a science teacher i would be all about that so i think it's science and social studies but since i'm a social studies person i'll stick to my lane and talk about what i know i would agree with you about no child left behind i think it was also the common core standards and it was those common core standards that there was a tiny little footnote in the convent core standards that said none of the standards are meant to displace the content. But nobody reads footnotes, and the Common Core standards displaced content. It was also because of what happened in the 1990s, which preceded that, the history wars and the effort by the National Center for History Education

[04:07]

in the 1990s out of UCLA to advocate for national history standards. And there were arguments on the floor of the United States Senate about, you know, what's going to be included. All the things that we're hearing in today's climate too, you know, what are we teaching in social studies classes? Are we doing too much about race, too much about gender, not enough about these other great narratives. And so that sort of killed it in the 1990s. And everyone decided to double down on skills and on analyzing sources and providing evidence and not really talking about what kind of evidence we would be looking at and what sorts of things that we were reading when we're trying to figure out what was the main argument of a piece.

[04:51]

Let's not just read things willy-nilly. Let's have some coherence to a curriculum. And that's why I think social studies offers that sort of coherence that is missing if you're just looking at everything from a skills perspective. Skills and content just cannot be separated.

[05:09] Justin Baeder:

Now, when you say the Common Core standards, are you talking about the Common Core ELA standards? Because there are no Common Core social studies standards, right? Yeah.

[05:16] Lauren Brown:

Yeah, no, it's the ELA standards. And the ELA standards, those influence the National Council for the Social Studies C3 standards. And if you look at the C3 standards, they are very much based upon the Common Core. And so those standards, which came out of a social studies organization, became very skills based and less discipline focused, which I think was a problem.

[05:42] Justin Baeder:

And we can trace that directly to controversy over what specifically should be taught in social studies classes in debates that happened in the 90s. Is that right?

[05:51] Lauren Brown:

Yeah. And it's only worse now, right? Nobody wants to talk about exactly what things kids need to learn in school because it's controversial and everybody's afraid of that. So people sort of dance around it. And yet I think there's probably a lot of areas that people would agree on.

[06:08] Justin Baeder:

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, we had some of that in science as well, around the teaching of evolution. And of course, every subject has its content areas that tend to have controversy around them. And as you noted, that has pushed standards in the direction of skills and performance. My read on those skills is that they often miss the mark. They're often not really real skills, or as you said, at least they can't be separated from the content.

[06:35]

Take us into some more of your thinking about skills and kind of what some of the shortcomings of a skills focus are.

[06:41] Lauren Brown:

Well, one of the things that I wrote years ago was that no kid ever came home from school and said, oh, my gosh, guess what we did in school today? We learned how to pull the main idea from a text. We learned how to construct an argument. That's just not what excites kids. And so when you put standards like that or objectives like that on a board, let's say, and you emphasize that over the content, it's just that's not engaging. You know, what gets kids excited about is learning real content.

[07:08]

Oh, my gosh, mom, did you know about like the Trail of Tears and what happened, you know, with this? Or did you know about, you know, the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War? And oh, my God, what happened there? Like, that's what gets kids excited. Kids get excited about content. And I assume it's the same thing in science.

[07:24]

So skills cannot be separated from the content because you can't teach a skill like constructing an argument without what is the argument about? So let's say what the argument is about has something to do with, you know, the causes of the American Revolution, you know, What's the goal here? Is the goal to teach kids to make an argument or is the goal here to teach kids about the American Revolution? And I think it's to teach the kids about the American Revolution and the skills are practiced as a result of learning that content. You can't separate them out. It's just learning doesn't work that way.

[08:02] Justin Baeder:

And I think especially if we contrast that to what we would do in my subject, you know, I do want students to be able to make an argument in science, but it's going to be a very different type of argument. It is a different skill to make an argument in science, especially if it's, you know, the kind of argument that you would make in a lab report. If I am generating a hypothesis and conducting some sort of investigation, collecting some evidence, and then writing a conclusion to

[08:28] Lauren Brown:

know make a claim about the hypothesis and back that claim with evidence that's just going to look very different it is a different skill than a historical claim that might be based on you know primary sources and just all the unique features of historical argumentation yeah and that's what it is is that you can't learn to make an argument unless you're making it about something and so what is the something it's the american revolution or it's world war ii or it's industrialization in the late 19th century or it's something in the sciences It has to be about something. I think in some ways, one of the things that we're talking about is in contrast to some of the points I had in the earlier conversation that you and I had on your other podcast about interdisciplinary learning. And while I was kind of touting that interdisciplinary making connections between disciplines can kind of help with knowledge and

[09:21]

it's what I'm saying is sort of the corollary to that. Like, yes, that helps, but we also need that strong basis within the discipline. And there's a reason why disciplines use that same word discipline. It's because we need to have that training in that subject. And so, um, While I love the idea of interdisciplinary learning, and I'll stand by what I said in that earlier discussion you and I had, which was based on an article that I wrote for Middleweb, I will say that that is a complement to the very strong disciplinary content and knowledge that you have within the discipline of history or science or what have you.

[10:08] Justin Baeder:

Well, Lauren, I certainly agree that kids love learning content and generally do not love, you know, working on skills. No kid, as you said, comes home and says, hey, I really got some great practice in finding the main idea today. No, they come home singing the lyrics to Hamilton, right? They come home talking about the specific things that they learned. And my older daughter right now is working on memorizing the full name of the Marquis de Lafayette, which is, you know, extremely long. And she's so excited about it.

[10:34]

Nobody's making her do this. It's just interesting to her. And I think a lot of our content in both of our subjects is that way, that is inherently interesting, inherently motivating. And that focus on skills just isn't. No kid has ever come back to me as an adult and said, you know what was the best part of your class, Mr. Baeder?

[10:50]

It was the lab notebook. I really love the skill of making data tables. Like, no, it's the content that is interesting to them. So why would we downplay that? And I think For elementary teachers in particular, there is a challenge of expertise, of interest, of being able to attend to everything because you're it, right? If you are a homeroom teacher at the elementary level, you may have very little time for science, very little training in science, and probably the situation is not quite the same in social studies, but I'm curious your take on just that challenge of you know, at the elementary level, we don't have dedicated history teachers.

[11:28]

We have people who teach everything. And one of those things happens to be history. How do you see that challenge?

[11:33] Lauren Brown:

Yeah, I think that's a huge challenge. I mean, I have such admiration for elementary school teachers. I can't believe that these people are there to teach math and reading. That's such a heavy, heavy lift. And so to ask them to teach science and teach social studies, that's a challenge. I think what happens, what I've seen in a lot of schools is, you know, fourth and fifth grade gets somewhat departmentalized, you know.

[11:58]

There's one fourth grade teacher that does the math and the science and another that does the social studies and the ELA, and that probably helps. However, I think it's really important that we have this starting in kindergarten. And I honestly can't speak to that since I'm not an elementary school teacher, but I think the kinds of the content that we're teaching K through two is perhaps not It's just not as detailed and as dense as the content that I'm teaching in middle and high school. So perhaps that's the answer is that they're able to do it just because it's just not as dense of content.

[12:41] Justin Baeder:

Some people might say, well, because it's not that dense as content and because we've got so many other pressing priorities at the elementary level, why don't you just let us focus on reading and math and you can teach all that social studies stuff in middle school and high school when you have the time and the bandwidth for it. What happens developmentally and cognitively when we leave that content out of elementary school?

[13:04] Lauren Brown:

When you leave that content out of elementary school, you get the kind of problems that every middle and high school teacher has had. where you have students that'll say things like, wait, we were fighting against the British in the American Revolution? And you just want to like hit your head open, like how do they not get that? Or the time I had a student stop me when we were in the middle of World War II unit to ask if Germany was part of Russia and not having an understanding that these are two separate nations. And so that's what happens is that there's a lot of content that I take for granted as a middle school and high school teacher. I've learned that I can't take much for granted.

[13:48]

But I even had a conversation of this with a college professor who teaches American history to mostly incoming first-year students at the university level. And I asked him, how do you deal with the fact that, do you have that same problem where you're kind of wondering what on earth they did in high school that your kids don't know anything? And he said, I don't assume anything. Part of it is he teaches a lot of international students, so maybe they haven't really had a lot of American history. But we cannot afford to wait until middle school and high school. And when we're asking kids in middle school and high school to do more complex, deeper thinking about things, if we have to first, you know, draw a map of the United States and show what all these things are, well, we're not going to get to that juicy stuff.

[14:33]

Or the situation I had when, you know, we were talking about the Electoral College, which is very complex. And I had a student just look at the map of the electoral college that I had projected on the board and the numbers of the electoral votes were really large, but the names of the states weren't there. And he goes, oh, my God, what's that big state with 38 electoral votes? He was pointing to Texas. I don't remember if that's the current one. This was, you know, maybe before the last census.

[15:00]

But, you know, he didn't know Texas yet. And, you know, at least there were other students who sort of like, really, you don't know Texas. But then I realized that even the kids who thought that other kid was maybe an idiot for not knowing Texas, most of the other kids didn't really know much more than Texas, California, Florida and Illinois, because that's where we live. And maybe Indiana and Wisconsin because they go there on vacations, you know. So that's why we have to teach it at the early age, because otherwise they have these huge gaps and they don't understand things or understand. Something I heard Bruce Lesh talk about, he's a social studies educator in Maryland, and I attended a session he did at the National Council for the Social Studies.

[15:43]

He talked about fractured integration. When we just dabble in social studies and we think, oh, we'll just like kind of throw it into our ELA block, you get that kind of fractured integration where, you know, you just... It's Martin Luther King one day and then Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation another. And kids don't have any conception of things.

[16:06]

They think that Martin Luther King Jr. lived around the same time as Abraham Lincoln. You know, they just get confused. So they need to have those building blocks.

[16:16] Justin Baeder:

Well, I think building blocks is an apt term because it strikes me that at the high school level, especially, so much of what we need to talk about requires that we talk in a shorthand that requires that those blocks exist, right? Like if you're going to have any meaningful discussion of US history, you have to be able to talk about states and legislative bodies of various types. And if you're explaining all of those from scratch, like what is a state? What are some examples of states? Texas is a state. Where is Texas?

[16:44]

Like if you have to say all of that, every time, there is no way you can get to what you need to get to at the high school level.

[16:52] Lauren Brown:

I mean, you're not going to get to the 20th century, let alone in-depth understanding of all the events leading up to that.

[16:58] Justin Baeder:

So I think it was probably Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap, that helped me really understand how that type of knowledge is a building block that allows us to use shorthands, much as when you're remembering a phone number, which we don't do too much anymore. But as a kid memorizing a phone number, you don't have to worry about the area code. very much right because everybody around you has the same area code and i remember in houston it was a big deal when we got a second area code but even that area code it was just you know one or the other are you a 281 or a 713 and it wasn't that big a deal to to remember that and when we take things like that for granted we miss how much of the subsequent higher order thinking they enable by giving us those shortcuts, those chunks that we can think in. Like I don't have to really rack my brain to understand what a state is. It's just, you know, it's just something that's familiar. I know where Texas is and I'm able to do things with that as a result.

[17:50]

And again, I think science is largely the same way. So let's talk a little bit about what this means for elementary teaching overall. You said that, of course, we don't want to squeeze out the content, but we also don't want to integrate it into ELA in a way that minimizes it. Say more about that, if you would.

[18:10] Lauren Brown:

I have been encouraged by some studies that are showing that literacy improves dramatically when kids have more social studies. And so I think what has happened is we've said, wow, our reading scores are so poor. We need more reading. We need more ELA. And how can we have the time for science and social studies when our reading scores are so poor? We really need to spend more time on reading.

[18:37]

But it's not, that's the wrong equation. I mean, that's the wrong question to be asking is that social studies can help improve those scores. And we've seen evidence of that. I attended a webinar by the Reading League of Pennsylvania. It was talking about a school district in Vermont that has emphasized social social studies and the science of learning in younger grades, and they've seen dramatic improvements in not just in reading scores, but also in attendance rates, a decrease in disciplinary problems, and That's just incredible. And I heard the same thing from Bruce Lash who works in a district in Maryland when I attended his session at the National Council for the Social Studies that, you know, same thing, fewer discipline problems, higher reading scores.

[19:29]

And so it's not that, oh, how are we going to have time to add on yet another thing? We don't have time for social studies. It's how do you not have time for social studies if those benefits are so strong? And what are you doing in that ELA block anyway? You know, you can do all those ELA things with social studies. I mean, I remember hearing over and over again that kids, you know, and the same thing kind of happens at the upper levels, too, where kids really are learning to write those essays in their history classes.

[20:03]

Less so in their English classes in some schools where the history teachers are maybe better than the English teachers. And so, you know, when people talked about writing and reading, like we do a tremendous amount of reading and writing in history class in middle and high school. And the same thing can happen in elementary school. So I think that's the answer to the question is that we have to shift how we're thinking about it. And instead of having this big fat ELA block, that ELA block needs to be squeezed shorter to make time for a social studies block that will incorporate literacy activities, reading and writing.

[20:42] Justin Baeder:

That is where students are going to develop many of those skills that we cut out social studies to make time for in the first place, that they're going to be able to do that reading, they're going to be able to do that writing. Some of which is going to be disciplinarily specific to social studies, but much of which is going to transfer to ELA and many other subjects. Well, Lauren, I appreciate your deep thinking and your recommendations on this. And I want to double down on the recommendation question a little bit. If you could wave a magic wand over America's elementary schools and get your way as far as social studies instruction, what would be some of your first wishes?

[21:18] Lauren Brown:

More social studies, more science, less explicit ELA.

[21:23] Justin Baeder:

Comes down to time, huh?

[21:24] Lauren Brown:

It comes down to time. Teach more content. Teach more social studies. Kids love it. It's interesting. There's great stories.

[21:30]

That's what history is about. It's about the world and how it... And I would say geography as well. I'll define the social studies broadly, including civics, because that's what...

[21:43]

Kids want to learn about the world. And you can capitalize on that curiosity and that hunger they have for wanting to know things. And that will... let you in and get the skills that follow.

[21:57] Justin Baeder:

Well, Lauren, if people want to find you online and read some of your writing, where are some of the best places for them to go?

[22:02] Lauren Brown:

Best place is Lauren Brown on Education on Substack. So just go to Substack, Lauren Brown on Education, and you will find it. And you can reach out to me there. They can message me. I'm also on LinkedIn under my name, Lauren Brown. Obviously, there's a lot of Lauren Browns, but Substack is probably the first and easiest place to find me.

[22:20] Justin Baeder:

We'll link in the show notes and we'll link to our teaching show interview as well. Lauren, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.

[22:27] Lauren Brown:

Thanks. Great being out here.

[22:28] Announcer:

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