Helping Students Understand Primary Documents—And Helping Other Teachers Do the Same

Ashbrook’s teacher programs don’t offer any pedagogical training. So how do they help social studies teachers do their work? “They just make teachers comfortable reading primary documents,” says Brandi Cook, a graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program. Cook teaches at Marion High School in Marion, South Carolina. “Helping teachers analyze those documents is going to make them want to share them with their students.”

Cook is Lead Teacher at her small rural school, located about 70 miles inland from Myrtle Beach. She understands what it means to teach in challenging circumstances. Eighty percent of her students are at poverty level, and all receive free and reduced lunch. Her students’ parents struggle to find work, since the textile plant that once employed many disappeared in the 1990s. Some work in a hospital in the neighboring county, a few make the long commute to work in the beach hotels, and a few work for the one thriving industry, the French luxury yacht firm, Beneteau Boats.

A Lead Teacher Who Gives Her Colleagues Choices

For 19 years, Cook taught US history, government and economics at Marion High. She earned the trust of administrators, who three years ago asked her to shift into the role of a curriculum facilitator. As Lead Teacher, Cook helps her colleagues improve their instructional methods.

Working across the curriculum, Cook makes classroom observations, coaches teachers who ask for help, and manages testing for the school. She also facilitates weekly team meetings in which teachers study their own practices and figure out which work best. (The program, supported by a federal grant administered through the Insight Education consulting group, helps teachers find their own solutions to problems that larger districts handle through curriculum specialists.)

It is rare for social studies teachers to share planning periods, but Cook’s administrators listened to her when she asked for this. “Every Friday they can sit down together as a group. If I’m aware of lessons they’re planning and have in mind primary sources they might use, I sit in on those meetings and offer those suggestions.” She is careful not to “talk down to my teachers. I give them choices. I don’t say, ‘This is the right way to do it; you’re doing it wrong.’”

In most professional development sessions, teachers listen as last year’s instructional fad is condemned and a new one announced. “What I loved about the MAHG program,” Cook says, “is that it didn’t preach pedagogy. They figured we were smart and professional enough to know our craft.”

Going For a Second Masters Degree

Cook already had a Masters, in Secondary Social Studies Education, when she began a second one. She’d enjoyed the Ashbrook educational approach when selected to participate in an earlier summer program, the 2007 Presidential Academy. During the three-week seminar, Cook met a range of intellectually curious teachers from around the country and learned that some were applying for fellowships, offered by the James Madison Foundation, to support Masters degrees in programs emphasizing Constitutional studies. “But I was not going to go for a second Masters. I had just finished paying off my student loans,” Cook recalls.

Two years later, she found herself bored during the summer vacation. “You can’t clean the house but so much,” she explained. She decided to try for the Madison Fellowship, offered to only one teacher per state each year. “The first year I was first runner-up for SC, and my brother told me I was the ‘number–1 loser,’ which just encouraged me to try again.” The next fall, in 2009, Cook succeeded, and began her MAHG studies in the summer of 2010.

How MAHG Inspired A Lesson Plan Used Around the Country

Her first course was Professor David Foster’s on the Federalist. This collection of newspaper editorials written to support ratification of the Constitution would “keep coming up again and again,” Cook’s friends from Presidential Academy days advised her. Despite her undergraduate history degree, Cook had never read the Federalist. The best known, number 10, addresses the first problem confronting the founding generation: could a single republic unite citizens from New England to Georgia, with all their varying interests? The author, James Madison, argues that in an “extended republic,” factional interests can be more easily balanced than in a small one.

As she listened to her fellow teachers parse Madison’s logic, Cook thought to herself, “I’ve got to make this do-able for students.” That next school year, she devised a plan. Breaking the document into sections of four or five sentences each, she wrote guiding questions for each section. She put students in groups, asking them to figure out the meaning of each section. When students asked for help, Cook replied, “I don’t know; what do y’all think?” After the groups finished, Cook helped them extract the big ideas and put them into a “graphic organizer” that shows how all of Madison’s arguments fit together into one convincing proof. Cook’s graphic organizer has become famous among social studies teachers around the country since she shared it through the Bill Of Rights Institute.

“I teach in a small rural school district, yet I have kids who could tell you what Federalist 10 is about. If my kids can do it, other kids can. But if I had I not taken Dr. Foster’s course and got comfortable with that document myself, I couldn’t have come up with that graphic organizer,” Cook says.

Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

Recently Cook traveled to the state capital, Columbia, to learn about new social studies standards that will launch next year. These will de-emphasize “the rote memorization that causes people to hate history classes,” Cook said, focusing instead on the “higher-level thinking skills” students use when analyzing primary documents.

One new standard involves “continuity and change in history.” Teachers must ask students, “How have things changed? Are they better? Worse? If so, how and why?” These questions arose naturally in the course of Cook’s MAHG studies, which pushed her to examine closely both the principles of the American founders and the objections to those principles brought by the Progressive generation. Teachers in the program find themselves asking, “How durable is the governing framework the Founders gave us?” (most find it has held up remarkably well) and “To what extent does it continue to reflect the shared convictions of Americans?” The second question will decide the nation’s future.

Cook remains involved in Ashbrook’s teacher programs by serving as an ambassador at weekend and one-day seminars on primary documents. She reads the entire packet of primary sources the teachers will discuss, yet remains quiet unless discussion lags. If that happens, she gives the professor facilitating the seminar an assist. She points to a passage in the primary documents she finds puzzling, and asks teachers what they think about it. During breaks between sessions, Cook talks with attendees “about the James Madison Fellowship, the MAHG program, our primary document library. They ask me questions, and we share resources and teaching approaches.”

“My first Masters degree gave me a raise, and I appreciate that,” Cook says. “But MAHG made me a better teacher.” It also gave her a life partner. “I was in my last MAHG class, on Political Parties, when I met my husband, Douglas Gammel. He was living in Florence”—Cook’s hometown, about 30 miles from Marion—“literally two blocks from my Mama. This Fourth of July”—the perfect wedding date for two American history nerds—“we will have been married three years.” Gammel teaches history at Hartsville High School in neighboring Darlington County. “So we’re spreading the wealth,” Cook says.