In April 2022, officials from the Maine Department of Education visited Whittier Middle School, in the small town of Poland. There was every reason to expect they had come to honor students who’d won in the state National History Day competition. And so they had—but they also honored eighth-grade US history teacher Jamie Karaffa, a Milken Educator Award winner.

It’s hard to say which is more praiseworthy—the seventeen years of creative teaching work that preceded Karaffa’s Milken Educator Award, or the many years that Karaffa and her colleagues have sustained the school-wide National History Day project. Each year, all 250 students at Whittier work on an individual or group project; at other secondary schools in Maine, only students in accelerated classes or history clubs participate. Many Whittier students’ projects are presented at the state-wide competition, and almost every year, a few projects make it to the national competition.

The projects vary in format. They may be essays, dramatic performances, exhibit boards, online exhibits, or even documentaries—slide shows with students’ recorded voice-overs. Each project represents one and a half months of steady classroom work. In February, on the day of presentation, 100 volunteers fan out across the school, interviewing each student on their work. “It’s an amazing experience for middle school kids,” says Karaffa, the 2015 James Madison Fellow for Maine and a 2021 graduate of the Master of Arts in Americans History and Government program. Steering students through the project “is the hardest thing I do every year, but it is so awesome to see the work students create.”

The Milken Educator Award

No doubt Karaffa’s work to ready students for the National History Day project contributed to her selection as a recipient of the Milken Educator Award. Offered by a private philanthropy, the Milken award honors early-to-mid-career teachers for extraordinary achievements. It comes with a $25,000 check—a rare bonus for those in an underpaid profession.

Milken Educator Awards Vice President Stephanie Bishop explained the selection process: “We are looking for the top 1% of educators in our country . . . . the teachers who are really connecting with students and communities.” Although called the “Oscars for Teachers,” Milken awards come as total surprises. Teachers aren’t even aware they’ve been nominated.

Karaffa, stunned by the award, looked out at students and colleagues and said, “This isn’t my award alone–this is because of all of you as well.”

National History Day: A Team Effort

She meant her gracious words. “I was taught you’re only as good as what you steal from others. That’s what teachers do; we share with each other and make each other better.”

The all-school National History Day project at Whittier began before Karaffa arrived at the school. She credits Whittier’s supportive school administration and her colleagues for keeping it going. “It continues because it results in the best student work we see. Support from the administration is key.” Because there is no state or national test in social studies, “it’s hard for schools and districts to prioritize social studies.  

“The skills students learn are those needed in the social studies classroom—but also in any classroom. Students begin the project by finding reliable primary sources. Then they analyze those sources, create a thesis, and prove the thesis through pictures and words.”

The research skills students practice will help them in their adult lives as voters. Practice creating and proving a thesis helps them with writing across the curriculum. “But what I love about the project is that even if kids are not good writers, they’re still able to create something that’s wonderful and does the job,” Karaffa says.

Karaffa’s Leadership

Maine Education Commissioner Pender Makin praised Karaffa for making “history come alive for her students by creating immersive, project-based opportunities that build connections between the past and present day while also fostering the critical thinking and leadership skills needed to be engaged and empowered citizens. Her passion, creativity, and leadership extend to her role as soccer coach and as a curriculum leader in her district and beyond.”

It’s likely that the head of the Maine Social Studies Division, who has since moved to a private-sector job, nominated Karaffa for the Milken award. She describes him as “a wonderful leader” who “helped me grow as an educator.”  After Karaffa participated in a program on new pedagogical practices, the division head invited her to mentor other teachers. She created new unit plans, presenting them online. One presentation drew heavily on her capstone project for MAHG, a study of Maine’s unusual way of allocating delegates to the Electoral College. (It is one of two states—the other is Nebraska—who do not use the “winner take all” system.)

MAHG Helped Karaffa Teach With Documents

Another presentation showed teachers “how to easily include primary sources in the classroom. You can’t teach social studies without primary documents,” Karaffa said. But MAHG study “definitely improved my use of them. It taught me how to better analyze documents and how to use documents to support arguments. Today I make sure to use documents in every unit I teach. Students study the documents and have conversations about them.”

Early in the school year, Karaffa uses a “document shuffle” to introduce students to primary sources. She posts examples from a range of time periods around the classroom. Some are very short excerpts of written documents; most are visual images—historic photos, paintings, political cartoons. Students walk around, spending two minutes studying and making notes on each document. “They write down what they see, what they think it means, and what would they ask the artist or creator if they could. Afterwards we discuss what they observed. I love hearing their insights.” Then Karaffa moves the images to the front of the room and explains their actual historical context. Students are intrigued to learn, for example, that the photo of a black horse-drawn carriage trimmed in gold and crowned with black plumes is not an exhibit at a fair: it’s Lincoln’s funeral hearse. The “document shuffle” prepares students to encounter details outside the realm of their immediate experience.

Encouraging Students’ Best Efforts

Karaffa knows how to encourage the best efforts of students who struggle in school. She began teaching middle school social studies in 2005, in New Hampshire. Moving to Maine in 2014, she worked for two years in “Spurwink,” a program for “at risk” youth aged 12 to 20. “I learned so much about creating relationships with kids, listening to what they’re trying to say,” Karaffa recalls. Helping angry or frustrated students to calm down, process what triggered their distress, and plan strategies for managing their behavior, she  “learned how to communicate with kids in crisis mode.”

At her current school, Karaffa connects well with students struggling in more ordinary ways. “Those kids who drive teachers nuts—they are my favorite kids. I love to show them they can be successful, and that somebody cares about them.”

Middle school students are still acquiring the knowledge best taught through social studies: that is, how to be social. For most young adolescents, Karaffa says, “their world is themselves.” She models the behavior she encourages, building rapport with students in the first weeks of the year. Checking in with each child individually to learn what they enjoy doing and what they have trouble with, she makes notes on her seating chart. This year she began allowing a few minutes at the beginning of each class period for students to report on good news in their lives. Students volunteer, “We won our game yesterday!” or “I’m gonna see my Dad this weekend,” or “I learned this new skateboarding trick.” The time lost to this non-academic activity is repaid in the classroom community it creates. Karaffa gains new insights into students, and students who are reluctant to talk about history learn to participate.

Teaching Empathy With Critical Thinking

Most middle schoolers are still acquiring a sense of empathy. Yet history study requires empathy just as much as it requires critical thinking. Karaffa feels fortunate to have helped colleagues in her district design the middle school social studies curriculum so that it covers certain important but troubling historical issues that push students to imagine the struggles of earlier Americans.

Seventh graders study American history through the Civil War; eighth graders study the Reconstruction era forward. They learn about the long struggle of African Americans, women and other groups for civil rights. Studying World War II, they cover the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese internment in America. “I tell my students I am the queen of depressing topics,” Karaffa says. But these topics get the attention of “even those kids who are most self-involved.” When she recently explained how the Jim Crow power structure in the South enforced segregation through periodic lynchings, her students’ eyes bugged out. One student exclaimed, “That’s stupid! Why would you kill somebody—for no reason?”

“Yes,” she responded. “Why did people do that?”

“I have always had a fascination with conflict,” Karaffa says. Like many good history teachers, she examines historical conflict with a dispassionate curiosity. “It’s fascinating to learn the different perspectives of each side” as war begins, and then to follow how the conflict plays out. Karaffa points to the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. “Had a different decision been made—had the Allied Powers not punished Germany the way they did, could we have avoided a second world war?”

Recently Karaffa attended a TAH multiday seminar on Brown v. Board of Education in Little Rock, Arkansas. For the first time, she read the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in its entirety. She was startled to realize that the ruling, which gave constitutional sanction to Jim Crow laws, involved more than an assumption that states who enforced segregation would provide equal facilities for the two races. The majority in Plessy made racist assumptions about the effect of segregation itself—assumptions that the Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren would reject in Brown. From now on, she’ll use a longer excerpt of Plessy to help her students better understand the significance of Brown.

Teachers like Karaffa see the potential for positive growth both in their students and their country. They know the two are connected. They need both tact and courage to help students think constructively about the conflicts of the past. It’s heartening to see their dedicated work rewarded by groups like the Milken Family Foundation.