Like most teachers entering the Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program, Leandra Wilden did not come to learn pedagogy. She came to increase her content knowledge. Yet in many ways the program helped her improve her teaching practice.

Perhaps teachers like Wilden enjoy the MAHG program in part because it emphasizes, indirectly, their own professional concerns. Focusing on primary documents, MAHG prioritizes the writing of the most influential Americans—leaders of political, social, intellectual and religious movements. Reading through the speeches, letters, memoirs and other writings of influential Americans prompts frequent reflections on leadership itself. Good teachers are, first of all, good leaders. To do their work well, they must establish good relationships with those they serve. Showing that they care is not enough. In the small republic of the classroom—just as in the larger political republic—achieving things involves helping people think carefully, choose wisely, and work in productive ways on their own behalf.

How to Structure Learning for a Highly Diverse Middle School Population

Wilden thinks continuously about ways to motivate and guide her highly diverse group of students. She teaches in Anchorage, Alaska, a port city in a state with an economy driven by fishing and oil. Anchorage is constantly welcoming a revolving population of immigrants, refugees, and mainlanders seeking economic opportunities. Wilden traveled here in 2009, fresh out of Michigan State University, taking a teaching job at Clark Middle School. At the time, Clark had the most diverse ethnic profile of any school in the entire nation. Children of a wide array of ethnicities—from Asia, Hawaii and other Pacific Islands, Africa, Latin America, and the native Alaskan tribes—made up 60% of those enrolled. Many spoke languages other than English at home.

Hired to teach her minor, language arts, Wilden worked closely with the literacy specialist at Clark, who provided frequent professional development sessions on Saturdays. She learned ways to structure class routines for student success, setting clear expectations and reminding students of her expectations in positive ways.

She shared her rubrics for grading with students, asking them to score their own papers, using a key that showed which skills they needed to develop to better understand literature. She used pre-tests before lessons and post-tests afterward. “I figure, let the students track their own progress. Otherwise, the tests we hand back to them show only scores, not what they don’t understand and need to work on. My students enjoyed the process.”

Most students gain reading proficiency long before they learn to analyze what they read in writing. Wilden learned to guide students’ writing by teaching them to highlight elements of their papers with different colors—perhaps green for the topic sentence, yellow for the conclusion, blue for each sub-theme, orange for supporting evidence, pink for sentences that explain the evidence. “It’s formulaic, but it helps students learn the writing process. They learn that if they can’t color-code their work, they missed elements.”

High School Students Need Positive Guidance and Content Expertise

In 2015, when Wilden left Clark to teach history at West Anchorage High School—also one of the most diverse schools in the nation—she adapted her positive methods to older students. For example, she teaches students to write “rainbow responses” to bell-work questions (questions Wilden posts for students to begin answering as soon as they arrive in class) about the previous night’s reading. Even students who neglected their homework can participate, treating the question like an open-book response, though open-book additions are in a different color than original response. Later, after sharing their responses with a partner or participating in class discussion, students use other colors of ink to expand what they wrote. “By the end they all have a beautiful response,” Wilden said. “No student who pays attention should fail to learn, because what they didn’t know, they got from their peers or the larger discussion.”

Wilden’s strategies work. Still, to better teach honors and Advanced Placement courses in US history, she felt she needed more content knowledge. After winning the Madison Fellowship for Alaska in 2016, she enrolled in the MAHG program.

The Breadth of the MAHG Curriculum

MAHG’s core curriculum covers all areas of American history, allowing teachers to fill in gaps left by social studies credentialling programs. It also offers elective “topics” courses. Wilden chose those that explored recurrent problems in American history—issues Americans debate in every generation. Such themes are often underemphasized in the chronologically organized resources available to high school teachers.

For example, Wilden chose a history/literature course on immigration taught by Dan Monroe and Suzanne Brown. Students who take the AP US history exam need familiarity with the various waves of immigrants who settled the country. Yet the recommended textbook does not explore the ambivalent attitudes of Americans already  here toward newer immigrants who brought with them non-Protestant religious faiths. The MAHG course looked at factors complicating the assimilation of the new immigrants into American culture: discrimination, cultural misunderstanding, and fear of loss of ethnic identity.

Such coursework built on Wilden’s undergraduate study of social history. Other courses emphasized political thought. Chris Burkett’s course on the antifederalist response to the Constitution challenged the usual assumptions about the founders’ thinking. A course on contemporary America, taught by David Krugler, traced the origins of current arguments between the political left and right. Many courses gave attention to foreign policy. “High school history textbooks mention treaties and their consequences.  But they don’t often explain the reasoning of those who negotiate them.”

One skill emphasized in the MAHG program is rhetorical and logical analysis. “This counteracts the tendency to accept sources at face value,” Wilden said. Tracing the arguments of primary texts, Wilden identified authors’ biases, logical fallacies, and use of rhetoric to cloak weak claims. Bringing this kind of analysis back to her classroom, Wilden could show students why they need to consult multiple sources before reaching conclusions about history.

Looking Backward at History—and Forward from the Past

Today Wilden teaches Advanced Placement (AP) United States History and IB (International Baccalaureate) History of the Americas. Although APUSH covers history chronologically, while IB covers themes, Wilden blends these approaches in both courses. There isn’t time enough in a school year to cover all APUSH expects students to learn. “We cope by focusing on cyclical patterns. After studying the Great Awakening, we move to the 2^nd Great Awakening to repeat what we learned about the first. When we study World War II, we review WWI, talking about issues the earlier war failed to resolve.” This tactic helps Wilden teach students the habit of “re-studying,” which some educational theorists think critical to successful learning in all disciplines.

Both courses pose the same perennial questions: What changes? What causes the change, and what are its effects? What things do not change? In both AP US History and IB History of the Americas, students consider these backward-looking questions from multiple perspectives. Yet the primary documents Wilden studied in MAHG allow her also to show history from the point of view of those looking forward into an uncertain future. The people of the past knew the problems they faced, but they could not know for sure which decisions would bring the changes they wanted to see.

The IB course “requires that you cover only three themes during the year,” Wilden said. “Teachers can and often do more. For example, one option is ‘independence movements;’ another is ‘nation-building.’ How do you teach the drafting of the Constitution without teaching the political thought that leads to the American Revolution? In my class, we do independence movements and nation-building together.” The class studies these first in the US, and then students research independence movements elsewhere in the Americas. Their research often shows a strange pattern in terms of continuity and change: revolutionary movements often have been followed by reassertions of authoritarian control, frequently through military coups. Why have these revolutions not led to stable periods of democratic nation-building?

The Supports Democracy Requires

“I read aloud an exchange of letters I studied in MAHG, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in their later years,” Wilden said. “Jefferson and Adams hoped the Latin American revolutions would succeed, yet doubted they would. I ask students why. Answering this question involves reflecting on everything they’ve learned. They find answers in the different colonial systems of Britain and Spain.” Spain did not allow its colonists to develop early forms of republican government—neither Houses of Burgesses nor town meetings. Latin Americans could not prepare for the freedom that revolutions brought. Thinking about this, some students have a sudden insight: it is all very well to read about republican institutions, “but that is not the same as developing the mechanisms in your own time and place.”

Even in the US, the political freedoms we gained through revolution are not guaranteed to last. Throughout the MAHG program, Wilden read American leaders’ thoughts on this theme. George Washington felt that to preserve the gains of the revolution, Americans needed an energetic central government. He warned Americans against the disruptive effects of faction. In contrast, Ronald Reagan, who famously warned that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction,” worried about passive acquiescence in the growing power of the central government. Lincoln, speaking on “the perpetuation of our political institutions,” saw potential threats in both directions. When an uncontrolled, passionate faction engaged in mob violence, it eroded citizens’ commitment to democracy, causing them to demand that  government restore order. At such times, the most ambitious could seize autocratic power, overthrowing democracy.

Having read American leaders’ thoughts on the supports for and threats to democracy, Wilden now asks her students to do the same. Students learn to discuss the American democratic republic not only as the founders understood it, but also as later leaders understood it. Tracing the arguments in these documents, students begin forming  their own ideas of what things best support, and what things most threaten, their rights and freedoms. Discussing the documents with classmates, students may see points they missed on first reading, leading them to reconsider some of their earlier conclusions. This way of studying history nurtures a slow, thoughtful mental journey, as students work out the pollical convictions they will act on as they face their own uncertain futures. As they listen to current news, they now have a better idea of what is at stake. They hear echoes of past debates in the issues debated today.

The MAHG program expands teachers’ content knowledge, deepening their understanding of history. Yet ultimately, MAHG helps them more skillfully teach the critical thinking skills students will need as citizens. “That’s what the MAHG program emphasizes so well, and what I try to teach my students,” Wilden said. “If I teach them to do research, to assess the reliability of sources, to challenge one source with other sources and acknowledge the vulnerabilities of each; if I teach them how to take that information and arrange it in writing, or respectfully discuss it with their peers, they’ll be able to research current issues they feel strongly about. Then they can choose what they want to do about it.”