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Descriptions of effective teaching often depict an idealized form of "perfect" instruction. Yet, pursuing perfection in teaching, which depends on children's behavior, is ultimately futile. To be effective, lessons and educators need to operate with about 75% efficiency. The remaining 25% can be impactful, but expecting it in every lesson, every day, is unrealistic. Perfection in teaching may be unattainable, but progress is not. Whether you are aiming for the 75% effectiveness mark or striving for continuous improvement, this podcast will guide you in that endeavor.
Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.
This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.
Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.
And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.
Only stuff that
works.
My guest today is Lauren Brown.
Lauren spent 20 years teaching US history in middle and high school and another eight years working at the university level with future social studies teachers.
She's now works as a consultant, as well as writing on middle web and her own substack.
On Substack.
She writes about education with a special focus on why social studies and history in particular matter.
Much of our work is about helping people see how good history teaching strengthens literacy and our democracy.
I think you're gonna like this one.
I.
Good morning, Lauren.
Thank you for being here.
Welcome to Better Teaching Only stuff that works.
Lauren Brown: Thanks, Jean.
I'm so excited to be here.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I've been a fan for a while hearing some of your thoughts about how to teach social studies and history and some of the more important things.
And so I wanted to just expand on some of the things that piqued my curiosity.
Sure.
and one of the first things that I wanted to talk about, and I think it's gonna be a theme throughout in this time that we're in.
Not only politically but educationally that is.
Also impacted by our politics.
It's very hard.
Everybody wants history taught, but nobody wants the same history or, you know, we're going through that now, like, what is, what happened, you know, a couple years ago or 10 years ago.
So, at any rate, my, my first question is the biggest one, and is it possible to teach history without any controversy or bias at all?
Lauren Brown: Well, I'm gonna throw that back right at you, and I'm gonna ask you why would you want to.
I don't think that history is rife with controversy.
That's kind of the whole point.
And I think if there is no controversy, then you're probably teaching history to superficially.
So I guess I would start by saying that it's the controversy that makes it so exciting and so interesting.
But then I'll back up because there's.
Lots of different kinds of controversy and some controversy is the kind we want to lean into and some kind is definitely not the controversy that we want to lean into.
So I think first of all, you know, if you have controversy about facts and evidence, I mean, history is part of the problem that we get into, I think, is that we misunderstand the discipline of history.
There's, you know, if you can kind of picture a Venn diagram of verifiable facts and information.
There's things that happened in the past, and we can verify whether or not those things happened through a variety of methods and sources.
And then in a different circle, we have interpretation, what facts we choose to tell, which facts we leave out, how we explain them the framing that we put around that.
The perspective that we have on that and the intersection of that, those two circles, if you will, that's what history is as the discipline.
So if things are controversial in terms of, we're gonna argue about whether or not something happened, that's not the kind of controversy I think that we wanna get into because there's certain things that we have to understand just.
Happened as a matter of fact.
But the way we interpret those facts, that's where you get into the controversy, but that's also what makes history interesting, I think.
And then there's an added layer in what our current politics are and our political position that feeds into how we might interpret things.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, if you could give one more specific example because again, an understanding that, I mean, even the facts.
I mean, we go to somebody sues somebody or somebody has tried for a crime and we have eyewitnesses that.
See different things and history is certainly, I was listening to you and Laura Sta this morning talking about the stories.
The stories, and so you have two people witnessing the same thing and telling different stories.
Can we, have we gotten to a point, well, let me ask it this way.
We can agree on facts if the facts seem pretty general.
It's like we had a war, the war happened.
That's pretty general is do we, is that when we get into more minutia or more details, is that when the facts can become more difficult to agree upon?
Lauren Brown: That's a great question.
I don't know that it's the more detail, it's more of the interpretation, but let's get into a specific 'cause I think otherwise we're getting too cerebral here.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Lauren Brown: So let's take Columbus for example.
It is a fact that in 1,492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Right?
Then there were three ships.
and that he didn't land in what later became the United States, but on the island that became known as Hispaniola.
and it is a fact that he took some indigenous people back, that they were enslaved, that there was some violence.
I mean, those are facts that happened.
Then how we interpret those facts, that's where it becomes complicated.
So for example, the way that we remember the history today.
I think we also need to make a sharp distinction between.
History and memory or nostalgia and history.
so for example, if we wanna be nostalgic and talk about Columbus a great hero, that's where you start getting into nostalgia, but also understanding how we've interpreted what.
His voyage meant for the world.
So for example, in 1892, in the 400th anniversary of Columbus's Voyage, it became a national holiday.
part of the reason that it did so was because it was an effort to make.
At a time where there was a lot of nativism and antagonist against immigrants, and there was the idea, well, if we sort of celebrate Columbus's voyage, Columbus was Catholic, he was Italian, and this is a way to celebrate immigration in our history.
And so if you will, Columbus Day was kind of.
Woke for 1892.
Fast forward a hundred years to 1992, and we have an understanding of Columbus and more of the destruction that came as a result of his voyage and the Columbian exchange.
So the way we think about events changes over time, and I think that's really fascinating for our students.
Gene Tavernetti: So I'm gonna go back to your conversation with Laura Sta, who's a primary grade teacher who loves histories.
I mean, she just loves to teach history.
Her face just beams.
It talks about the story she gets so excited.
And I wonder about the example that you just gave about Columbus.
Because it seems to me that there were two things, two developmental areas going on at the same time.
The first one is individual maturity.
I mean, there are just, you know, when you're in second grade, oh yeah.
You start singing the songs and, you know, you started to do the poem there about Christopher Columbus.
So there's that element.
And we can teach more as we mature individually.
But then you've got that other dimension that you just talked about, and that is like maturing as a society, how we interpret, does that make the teaching more difficult?
Well, first of all, do you agree?
Lauren Brown: Yeah I'm really glad you brought up the thing about developmental and ages I will never forget, and this is almost 20 years ago, I still remember his face.
A student I had Nicholas, who after we were talking about the Emancipation Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln and how that came to be and he raised his hand and he is like.
How is it that, you know, when we're taught as kids that Lincoln was this great hero and this great emancipator, and now you're telling us that there was this whole politics involved in how the Emancipation Proclamation came to be.
And I thought it was a great question and I have been really wrestling with that my entire career since is, you know, how do we tell the stories and remembering that at certain ages there are certain things you wouldn't.
You know, a fifth grader's not gonna understand, you know, the role of Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief.
The fact that he doesn't have the political power to emancipate the enslaved, they don't have that information.
It's not developmentally appropriate, and I think that has to evolve over time.
To give you another, for instance, I am currently volunteering reading with a fourth grader once a week in a fourth grade classroom.
And we were reading a book of her choice that the kids get to pick whatever book they want their mentor to read.
And she picked out a graphic novel about Harriet Tubman.
And as we were reading it, I mean, it's a graphic novel, it's like a comic book.
And we get to this point where it started talking about.
Enslaved people being captured and sometimes branded even on their face.
And as I'm reading this, she starts to wince and become very agitated and she looked away and I said, do you want me to stop?
And she goes, just skip a few pages.
And I should note that this is a very mature fourth grader of a very high reading ability.
And yet.
She's a child.
I mean, she's 10 years old.
And so certain information is really disturbing.
And I think as history teachers, we have to be so sensitive to what our students are ready for as we teach.
I think that's really important.
Gene Tavernetti: Oh, well.
So there's that being ready emotionally, but there's also being ready intellectually.
I mean, there is so much that goes on.
the example that I always think about is I remember Bill Clinton's impeachment.
Lauren Brown: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: Okay.
So how do you talk about Bill Clinton's impeachment?
you know, because I know we have history.
Fifth in California, fifth grade, eighth grade, and 10th or whatever it is, and how can you talk about that and exclude the fact that he was lying about having sex, with somebody or involved in sexual acts.
Because that's part of what divided the country.
so, I mean that's an example, but we have so many examples like that.
Do we just whitewash them when the kids are younger?
Do we avoid talking about them?
Lauren Brown: Great question.
Gene Tavernetti: I'll put you on the spot here, Lauren.
Lauren Brown: Okay.
So, the last time I taught about Bill Clinton's impeachment was during his impeachment and I was teaching 11th graders.
And yeah, we had, we kids were asking questions about the blue dress and it was awkward with a capital A. So I think the answer to your question is.
Well, first of all, I mean there's a lot of detail in that.
I wouldn't teach about Clinton's impeachment as this whole separate thing.
It would be more in the context of political polarization.
when you first started our conversation, you talked about these times that we're in, and I'm very cognizant of the fact that we are much more divided politically today than we were in the 1990s.
Those of us who were around in the 1990s, we were pretty divided in the 1990s too, hence Clinton's impeachment.
And when I was teaching about it, we were actually in the middle of our unit on Andrew Johnson's impeachment during reconstruction and it was sort of the perfect counterweight to that.
So I think it's probably not a topic that you would be talking about very much with.
Fifth graders.
I mean, you wouldn't be talking about the fifth graders, right?
Yeah.
It's not because of the sex, but because the topic is just too complex For the kind of history you're teaching at that grade.
You know, middle school, maybe more so.
But again, it's less about the details of the actual case and more about what it says about politic, you know, using impeachment as a political tool and as.
Kind of a weapon, I would argue of partisanship that I think we have seen both Democrats and Republicans do, and that's why we've seen impeachment happen more often.
Gene Tavernetti: Well done, Lauren.
Okay, so Let's move on to another topic that I've heard you discuss before.
and that is teaching the Constitution.
And the reason that I bring it up is that I think you said in your state there was a constitution test in seventh grade.
Lauren Brown: Yep.
Gene Tavernetti: And in California, I remember that there was a constitution test in eighth grade.
And to pass it, it was a multiple choice test.
And to pass it, you needed to know how to answer all those multiple choice questions.
But you didn't need to know anything about the Constitution necessarily.
I mean, you didn't have to have any understanding.
So, and I just think that's a waste of time.
Doing anything without any understanding at all.
So, how do you think about teaching the Constitution to seventh graders and then continuing to talk about the Constitution as well, again, in California there was A separate class called American Government where you got it, you know, more in depth.
So can you talk about what that progression for you looks like and what do you think is important for seventh graders to know versus high school, et cetera?
Lauren Brown: Sure.
It, first of all, in Illinois it's the same thing.
It's in middle school and then again in high school.
Now there's a civics requirement.
My students didn't realize in Illinois, the teachers write their own tests and it's according to the district.
So I wrote my own constitution test.
So I wrote a test that I felt was meaningful to my students that was not just rote memorization, you know, a hundred multiple choice questions.
That's not what my tests looked like.
Yeah, and it included a written component What I've learned about teaching the Constitution both at the high school level and at the middle school level, is it does have to evolve, but in both cases, kids are absolutely capable.
Even seventh graders of reading parts of the actual Constitution.
Not every word of it, but I think first you have to introduce them to the document.
So you have to lay a lot of the groundwork Middle school in order for them to get it at a deeper level in high school.
And so I think, you know, in answer to your question, which again is this sort of broader question too about American history, you know, what do you do in middle school versus what you do in high school and elementary school?
And so you have to start with some of the basics like you mentioned.
Actually before we got on this call about the three branches of government.
I had a conversation the last time I taught the Constitution a few years ago to seventh graders and I had a conversation with a student who needed some extra help.
And this was a student who had been really in and out of school a lot.
High absentee rate.
And I realized in our conversation, she really had no conception of what I meant by a branch of government at all.
The foundations weren't there, and those foundations I think, have to be set even earlier in elementary school.
We have a government in Washington, DC It's a city.
It's a federal district that there are buildings there showing them pictures of buildings.
The buildings that match with each branch of government.
The constitution is paper.
Showing them these things.
That is sort of the foundational information that we'd want in elementary school.
And then in middle school, you can actually start looking at the document.
I teach the constitution thematically, talking about different principles by the time this podcast I will have already done a webinar on this that I'm doing tonight, but about how to teach it that way.
And looking at themes, so not going branch by branch, but looking at.
Broader themes like federalism, individual rights, separation of powers, checks and balances.
Middle schoolers are capable of understanding those concepts when you apply 'em to real examples, so.
Article one, section eight, clause three, the commerce clause.
You know, Congress has the right to make laws about commerce.
Well, what do we mean by commerce in defining those terms?
And then talking about, oh, so this is what gives Congress the right to make laws about interstate commerce.
Things that go from one state to another state.
And giving those examples or like, I forget which clause it is, but in that same article, one section eight with all the clauses, that's how we have a post office.
And so when students see, oh, that stuff that exists out in the real world, like post offices, that's a thing.
It says it right here in the Constitution and that's concrete.
It becomes concrete for them.
This abstract document and then applying it to historical examples.
So you know when you get to separation of powers and checks and balances, and we can look at something like Nixon and Watergate and understand that Nixon not wanting to give these tapes, was trying to protect the presidency, protect separation of powers
Powers as the president and what Congress is doing by asking him for these tapes is saying No checks and balances.
We want to check the power of what it is that you're doing, and getting students to read these sort of real life examples of what happened in history and seeing how the Constitution is applied and interpreted, I think makes it come alive for kids.
Gene Tavernetti: You, you were talking about the constitution and talking about real life examples, but I think that's the whole everything when we talk about history, we need to do that.
And I'm going to right now confess my ignorance on a lot of issues.
All right, so I grew up at a time you know, teenager during the Vietnam War.
I remember having to be registered for the draft when I was 18, and during the war you could sign up.
If you're going to college, you could get a student deferment.
There were ways to get deferments, and then they changed the law.
so they started a lottery.
depending on your birthday, all the birth dates went into just like a bingo machine, and they pulled out a birth date I remember my number, my lottery number was number 79 to be drafted, which was pretty low.
Lauren Brown: Wow.
Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: Thank goodness.
Thank goodness the war ended.
And then the draft ended.
But at that time like many people, I began to wonder what would it take to think about what would be worth going to war over?
Because that was a big thing.
Like, is this worth going to war over?
So when I was 19, I hadn't had it figured out.
I didn't figure it out till nine 11.
And I realize now I see why we had gone to war.
But you know what?
I skipped Pearl Harbor, which was, you know, so, so my point is, there are all of these things that are abstract to us as Americans.
War being one of them because it didn't happen on our soil.
So all the people involved in the Civil War, they didn't wanna do that again.
And I didn't know till.
A few weeks ago, or maybe I remembered about, you know, the Japanese attacking California.
But that stuff just doesn't happen here.
And so it's very difficult to teach some things because emotional knowing versus intellectual knowing about an event is just not there.
Boy I went on a lot about that.
Thoughts.
Lauren Brown: Oh my gosh, lots of thoughts.
So.
I mean that last bit you said about the difference between emotion and, you know, using emotion.
When we're talking about history that's when we start to get into that controversial area is when we move away from history as nostalgia to history, as actual history.
Nostalgia is not history, and so when we use.
Like nostalgia is looking backwards with a selective lens.
It's using emotions to explain things.
Nostalgia asks us to like feel the past and how we feel about things, whereas a legitimate perspective, a historical perspective, is using evidence.
Like, for example, getting back into this question you had about, you know, teaching history that's controversial when we use our emotions, how we feel about the Vietnam War or Columbus, or a period like reconstruction, that's not history.
And so.
When we talk about how we want our students to feel about history and the role of history in creating an educated citizenry, we have to be really careful,
I think that we have to be careful about using history as propaganda.
To promote this view of our country as, I mean, what does it say in the Constitution among the very first words, right?
Like we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.
That word is really intentional.
They argued about every word that went into that document, and I can tell you there is no high school student.
There is no middle school student.
There is no elementary school student.
That thinks our nation is perfect.
And so when we try to whitewash history into this view of, you know, the United States as this land of liberty and freedom for all, without leaning into the ways that we
haven't always lived up to, that we're doing our students a disservice and they're not gonna find it believable because they all know that there's things that are imperfect.
Gene Tavernetti: Lauren let's, go from your last question.
When you talked about the preamble and to form a more perfect union and the kids know that things aren't perfect and getting back to.
Is one of the reasons to teach history to teach civics.
I don't wanna say to Indoctrinate, but to, I can't think of another word at this time.
I mean, I think of, we're five years old, what do we do?
Hand over the heart.
Everybody learns the pledge of allegiance and all our stories.
We're always the good guy who're always, you know, how does that fit into this, again, talking about vs versus interpretation, talking about developmentally what kids can understand.
You know, again, I'm gonna go back to your conversation with Laura Stan, because I love Laura so much and she's always worth listening to if you ever have a chance.
But just talking about the kids' excitement about the war of 1812, the first two words are the war of 1812.
So, so anyway, I think, you know what I'm asking you about how do we teach these controversial things?
Well, how do we teach the facts in such a way that kids can understand it, but still get some.
Some depth, I guess.
Lauren Brown: Well, I heard like your first question was kind of what is the role of teaching history like, and you said you didn't wanna use the word indoctrination, which Yeah.
We definitely don't wanna use that word, but I think so lemme just first speak to that.
I think.
Teaching history is essential.
I used to do a lesson with my students about a famous quotation from Thomas Jefferson.
It was in a letter he wrote to Edward Carrington, who was one of the delegates to the constitutional convention.
And he said, Jefferson wrote where it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government.
I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
By that I should mean every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading 'em.
And I think there is such a strong corollary between our nation's reading scores and the health of our democracy.
I think teaching kids about the history of our country is vital to understanding what happened and.
I've been reading an amazing book that I highly recommend to anyone who teaches history.
The four Question Method of teaching history.
It's a book that Natalie Wexler has mentioned.
And, you know, they talk about how there's essentially four questions in history, and the first one is what happened?
And so thinking about, you know.
What happened?
That's the job of the elementary school teachers is really just to teach what happened.
And that's also where I was talking earlier about that sort of Venn diagram, you know, of there's facts and we can show that this happened.
The interpretation is different but we need to tell students what happened.
And then the four question method talks about other questions like what they were thinking.
That's interpretation and why did this happen in this place and at that time?
And that's explaining it in more detail.
And then where the controversy comes in is what do we think about that?
And what do we think about that today?
And that's judgment.
And I think elementary school students are capable of that as well.
But you're going to get into it at a deeper level as you move on in high school.
Like, let me give you a for instance, like women's suffrage.
You know, like what happened?
Women used to not be able to vote and then they were, and so some of the stories about how that happened, it's a great story.
Some of the, you know, more details about it and the nuance happened as they get older.
And I taught my eighth graders, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about women's suffrage is that there were so many women who were opposed to it.
And so understanding why.
Women, not just men.
You know, we put on our lens and you know, in the 2020s we think, well, you know, people didn't want women to vote because they were sexist and didn't think women could do it.
And well, that's part of it.
That's not the full story because there were many women who were opposed to it as well.
And.
Because the way we thought about gender roles was so incredibly different than the way we think about that today.
And once you can shed the light on how different people thought differently in different eras, it just helps students understand that when we're studying the past, I forget which Historian said it, but it's like the past is of like a foreign country.
People think about it differently, and I have always been so fascinated with that.
Gene Tavernetti: it took me so long to understand some things, you know, some events and I will give you an example of one now, and that is the idea.
We can have 80% of the country agree on that.
We should do something about a certain topic.
Yet we can't get Congress to even vote on it, you know, and so I think it takes a sophisticated understanding, not only of the three branches of government and representatives from different states and their politics and, it's just so complex.
Can we ever, when are kids ready to understand the committee system and the power of the speaker and the leader in the Senate and those types of things?
Lauren Brown: That's a great question and that's where I think when, you know, getting back to your question about teaching things at a different level.
So in middle school I have taught certain aspects of the constitution and students are able to figure out.
how there's things in our constitution today that are frankly not working so well.
You know, let's take the electoral college.
I think middle schoolers are very capable of understanding the problems inherent in the electoral college because we have a state, like your own state of California whose population.
Is so big and yet you have two senators and Wyoming, which is so small also has two senators, and so they can understand what impact that has on the Senate, what impact that has on the electoral college.
Whether or not that means it's time for a constitutional convention or an amendment to our constitution.
I will not answer that, that's a complex question and that is obviously subject to personal opinion and personal politics, but they are capable of that.
Committees lobbying.
That is, I think, at a level that perhaps middle schoolers aren't quite there yet.
And that's something, I think that's like the next level that you get to in a high school government or civics class.
So I do think there's developmental things that,
Gene Tavernetti: Lord, okay, you brought up as an example, the electoral college that kids can see issues with that.
Isn't that a controversial statement that we have problems with the electoral college?
Lauren Brown: The way it's not controversial is like whether or not we need to amend it or change it.
That's controversial, that depends on one's point of view.
Okay.
But to show, for example, the number of elections that we have had where you have the popular vote, not matching.
The electoral vote like in 2000 and in 2016.
That's factual.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
Lauren Brown: And students can understand that.
And it strikes and it's up to them how they feel about that.
I can tell you most of them feel like that.
There's something not quite right about that.
You know?
'cause we're taught at a young age, majority rules.
right.
When they're playing games on the playground.
Gene Tavernetti: you know, and I could just hallucinate you in your classroom, Lauren, showing, oh, look at the election of 2000.
Look at the election of, you know this, look at this.
And the kids say, well, that's not right.
And you just shrug in your shoulders.
Well, what do you think?
You know, because
Lauren Brown: constitutional,
Gene Tavernetti: It's hard for a teacher.
And I would be upset with my teacher if I couldn't hear some sort of opinion from the teacher about these topics that we're grappling with.
Should teachers have like, well, you, let's just continue with the Electric College.
I'm sure there are, people think the Electric College is just fine.
They don't want all those goofy people in California, you know, taking control of things.
So I guess my point is.
It's hard to stay out of controversy, period.
I mean, because even with the facts which we talk about, there's always something that comes up that we have to address in some way and have some sort of neutrality.
With some intellectual honesty, expressing our opinion somewhat.
Lauren Brown: Yeah.
Well, I think what's the question that I think would be really interesting to ask students is, who in our country has a vested interest in keeping the electoral College and the Senate the way it is, and who has a vested interest in changing it?
And you know, when you talk about, for example, potentially making Washington DC a state because of.
They don't have representation in the Senate.
I mean, since the amendment, I forget which amendment it was.
But they do have representation in the electoral college now.
But they don't have senators or Puerto Rico making Puerto Rico a state.
And who has a vested interest in doing that and who doesn't?
Because the likelihood is that both in Puerto Rico and in Washington DC they're likely to skew Democrat.
And so I think.
Asking, you know, those questions of our students helps 'em to understand the controversy.
The job of the teacher is to point out the controversy, not to take a stand on it.
And I think that's a way out, you know, I understand.
It's just feels sometimes so touchy to be a history teacher right now, but you can bring up those controversies without taking a stand on it.
Your id, your job is to unpack.
Why the controversy exists, not to opine on it.
Does that make sense?
Gene Tavernetti: It does.
It does make sense.
And you can see how difficult it is for a teacher not to step over that line.
Lauren Brown: Very.
Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, even unintentionally, you know, facial expressions or whatever.
I remember, I was just starting school when Alaska and Hawaii came into the union.
Lauren Brown: Mm-hmm.
Gene Tavernetti: And nobody ever told us about, well, Alaska, we know it's gonna be more conservative and Hawaii's gonna be more, you know, and so we have a balance of these two states.
in my memory of history, talked about, you know, maintaining that balance just as we were doing during the Missouri Compromise?
And I mean, you know, so there are all of these analogous things throughout history that, and I've been a little bit older.
Maybe the history teachers were talking about bringing two states into the union in a similar fashion as they were doing in the 18, you know, middle of the 18
Lauren Brown: Oh, what a great analogy.
I love that.
I can we talk about Pennsylvania for a minute and Wisconsin and some of these swing states.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah,
Lauren Brown: I think.
And getting back into like sort of what's developmentally appropriate and dealing with controversy.
Like one thing that my students have figured out my seventh graders figured out without me saying it explicitly, is that a lot of the elections really come down to a handful of people and a handful of counties and a handful of swing states.
And that's something I kind of wish I didn't have to explain or they wouldn't come to because I think it leads to a cynicism about elections and whether or not their votes even count, you know?
And a state like Illinois, that's been pretty reliably blue.
So you know, that's something that I think.
We have to be really careful and really mindful of as teachers in teaching that students have agency and that people in the past had agency.
we make choices.
And so, you know, I hate the idea and I fight back at it with every breath in my body.
This idea that like, well, my vote doesn't matter.
My vote doesn't count.
And I say it absolutely does because when you don't vote, you're letting other people make that decision for you.
But, you know, I can't get around the fact that it is true the way our elections work these days.
But again, maybe that's, you know what I said before, maybe the answer is.
This is how it is, and I don't have to say whether I think that this is right or wrong.
Students are gonna understand that there's something maybe, not quite right about the fact of elections being decided by a handful of people in a handful of counties and a handful of states.
What do you think?
Gene Tavernetti: now I'm making the connection between government and civics being a citizen, you know, being active as a citizen.
Oh.
You're upset about that.
It's just a handful of folks.
What can we do, you know?
and I was I'm going to forget her name, McCormick, I can't remember her first name who has a book about that parents should be teaching their kids civics.
And she really opened my eye in a broadening of civics about what it means to be a citizen.
You know, and you know what?
You've got this first Amendment right.
you don't think that's a good idea?
What can we do?
You know, the merging of civics, what we can do in the United States versus other countries, because we have these enumerated rights.
Become so critical as well.
So we don't have that feeling of I can't do anything about it.
This is just the way it is, you know?
You know, from cynicism to activism, or whatever we wanna call it.
Lauren Brown: Well, that's what I love so much about history.
I mean, history is all about.
It's stories of people and people who made a difference and people who made decisions.
And that those decisions had consequences and they led to other decisions.
And so, you know, when you were talking about the Missouri Compromise, I can't help but think, you know, of this sort of big question about, you know, like.
Was the civil about inevitability in history and one of the closing words I always left my students with on the last day of school is that nothing in history is inevitable.
And, you know, take like the Civil War, for example, you know, by.
1859, it was kind of looking inevitable, but it didn't start off that way.
And it was because of a series of decisions and decisions that were made from, you know, Dred Scott decision.
You know, the compromise of 1850 and backwards to the Missouri compromise and backwards to the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution.
And those decisions once made, had ramifications and.
That foreclose other opportunities in history.
And you know, when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration, I mean, he's the embodiment of contradiction in our country.
Right,
Gene Tavernetti: right.
Lauren Brown: I mean, the author of, that All Men Are Created Equal and an enslave who had put in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
You know, all those, accusations against the king.
He has done this, he has done this, you know, the intolerable acts, the stamp act, et cetera.
And he had put in a big thing about slavery, but they debated about that and left it out.
And, it was that decision followed by other decisions that entrenched slavery as an institution in our country.
And so I think that it's really important to remember.
that one of the ways that we have around that sense of hopelessness that kids sometimes have, well, I can't do anything.
and I think we wanna fight against this idea of, oh, the United States is just, you know, we've done all these horrible things, we wanna fight that.
Because when we do that, we destroy hope and we destroy agency.
And so, as many examples as we can give students of individuals.
Who made choices and worked with other individuals and formed groups and things changed.
You know, slavery ended, the Civil Rights Act passed.
Women have the right to vote.
things have changed and I think that's really important to stress to our students.
Gene Tavernetti: You know what, Lord I, I could talk with you.
For about a lot of stuff all day long.
In fact, I'm sure that people are feeling our listeners feeling very much the way I'm feeling, you know, hoping that their kids have history, teachers like you, so thoughtful and I'm sure that's what folks are thinking.
Having said all that, do you have any questions for me, Lauren?
Lauren Brown: I do, I'm a couple times in this interview you've mentioned that you know, you didn't know very much about certain topics in history and I know that, you know, on your
podcast you've had people come in and talk about the science of reading and the science of learning, and I have become so interested in that and I am so convinced that, you know.
Like what I said before, that there's a strong correlation between our literacy in this country and the health of our democracy.
And I'm feeling hopeful about the role of the science of learning and improving education.
And so I'm wondering what your take is on that, given that you've expressed what it sounds like you feel are gaps in your own education when you were in K through 12 school.
you and I are both old enough to know that the pendulum has swung a lot in education.
Do you see the science of reading and the science of learning as maybe the end of the pendulum swinging?
Like, is this gonna give us a way out of this conundrum of kids graduating from school and not knowing things that we are all sure that they should know?
Gene Tavernetti: Laura?
I think there's only one thing more siloed than our politics, and that is.
Education and when, we talk about silo, not only how we think about education should be educational knowledge.
I mean knowledge, you know, like science of learning, science of reading several times in the recent past, I've been working with staff and I'll ask them if they've even heard of this or they know of this.
And then the answer is no.
And that's not their fault.
that's just the way we are.
I think it's also a function of how big this country is.
And so I think there's that, but.
Getting back to social studies and science of learning, you know, things that I have absolutely noticed is what Doug La Ma had to say and Faith Howard and everybody said, kids just don't read in school.
And so I think there's such a great opportunity, to read more in school.
I can't remember who said, you know, that kids go all day without reading at all.
Lauren Brown: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: And I wanna throw Mike Smoker in there as well.
I mean, you know, who's no, spring Chicken has been saying the same thing for, you know, a quarter of a century.
We just need to read more.
I don't know about hope.
You know, I think we are evolving to a place that we're not gonna have a school system, but lots of systems of schools but Best hope is That our public education still becomes a school of choice, that we can improve.
I just don't think we can improve everything.
It's, you know, so I don't know how you are in Illinois, in California.
You know, I laugh at some folks, oh, we need to have the state.
Mandate something crime, we can't even do the same, you know, the same curriculum in a school district, much less the whole state.
So that's a fallacy.
I mean, you know, that's not gonna happen.
So I just think we're gonna have pockets.
We're gonna have pockets where we're gonna have some good things but across the board, I don't know.
Now having said that, I don't know if it's ever been, you know, talk about nostalgia.
It's never been as good as we thought it was, you know?
Lauren Brown: not that I
Gene Tavernetti: agree with you.
Lauren Brown: I agree with you.
I don't think there's like a golden age of public education in the United States.
Gene Tavernetti: There's not a golden age and there was some bad stuff going on.
I mean, everything that's happened in education has been an evolution.
I mean, we could talk about one of the things that I always ask people who are interested in school choice.
So what are we gonna do with the kids with special needs?
Because I could tell you in my lifetime before IDEA and I have to stop saying in my lifetime.
but you know, prior to IDEA, I mean, there were kids, there was no testing
They just, okay, we're going to, put them over here and literally in another building, a hundred yards away and have no contact.
You know?
And do you know how they got out of that program?
They didn't.
Lauren Brown: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: And so something had to change.
Now we're at a place, well, look at these IEPs.
They don't they're no substance to them and they don't occur.
But that was a reaction to how bad it was before.
Sure.
We need to find some common ground.
But I think one of the things that diminishes my hope is there's just no institutional memories.
In education in schools,
Lauren Brown: well, people should follow my substack because I mean, this has become like the hill I wanna die on, you know?
Yeah.
That, I think literacy is so important.
So many people have talked about reading as a fundamental civil right, and we know how to teach kids how to read and we just haven't been doing it the right way.
And you know, one of those things that can, you know, once we get past the.
I mean, I am a little nervous because I do think of what you're saying is, you know, as we talk about the science of reading, people are like, oh, that's that thing that's all about phonics.
Right.
And they misunderstand that it's about much more.
So the hill I wanna die on about that is one of the things that, so much that is the other part of reading is background knowledge and vocabulary.
And guess where that can help?
Yeah, like social studies, more social studies, K through five, and the science of learning.
You know, and I worry that people will be like, oh yeah, that's that retrieval practice where you just have kids like, you know, write on whiteboards and they'll misunderstand that.
It's much more complicated than that.
But I am hopeful that there are starting to be more voices.
I see that a lot on substack in.
Understanding the nuance, so, you know, to like, bring back our conversation full circle.
You know, history is not about, you know, good guys and bad guys.
Villains and Saints history is much more complicated than that.
It's much more nuanced.
It's not, you know, is the United States an evil racist country or is the United States, you know, land the free and home of the brave?
It's a combination of both of those things.
And education is not just like one simple, like little.
Fix.
It's not like, oh, we can just throw a whiteboard in every class and you know, or phonics and every kid will be able to read and every kid will be able to learn.
It's much more complicated than that.
But I am hopeful, I guess, that people understanding the, like, we can't be so siloed and that's why I wanted to do that conversation with Laura Stam.
I think it's so important that we have that sort of vertical articulation of talking with, you know.
High school teachers talking with elementary school teachers and people in the academy and schools of education being more in the classroom that maybe we can break down those silos and understanding, like making education itself become more professional.
And if we're more professional, then we won't be swayed by these fads and we won't see that pendulum swinging like.
From one year it's learning styles, and now we know that it's not.
If we really embrace the science of learning, we won't jump on fads and we'll stick to what actually works and what actually helps kids learn.
Gene Tavernetti: Lauren?
Okay let's quit on a high note.
Lauren Brown: Okay.
Gene Tavernetti: Thank you so much.
I enjoyed this conversation so much and me too.
I look forward.
Thank you.
Look forward to seeing you someplace soon.
Lauren Brown: Yes.
Absolutely.
Gene Tavernetti: If you're enjoying these podcasts, tell a friend.
Also, please leave a 5 star rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
You can follow me on BlueSky at gTabernetti, on Twitter, x at gTabernetti, and you can learn more about me and the work I do at my website, BlueSky.
Tesscg.
com, that's T E S S C G dot com, where you will also find information about ordering my books, Teach Fast, Focus Adaptable Structure Teaching, and Maximizing the Impact of Coaching Cycles.