How History Is Taught in Schools
Scholar Suzanne Wilson paints a familiar picture of teacher-centered instruction dominating history classrooms. Often called dismissively by critics as “traditional teaching,” it is a mode of instruction that is recognizable to most readers above the age of 18 who have ever taken high school history courses. In one study, for example, 97 percent of students in history courses reported that their teachers lectured some of the time, they memorized information (83 percent), and used the textbook weekly (89 percent). Other classroom studies between the 1920s and now have found similar outcomes.
Yet the consistent portrayal that researchers and reform-minded historians have constructed of secondary school classrooms is hardly monolithic. In my research on how teachers taught between the 1890s and the