Testing to the Teach

Last year I had the rare experience of teaching an actual declared history major in one of my U.S. history survey courses.  Indeed, this student was not just a history major, but a graduating senior, and a very strong student and good writer.  They were taking my introductory course at the encouragement of their advisor, because the student had taken the Texas State’s certification exam for high school history instructors and had not passed the test. So they needed a quick refresher for the U.S. History portion of the exam.

I asked the student to share with me whatever information they could about the format and parameters of the test so that I could understand how best to help them right then and also perhaps frame my teaching of the survey to be of use to any future students who might be preparing to be teachers.

So the student came in to meet with me during office hours.  We had a good conversation. After we had talked, I asked the student if they would mind my sharing what I had learned from them and their situation in a blog post for our readers here, and they said to go right ahead.  Almost a year has passed, but I am just now getting around to that.

And let me tell you: I learned a few things from my student.

First, I learned that the certification exam for history teachers in Texas is a multiple choice exam:  all multiple choice; no writing portion.

I was surprised, and I said so.  “So the exam is testing your ability to memorize basic historical facts?”

“Pretty much,” they said.

“Well,” I said, “I can see why a history major might not pass the test on a first attempt, because memorization of facts is not generally what we emphasize in undergraduate classes.”

“No,” they said. And they explained that the classes they had taken, the professors they had studied with, had emphasized evaluating historical evidence, making sound historical arguments, and so forth.  Basically, a lot of writing, as one would expect.  Indeed, every history department at every undergraduate institution where I’ve ever taught has some expectation that we will be asking our students to write – and rightly so!  History is not a collection of random facts; it’s an interpretive discipline that uses both “random facts” and reasonable inferences about them to explain and understand various aspects of the past.

Now I use multiple-choice questions on exams and reading quizzes all the time, as do many of my colleagues. But I also use essay questions and assign major papers. And my exams at least are open-note, because I don’t think the point of taking U.S. history at the college level is to memorize facts.  That’s what Google is for. Instead, let’s learn how to take the vetted facts we have at hand — either via memory or via the internet — to grapple with major questions and advance sensible arguments.

But the ability to write historically sound arguments is not one of the competencies covered in the state’s teacher certification exam for our subject.  Instead, the exam was merely looking for the aspiring teacher’s mastery of (some subset of) the basic facts that go into such arguments.

Now, I don’t think that’s a bad thing to evaluate.  Just as chemistry teachers should have some command of basic facts related to their subject, so should history teachers.  But out of the entire sweep of the American past, what set of facts are absolutely essential to be able to recall from memory?  Or is it a set of key events? Key documents?   Are we talking “Who wrote the Federalist Papers?” or are we talking “What did Federalist 10 argue?” Are we talking “What principle did Washington underscore in his Farewell Address?” Or are we talking “Who was the Vice President during Martin Van Buren’s administration?” (The answer to that last question is not an uninteresting fact, surely, and significant for anyone studying, say, race and citizenship in antebellum America — but is it essential enough to require memorization, or is it one of those minor details that a teacher can quickly look up if it comes up?)

I was honestly a little stunned that teacher credentialing was a matter of multiple choice, when the choices of which multiple choice questions that might be asked are literally endless. (Side note: Obviously, when it comes to how much can be riding on a single multiple-choice exam, I absolutely should not have been stunned.)

So I asked the student, “Does the state provide any guidelines for what kind of questions will be on the test, or what areas they will cover?”

The student was ready; they handed me a printout of the Texas Education Agency’s preparation manual for the exam, and pointed me to the page indicating, in broad terms, what areas a candidate for teacher certification would be tested on.

You can find the current version of that manual here; if you click on the sidebar option “Domain II – U.S. History,” you can see the various areas of U.S. history that are covered by the exam.

I skimmed through these broad descriptions.  I didn’t even make it through “Exploration and Colonization” before I had to stop and do a double-take.

Here’s what the State of Texas expects of beginning U.S. history teachers in grades 7-12:

“Demonstrates knowledge of the foundations of representative government in the United States (e.g., ways in which the Mayflower Compact, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and the Virginia House of Burgesses contributed to the growth of representative government).”

What stopped me in my tracks was the mention of the Iroquois Confederacy.  I’m not a specialist in the era or area in question, but my basic understanding is that connections between the Iroquois Confederacy and the emergence of representative government among the English colonies are rather tenuous at best.  I know that at one time the idea that English colonists borrowed ideas of self-government from the Iroquois was a widely-discussed claim – indeed, it came up in the Stanford debates – but I didn’t think it was anything like a consensus view of the field.

Indeed, some time after meeting with that student, I polled my colleagues on social media about this very issue.  I just tossed the question out as a Facebook post:  “yo, vast early America peeps, where do we stand in the survey vis a vis the possible influence of Iroquois polity on American notions of governance?”

Without directly quoting any of the many expert historians who responded, I can summarize the feedback thus:  the idea of “Iroquois influence” on representative governance in the U.S. began to get a lot of play around the U.S. Bicentennial (so, the 70s), partly as an expression of a “contributionist” approach to Native American history.  In the 1980s and 1990s, there were very heated debates on this question, and the historiographic controversy was addressed in the 1990s in a forum in the William and Mary Quarterly (“Forum: The ‘Iroquois Influence’ Thesis—Con and Pro,” July 1996, with arguments against the thesis from Philip A. Levy and Samuel B. Payne, Jr., and a defense of the embattled thesis by Donald A. Grinde, Jr. and Bruce E. Johansen). While the basic argument of Grinde and Johansen still has some proponents, the early Americanists I consulted suggested that it is not a widely held view.

However, one contributor to the thread noted that the idea of “the Iroquois influence” is still presented as a credible and significant idea in a widely-used American government / political science textbook by Kenneth M. Dolbeare and Michael S. Cummings.  A recent edition of their volume, American Political Thought, has this to say at the conclusion of a whole section on the Iroquois influence on American politics:  “Some scholars view the similarities between Iroquois and U.S. thought and practice as largely coincidental, while others, notably Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen, see important lines of influence.  How powerfully the Iroquois experience has affected American ideas and institutions remains controversial, but it certainly was not an insignificant factor” (6^th edition, pp. 9-10).

But that backchannel conversation between me and my colleagues came later.

For the moment, right there in my office, I simply told the student, “I can see why this exam would throw a history major. Some of the things that you’re expected to know don’t really square with what history professors teach or what history majors would be learning today or how history majors would be learning today. But I will do my best to help you prepare for a retake.”

I most certainly did not teach to that test.  Instead, I had my students write, as history profs are wont to do, and I asked them big sweeping questions about our units of study, and I expected them to marshal evidence in the service of sound historical arguments.  I’m pleased to say that for this student, my usual approach did the trick.  Maybe all they needed was an extensive review of U.S. history to the Civil War, and the course served that purpose apart from any assignments designed to help the student demonstrate historical knowledge and historical thinking.

But what in the world am I to do with the fact that the history exam for secondary teachers in the State of Texas is a multiple-choice test? How exactly would a multiple choice question about the Iroquois — the Haudenosaunee — confederacy even work in determining a student’s preparation to teach middle school or high school social studies?

Many historians of early America find the argument of Grinde and Johansen unconvincing, though perhaps a few champion it. Meanwhile, some widely read political scientists clearly favor the idea; others, presumably, take the view of the many historians who find the thesis to be some form of wishful thinking (as one scholar put it in comments on my Facebook page).

Which view, one wonders, holds sway with those who are writing the Texas exam for 7-12^th grade history teachers?

Meanwhile, the rather detailed Texas state guidelines for secondary education in U.S. history to 1877 (which happens in 8th grade) or U.S. history since 1877 (which happens in high school) do not specifically mention the Iroquois — the Haudenosaunee — at all.

This arrangement is a problem for many reasons, none of which can be adequately addressed via a multiple-choice exam.