How “depth over breadth” can lead to “college and career ready”

Last week I had the opportunity to spend some time with a group of 14 teachers and principals from the Henry County Public Schools at our middle campus.  HCPS is undergoing an effort to redesign their middle school program to better support the learning needs of young adolescents, and they chose our school as one of several around the country to visit for ideas. During a discussion of the ways the Coalition of Essential Schools common principles are reflected in the practices of our school, one of the teachers asked me which principle I find the “most difficult to implement”.  Although it’s not necessarily difficult to implement, the principle of “depth over breadth” can often come with tensions that a school must work to reconcile and explain.  For example, the sentence from the principles that reads “…the aphorism “less is more” should dominate: curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content” can conflict with the fact that students (and now teachers) are assessed on a multiple choice social studies standardized test each spring.

As a middle and high school history teacher, I know that in many schools the social studies curriculum (normally a textbook) is geared towards an approach to learning history that favors marching through wide swaths of time in order to become familiar enough with lots of names, dates, and places to recognize them on an annual multiple choice test.  This is certainly true in Georgia, especially as students get older.  Take a look at the social studies content frameworks for middle school students.  Or answer a few sample social studies CRCT test questions on the Georgia Online Assessment System site (the user id and password for each grade level test is the grade level itself, i.e. “Grade8”).  “Covering content” is the path to success on these tests, but at the cost of “thorough student mastery and achievement”.

I taught social studies for several years in Massachusetts, where annual standardized tests focus on English Language Arts, math, and science but not social studies.  Massachusetts, generally regarded as having one of the top public school systems in the country, recognizes that for the purposes of assessment and accountability, having a multiple choice social studies test would not capture the most important skills of the subject.  As a result, I had the time and space for my teaching of social studies to center on deeper study of big issues and questions of history that asked students develop as researchers and historical thinkers.

At ANCS, our belief in the CES principles means that a similar focus on social studies teaching driven by mastery rather than content coverage can sometimes result in lower scores on the social studies CRCT.  Could our students do better on such a test if we adjusted our practices to cover more content with less depth?  Of course.  But given the current emphasis on “college and career readiness” as an outcome of schooling, I’d argue that students’ readiness is stronger through the approach we currently take.  And there are signs that others are starting to agree.  One big example is the recent decision by The College Board to retool its Advanced Placement U.S. History course and test.  The course is now being arranged around a set of “historical thinking skills” to foster depth over breadth in the curriculum, and the associated test—which can earn students college credit—is also undergoing a significant revision to reduce the number of multiple choice questions in favor of more complex ones.  According to the College Board, instead of its old exam which “encouraged shallow learning, as teachers and students raced to cover every possible topic that could appear on the exam”, the new AP U.S. History test will feature more questions that are “organized into sets asking about primary and secondary written texts and other forms of historical evidence (such as charts or maps). These questions will ask students to put these texts into context and make valid connections across time and place, in the way that historians usually reason about unfamiliar historical evidence.”

Like the College Board, we see the most value for our older students in helping them to grapple with big questions as they make sense of history.  So while we may not cover as much content as a typical middle school social studies class, we do cover content—it’s just that the names, places, and dates come in the context of exploring the larger issues of a person, event, or time period.  From my own experience, having taken many history classes in college and having a career that often requires me to analyze and think about the past, I am confident that the CES principle of “depth over breadth” can help make a student “college and career ready”.