Teaching Students to Question Knowledge

No schooling was allowed to interfere with my education.

—Grant Allen

A decade ago, if you had told Erin McCarthy she would become a teacher, she would have laughed. When she graduated from college, the last thing she wanted to do was teach. She was fascinated by history but bored by her social studies classes. Searching for a way to breathe life into overlooked objects and forgotten events, Erin started her career working in museums. Before long, she found herself writing a resource manual for teachers, leading school tours, and engaging students in interactive programs. She realized that the enthusiasm she saw on field trips was missing in too many classrooms, and she decided to do something about it.

For the past eight years, Erin has taught social studies in the Milwaukee area. Her mission is to cultivate curiosity about the past, but also to motivate students to update their knowledge in the present. In 2020, she was named Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year.

One day, an eighth grader complained that the reading assignment from a history textbook was inaccurate. If you’re a teacher, that kind of criticism could be a nightmare. Using an outdated textbook would be a sign that you don’t know your material, and it would be embarrassing if your students noticed the error before you did.

But Erin had assigned that particular reading intentionally. She collects old history books because she enjoys seeing how the stories we tell change over time, and she decided to give her students part of a textbook from 1940. Some of them just accepted the information it presented at face value. Through years of education, they had come to take it for granted that textbooks told the truth. Others were shocked by errors and omissions. It was ingrained in their minds that their readings were filled with incontrovertible facts. The lesson led them to start thinking like scientists and questioning what they were learning: whose story was included, whose was excluded, and what were they missing if only one or two perspectives were shared?

After opening her students’ eyes to the fact that knowledge can evolve, Erin’s next step was to show them that it’s always evolving. To set up a unit on expansion in the West, she created her own textbook section describing what it’s like to be a middle-school student today. All the protagonists were women and girls, and all the generic pronouns were female. In the first year she introduced the material, a student raised his hand to point out that the boys were missing. “But there’s one boy,” Erin replied. “Boys were around. They just weren’t doing anything important.” It was an aha moment for the student: he suddenly realized what it was like for an entire group to be marginalized for hundreds of years.

My favorite assignment of Erin’s is her final one. As a passionate champion of inquiry-based learning, she sends her eighth graders off to do self-directed research in which they inspect, investigate, interrogate, and interpret. Their active learning culminates in a group project: they pick a chapter from their textbook, choosing a time period that interests them and a theme in history that they see as underrepresented. Then they go off to rewrite it.

One group took on the civil rights chapter for failing to cover the original March on Washington, which was called off at the last minute in the early 1940s but inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic march two decades later. Other groups revised the chapter on World War II to include the infantry regiments of Hispanic soldiers and second-generation Japanese soldiers who fought for the U.S. Army. “It’s a huge light-bulb moment,” Erin told me.

Even if you’re not a teacher by profession, you probably have roles in which you spend time educating others—whether as a parent, a mentor, a friend, or a colleague. In fact, every time we try to help someone think again, we’re doing a kind of education. Whether we do our instruction in a classroom or in a boardroom, in an office or at our kitchen table, there are ways to make rethinking central to what—and how—we teach.

With so much emphasis placed on imparting knowledge and building confidence, many teachers don’t do enough to encourage students to question themselves and one another. To figure out what it takes to change that mindset, I tracked down some extraordinary educators who foster rethinking cycles by instilling intellectual humility, disseminating doubt, and cultivating curiosity. I also tested a few of my own ideas by turning my classroom into something of a living lab.