Over the years, discussions on teaching American history have generally focused on content and teaching methods. Some teachers advocate including more voices in the story; others complain of having to squeeze more content into an already-tight calendar. Using a global framework to teach the American past gets growing emphasis today. Some professors value such a reorientation as an innovative response to globalization; others see it as a distracting add-on that truncates important lessons about key American institutions. Wrapped within these debates are questions of teaching style. To lecture or not? To rely more on primary sources or secondary sources to fashion the story? To give students more hands-on experiential learning or more practice in developing abstract thinking?[1]

Those fundamental questions about teaching American history can be answered only when we first settle on how (and not what) we want our students to learn. To consider this question requires the historian as teacher to shift away from teaching the topic and toward teaching the student. Such a change does not come easy because many of us teach the way we were taught. In a tradition-bound discipline, graduate courses focus on content with little or no pedagogical discourse, and doctoral work remains centered on research and writing. The classroom serves as a testing ground for our research, students as a captive audience for our findings. What training we have as teachers usually comes haphazardly. We might be fortunate enough to have a teaching mentor, but more often than not we suffer on our own as teaching assistants and adjuncts. Even when as classroom historians we want to be more student centered, the internal demand to publish or perish tamps down the pedagogically adventurous. But accrediting agencies and state departments of public instruction continually press for new methods of history teaching that stress inquiry-based learning and for assessment models that go beyond time-honored testing of knowledge. The demand for engaged students and a faculty more attentive to the needs of the individual learner has never been higher, but the gulf between our practice and these theories continues to grow. What is a historian to do?

The history faculty at Alverno College grapples with those issues. Rather than approach them from within the silos of our specializations, we confront them by holding discussions across disciplines and departments in order to direct an innovative curriculum we call ability-based learning. At the heart of this learning program stands a series of institutional outcomes, or abilities, which serve as our blueprint in teaching history. Without them, both student learning and the direction of our own teaching would more likely reflect the old saying “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

While some schools are just beginning to define outcomes and to design and implement ways to reach them, Alverno College’s thirty-five-year experience with an outcomes-based curriculum has earned it a national and international reputation.[2] Located on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Alverno is a liberal arts college for women established by the School Sisters of St. Francis in 1887.[3] Today we have an enrollment closing in on 3,000, with a growing emphasis on graduate programs in business, nursing, and education.

Alverno’s Department of History has four full-time faculty. While our scholarly interests inform our teaching specializations, we all serve as generalists in broadly defined areas such as the United States, Europe, Latin America, or Asia. We also serve the general education curriculum by teaching introductory courses combining the four disciplines that form our Humanities Division: history, philosophy, religious studies, and English. Two single-semester history courses are required of all students, and our two-semester American and world survey courses are required of education students. Our history majors number around 35, with approximately 20 minors.

Alverno College serves a diverse body of students by offering classes on weekdays and weekends. Close to 75 percent of our undergraduate students are the first in their families to attend college. Almost 35 percent are students of color. About 75 percent are over age 23 (with an average student age of 30); many are employed, often full time, with 100 percent of students qualifying for need-based financial aid. A majority of our students come from the Greater Milwaukee area and are a product of its schools, which vary widely in resources and quality.[4]

Alverno’s capacity to offer a high-quality education to a student body of such diverse socioeconomic and academic background can be attributed to its ability-based curriculum and assessment processes, developed over three decades. Students are expected to master the content traditionally associated with a specialized degree. They are also required to demonstrate the competencies associated with eight core “abilities” needed for effectiveness in the worlds of work, family, and civic life. The college’s ability-based curriculum makes explicit the expectation that the student should be able to act on what she knows.

The abilities serve as a common thread in all of the college’s programs: faculty members use them to shape courses, and they constitute the core of each student’s learning sequence throughout her eight semesters at Alverno. A cross-disciplinary department for each ability offers a forum in which faculty can conduct scholarship on teaching and assessing the abilities and develop new approaches to student learning in the ability. Such departments also provide an administrative structure through which the college can coordinate and evaluate the ways that the ability is taught across the college curricula. All full-time faculty members are required to serve in an ability department; individuals select which of the eight ability departments to join, and they may switch departments at any time. The eight abilities are integrative communication, analysis, problem solving, valuing in decision making, social interaction, aesthetic engagement, effective citizenship, and developing a global perspective.

During the early years of the ability-based curriculum, as Alverno’s faculty worked to integrate the abilities into the colleges’ academic programs, a general understanding developed that instructors would not teach all abilities in each class and that each department would not be responsible for every ability. There were no prescribed expectations about which abilities would be taught by whom or in what disciplinary departments. This open, inchoate aspect of the design process led to protracted, yet fruitful, cross-disciplinary discussions. The history faculty, for example, may have had a general understanding of what it meant for a student to do historical analysis, but its members were uncertain how a student develops her global perspective in studying the past, let alone how to teach in order to promote that development.

From these conversations, the history faculty incorporated a fundamental principle into the curriculum that soon affected our teaching of history. While content might be absorbed at any point in a student’s college life, abilities are developmental. Most of our students do not come through the classroom door already polished communicators. Nor do first-year students interact effectively in the classroom or solve problems that arise from complex group processes. Though some students may have an intuitive sense of what kind of art they like, many do not understand the artistic processes involved in making it or the historical or social contexts out of which the work arises. To meet our students where they are in the classroom, the Alverno faculty defines six levels of progress within each ability, for teaching purposes generally grouped into the three broader categories of beginning, intermediate, and advanced. (Thus levels 1 and 2 of an ability, for example, would usually be taught in the same course.) The beginning and intermediate abilities form the basis for our general education requirements. Abilities at the advanced level are taught and assessed in the students’ major discipline(s). When a student is successful in meeting one level of an ability, which she must demonstrate in multiple courses and across disciplines, she moves to the next level and takes courses that teach and assess at that level.

While as historians we expect our students to integrate all eight abilities in their academic work and beyond, we explicitly teach and assess for certain ones in each class. As a department we identify which abilities are integral to our field. In the beginning and intermediate courses, Alverno’s history faculty teach and assess for abilities including integrative communication (which includes writing, reading, speaking, listening, quantitative literacy, and computer literacy), analysis, developing a global perspective, valuing in decision making, and aesthetic engagement.[5] At the advanced level we teach and assess for integrative communication, analysis, and valuing in decision making.

While the eight abilities embody our institutional outcomes, the history faculty contextualizes them or translates them into the specifics of our discipline. Early on, we had lively discussions about what it meant to “do” history. Fortunately, they have continued to this day. While we are never satisfied that we have fully expressed the integration of abilities with our collective understanding of the history discipline, the Alverno history faculty currently teaches for five outcomes. The student: 

• Identifies culturally grounded assumptions that have influenced the perception and behavior of people in the past and identifies those that influence her own perception and behavior.
• Identifies and critiques the theories, concepts, and assumptions that historians have used to create coherent interpretations of the past.
• Identifies, analyzes and communicates the implications of values and valuing orientations that underlie her own and other historians’ choices of subjects for study, their theoretical approaches to these subjects, and their interpretations of these subjects.
• Independently uses theories and conceptual frameworks to organize, synthesize, and communicate her interpretations of historical phenomena.
• Takes responsibility for her own interpretations of the past by explaining and defending them publicly in a variety of personal and professional contexts.

The outcomes represent our views as historians interested in the ways culture constructs knowledge. Our concern with how meaning is created carries over into how we think about history and how we teach. (For an interactive presentation of the relationship of institutional outcomes to department, course, and assessment outcomes, view Table 1)

Over the years, as we deliberately melded content with a learning process designed to foster the abilities, we saw a need to revamp our history curriculum. We no longer teach the American survey courses in the first year. The very nature of the outcomes we seek makes it a challenge to provide a chronological run through America’s past and to teach disciplinary skills typically reserved for advanced history majors. Since we agreed that it was important to teach metacognitive skills to first-year students to give them opportunities to practice the abilities as they relate to the discipline of history, our beginning courses required a more concentrated focus. Thus the faculty design first-year history courses centered on a particular place and time of the historian’s choosing, such as the United States in the 1960s or Europe during World War I. The course content and the method of assessment are the sole prerogative of the individual instructor. The course outcomes, however, are team-designed by the history faculty and reflect specific abilities. By bringing together content and efforts to develop certain abilities, we intend to teach students to examine how the characteristics of a society and culture at a particular place and time influence the behaviors, values, and ideas of people living there and then, which in turn generate continuity and change. In the chronologically limited and pedagogically self-conscious beginning courses, students learn how individuals and social groups reshape the culture and society in which they live through their actions and their cultural expressions and how they sometimes affect international developments. The first-year courses are part of our general education requirement and are open to all students. (For a representation of the way abilities are developed in courses at successive levels, view Table 2.[6]

The content in these beginning-level courses serves as an anchor to the past when a student takes the American survey courses in her second year. As she confronts the sweeping panorama of the American past, she now has a few touch points to center her. This we believe is the case even when a first-year course is not about the United States, because we strive to teach U.S. history within a broad global context. The courses serve also as a training ground for students to learn the skills inherent in doing history. For instance, in our first-year history courses, all students spend much time learning how to read and interpret primary sources. One common exercise asks students to explore (in groups) the basic questions a historian asks in order to identify the context, content, and contribution of a document, and it reminds them to be aware of their own assumptions and biases when confronting historical evidence. Such a learning tool helps beginning students practice the systematic integration of content with abilities.

A closer look at the way we teach historical analysis illustrates how we translate Alverno’s institutional abilities into classroom practices. At a beginning level, Alverno students are taught the ability we call analysis, or what others might call critical thinking. Alverno’s analysis department defines the first two levels of analysis as making accurate observations from material studied and drawing reasonable inferences from those observations. In the discipline of history, we teach students this ability through their reading and interpretation of primary sources as well as instruction on how to “read” historical monographs, films, and ephemera. For our students as they begin to learn about their own thinking process, “accurate observations” may mean simply clarity in knowing who said what and when. At the intermediate levels of analysis, we stress the more complicated concepts of interpretation and historical truth. Thus when students take the American survey in their second year, they begin to apply disciplinary concepts and frameworks with growing understanding. Broadly speaking, the student is taught to perceive and make relationships (level 3) and to analyze structure and organization (level 4). We translate this in our discipline to mean that a student demonstrates level 3 of analysis by going beyond the use of a single source, document, or text, as she synthesizes multiple sources to reflect her own understanding of a historical person, event, or phenomenon. At level 4 the student explores how schools of thought influence historical interpretations over time and how historical arguments are structured. (See table 1.)

The developmental nature of the analytical ability makes it imperative that instructors provide students multiple opportunities to practice their critical thinking at each level, while continually challenging them to go further. As an instructor, I do not assume my students have all thoroughly studied the subjects I present to them. I am confident, however, that because my students met the outcomes of the earlier courses and have already had some practice interpreting primary sources, I can design an assessment for the American survey course that is more analytically challenging then the assessments in their beginning courses.

A good example of how such skills scaffolding works is my initial assessment of student performance in the second half of the U.S. history survey (1900 to present). After three weeks, my students have studied the standard topics one would expect to cover: industrialization, corporate consolidation, westward expansion, immigration, the rise of labor unions and labor ideology. They have read and discussed historians’ monographs on labor unions, Populists, and reform movements of the Progressive Era. In large- and small-group discussions, I present a set of questions to frame each historical topic. For example, to answer the question “What was the importance of labor unions to the worker of early modern America?,” students read contemporary statements from union leaders, company managers, newspapers, and politicians about the pros and cons of labor unions. To help shape the subject historically, I have them read a scholarly monograph on unions’ struggles and use their textbook as a reference.

In their final experience before I assess their learning, I create an exercise that integrates both content and a variety of abilities. The class is broken into small groups, with each group responsible for reading and discussing a different worker’s autobiography. Their source is the magazine Independent, which published a series of workers’ stories in the early 1900s.[7] These workers, from diverse ethnicities, races, and backgrounds, told very different stories of how they came to their present circumstances and expressed very different hopes and dreams. In this exercise, students must not only recount the worker’s story, but also explain his/her life through the lens of labor union history, labor ideology, and the contribution their worker made to America as defined by their readings, my lectures, and class discussions. Individually, they read and summarize a particular labor story. Together, they create a historical synthesis from multiple perspectives. They stand before their peers, telling the worker’s story within a historical framework. Then, after the presentations, invariably quite different descriptively and interpretatively, the students discuss the shifting nature of their own historical thinking regarding labor unions. This classroom experience allows the practice of multiple abilities, including social interaction, analysis, valuing, and communication. While students engage the materials, I informally assess their work, publicly making note, for example, of how well a student has internalized the information she has read, or whether one is drawing on more than one work to articulate her position, or if one is speaking “on her feet” and using limited notes. Students also engage in this process by assessing each other as the exercise moves along.

Now I am ready to assess their learning formally. Just as the college seeks its institutional outcomes (the abilities) and our discipline pursues outcomes, each course has its own set of outcomes. One goal (a hybrid of several outcomes) set forth in the course syllabus that I use as a guide in designing this assessment is:

Develop and demonstrate the ability to analyze historical documents by applying an accurate understanding of the historical context in which they were written and to communicate your analysis clearly and in a well-organized manner.

Students are asked to assist a friend, Chris, who is presenting a proposal for a new History Channel special to be called “The American Spirit.” Chris hopes that the production company will employ her to explain the story of common folk who lived and worked in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Chris is good at the production end of television but does not have much background in history. She did some preparation by reading all the miniautobiographies published in the Independent. She is certain that these stories will appeal to the producers, and she hopes to use them as the starting point for a deeper exploration of how people lived. Chris also wants to include a perspective from contemporary observers of social life. Corresponding to many Independent essays is Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives.[8] Chris asks her friend to select one chapter from Riis’s book that best corresponds to a worker’s autobiography from the Independent, to critique Riis’s perspective in relation to that worker’s, and to explain to Chris what those sources say about the differing values and points of view Americans held at that time. The student is also asked to offer Chris an additional primary source that would help expand the historical context for the audience.

A significant dimension of this assessment that cannot be understated is the audience. One dimension of the communication ability is that the student learn to write differently for different audiences. When asked to write a report to a fictitious friend who is not versed in Riis’s work or in the larger questions of labor history, unions, and management’s response, the student is placed in a position of authority and in charge of giving shape to this account. In other words, she is expected to write as a historian. I am also more likely to receive a final product that is more fully developed with evidence because the student will not leave out valuable information on the assumption that I already know it.

Because we organize our curriculum in stages in the development of the students’ historical mindedness, we deliberately design beginning and intermediate courses as intellectual prerequisites for advanced-level work. Only after a student has demonstrated satisfactory work in the abilities through level 4 is she allowed to take courses at the advanced level. We believe this is an important new stage in her academic career and, with her peers, welcome her into this new and challenging level of learning with an event that celebrates her accomplishments and helps her plan for what is to come. Together with the students from all majors who are moving to advanced-level courses, she hears a faculty member present a lecture on his or her intellectual hero and then meets her fellow history majors and faculty members to talk about careers in history and work at the advanced level. This academic ritual stresses a new stage in the student’s academic life, but for the history faculty, there remain considerable overlap and reinforcement between our intermediate and advanced courses, both in teaching strategies and student approaches to learning. We continue to stress that history consists of interpretative rather than objective representations of the past. We put competing and conflicting historical narratives into students’ hands and work with them to evaluate the ways those narratives are constructed and the values and perspective that underlie them. According to our department’s “statement of the major,” provided to students on entry to advanced-level work:

There is a characteristic rhythm to activity in all advanced-level history courses. Students begin with a critical examination of the professional practice of historians and then go on to perform their own understanding of this practice, not merely by emulating it but by consciously attempting to overcome shortcomings revealed by their critiques.[9]

To put it more bluntly, as one of my colleagues would say, rather than receiving a lecture on a topic that offers a synopsis of a particular work, students in our advanced courses are taught how to “gut the book” (and by extension, the author!) in ways that contribute to our understanding of the topic. Our course in historical analysis exemplifies how this occurs.

Undergraduate history majors and minors usually spend much of their time studying history as a body of knowledge about the past and very little time considering history as the process by which we create knowledge. Even at Alverno, where the very first history courses emphasize history as a way of thinking and asking questions about human experience and not as a body of objective facts to be learned—old habits of just learning “the facts” are sometimes hard to break. The course on historical analysis, which emphasizes the thinking of different historians more than any particular era or place, is intended to serve as a corrective. Its outcomes, with the abilities identified in parentheses, are:

1. to identify and critique the theories, concepts, and assumptions that historians use to create coherent interpretations of the past (analysis, level 5; valuing, level 5).
2. to think critically about historians’ use of quantitative information and language and to use quantitative abilities effectively to communicate evidence supporting your historical interpretations (quantitative literacy, levels 3 and 4).[10]
3. to create independent interpretations of the past with a conscious regard for the way your own assumptions influence your interpretation of the evidence (Communication, level 5; analysis, level 5; valuing, level 5).
4. to take responsibility for your own interpretations by explaining and defending them publicly (communication, level 5; valuing, level 5).

Two related exercises demonstrate how these outcomes translate into classroom experiences. To explore “coherent interpretations of the past,” I use Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties because Schama artfully plays with various forms of evidence to argue for an expansive creativity in writing historical narratives. In his first section, Schama offers competing narratives of the 1759 siege of Quebec, including the voice of a common soldier scaling the cliff to reach the Plains of Abraham.[11] In a position paper, each student takes a stand, informed by her reading of other historians, on whether his narrative technique constitutes historical proof. Later in the semester the students research and write narratives of their own, using the same primary sources from a historical event of some controversy, such as the incident at Fort Pillow during the Civil War or the massacre at Sand Creek (both of which generated extensive congressional reports with eyewitness testimony). When using evidence, students must exercise the same caution they advise Schama to show. In writing their narratives, some adopt his daring approach as well. Each student then prepares a presentation to defend her thesis and her narrative approach.

This experience blends the three abilities we teach in advanced history courses at Alverno College. Level 5 of analysis specifies that the student “refines her understanding of frameworks and identifies criteria for determining what frameworks are suitable for explaining a phenomenon.” This she does in her critique of Schama’s method and in her own decision on what approach to take in writing her narrative. She has an opportunity to meet level 5 of communication in how she “selects, adapts, and combines communication strategies in relation to disciplinary/professional frameworks and theories.” In her presentation and self-assessment she defends her narrative method, allowing me to assess her ability to meet valuing at level 5, which is to use “valuing frameworks of a major field of study or profession to engage significant issues in personal, professional, and civic contexts.” This kind of assessment can be a transformative experience for the student, as she practices the stages for constructing a historical monograph while consciously considering professional questions of accuracy, truth, and integrity.

The Alverno College history faculty’s use of institutional outcomes, translated into departmental outcomes and further refined into course and assessment outcomes, has predicated a fundamental shift in classroom pedagogy away from content delivery to an inquiry-based methodology. How does one, for example, expect a student to “identify, analyze, and communicate the implications of values and valuing orientations that underlie her . . . choices of subjects for study” if the classroom environment limits her ability to discuss her own values as well as those of the people and societies she is studying? If as a faculty we are to require a student to take responsibility for her interpretations of the past “by explaining and defending them publicly in a variety of personal and professional contexts,” then we need to create the space and time for her to do so. With the onus on students to meet such performance-based outcomes and on instructors to provide them multiple opportunities for doing so, classroom logistics had to change. We accomplished this by bending time and reconfiguring space.

Time is an eternal problem for history teachers; not enough of it to cover all the content, and too much of it to get through in one semester. Alverno history professors have the added responsibility of integrating abilities with content. Students are called on not only to respond to our presentations but also to give their own, individually and in groups. Rather than listening to instructors lecture on an article or book, students lead discussions moderated by their instructor. This need for more experiential learning mandated an important institutional concession. With students at the front and center of classroom discourse, the standard fifty-minute classes proved too limiting. As a result, many Alverno courses are taught as four-credit courses, including all advanced-level history classes and both American and world history survey courses. We meet with students twice a week for 110 minutes each or once a week for 230 minutes. Some intermediate courses earn only two credits, meeting once a week for 110 minutes. For teachers committed to doing a thorough job in teaching history, more seat time presents little downside.

Lengthening class time is only one solution to the problem of meeting learning outcomes, and such a systemic change may not be possible at other institutions. Another step may be more feasible. Alverno’s students are taught to interact with each other in a variety of ways in the classroom. In fact, one of their first-year courses is devoted to teaching and assessing social interaction skills, specifically the ability to use various problem-solving models to complete group projects. We also recognize that students have multiple learning styles; some are hands-on learners, some need to talk things through, and others think best by writing. To meet all these styles, we find students work best sitting at tables rather than individual desks. Our students face one another, figuratively and literally, in order to tackle the historical questions we put before them. An added bonus is that students versed in group problem-solving models tend to police themselves when it comes to the occasional slacker. A student who comes to class unprepared to discuss the readings cannot easily fly below the radar. Students get from their peers, long before their instructor delivers it, the message that poor preparation for classroom participation is unacceptable. This helps offset a common concern that group work allows students to get off task.

A final challenge for teachers of history that we have managed to conquer at Alverno College are the giant classes and the impersonal relationship between teachers and students. Our beginning and intermediate history courses are capped at 25 students. A generous teacher may be willing to admit all the students on his or her wait lists, so enrollment may reach 30, but overall Alverno College’s student to teacher ratio is 18:1. Advanced-level classes are capped at 15. While we have yet to reach the Socratic method of one-on-one tutorials with our students, smaller class sizes help improve communication between professor and student. Fewer students mean more feedback on their performances, an essential component of an abilities-based curriculum, since students require and expect that we too will use evidence to make our arguments.

Over the years, I have had many encounters with history professors from other institutions who angrily denounce “outcomes” as a curse of additional labor for an already overworked faculty. They may have the problem reversed. When faculty advocate and then create their own outcomes-based curriculum, they can work to resolve many of the problems we tend to associate with teaching and learning in higher education—passive students, isolated and noncommunicative faculty, overloaded classes, and insufficient time to deal with coverage mandates. If history faculty are putting the cart before the horse, then learning outcomes are not the problem at all. They may be a solution.