Present and Past Tense in History Teaching
Reflections on tense and Professor David Moss' Case Method
And there it is, four paragraphs into this article on Professor Moss’ teaching method:
“David Moss teaches history in the present tense.” On a blackboard in an Aldrich classroom, the professor scrawls, “The federal government is insolvent!” He sets the scene for the class, an unusual mix of Harvard undergraduates and MBAs. “I want you to imagine: You just fought in the American Revolution,” he says.”
Now, you may ask: What of this tense talk? In October 2021 I attended a professional learning session on Case Method Teaching run by the Harvard Business School and Professor David Moss. The Case Method Institute (CMI) has increased their partnership with K-12 teachers of history over the last 10 or so years after remarkable success at the Harvard Business School with a course generated by Professor Moss entitled “History of American Democracy.”
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to participate in this free professional development from such a prestigious institution and professor, so many weeks ago I made sure I was registered. As is the case with many professional learning opportunities these days, pre-work was assigned for the all-day Saturday session. The pre-work entailed reading through a few “cases”—the materials Professor Moss and the CMI mull together as the showpieces of the curricular resources. These cases are anywhere from 5-25 pages of secondary historical narrative which situate learners in socio-historical context for an instrumental “decision point.”
Three cases up for review for our PL were one on Madison and the writing of the US Constitution, one on an Australian Ballot for California, and one on the Selma protest marches associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1960s in Alabama. While I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the curricular materials themselves, and I’m excited about applying these materials in 9-12 history classes, the really struck me about the professional learning experience wasn’t the material itself, but the character and quality of the historical discourse facilitated by Professor Moss in the session.
The Saturday session was broken into a few component parts—an overview and introduction which was teacher-facing, then a sequence wherein we participated as learners in a sort of simulation of the Case Method approach. This simulation itself was in a few parts—we began with a small group discussion of the case at hand for about 45-minutes in groups of around 8, then Professor Moss ran a two hour discussion of the case virtually for dozens of participants. Again, I was struck by the intentional facilitation of the historical discourse, rather than the quality of the materials at hand for the discussion.
Professor Moss had not only prepared five-or-so thoughtful, divergent, text-dependent questions, but also drew up what he refers to as “boards” in preparation for the discussion. These hold the content that he intends to scribe for learners during the discussion component—it may range from one to five or so boards, but in effect they’re sort of exemplars or forecasts of potential learner responses, or even look-fors which the instructor has in mind for the course of the discussion. These allow Professor Moss to ensure that all specific talking points are addressed during the group discussion, and guide his facilitation of the discourse itself.
Finally, what I found most fascinating is not necessarily the coherence and concerted power of the materials outlined above (i.e., secondary historical narrative, teaching notes with exemplars, text-dependent questions), but the talk moves Professor Moss used in the discourse. These were frequent follow ups of the type: Can you say more about that? What makes you take that position? etc. Professor Moss generated thoughtful and divergent discourse by intentionally pushing to make thinking audible, by soliciting further information from participants, and by situating the group’s discourse in the present tense—and this is what I find most fascinating about the session.
Oliver Caviglioli recently made a comment about tense use in historical discourse on Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time,” a comment about history writers taking on the present tense in historical narrative to drive engagement and excitement in their storytelling. I’m struck by the core idea of Professor Moss’ approach being ‘decision-points’ in socio-historical context. Professor Moss repeatedly situated us in the 1960s moment wherein MLK Jr and others had to consider a variety of information sources, historical trends, political and legal trajectories, in order to come to a thoughtful decision that real historical actors had to make: whether or not to lead protesters across the Selma bridge after President LBJ’s negotiations and a federal injunction.
Turns out there’s a name for this—the historical present tense. The Grammar Girl podcast does a great job of breaking down the usage of this tense—both in formal, informational sources, as well as informal and conversational ones. This makes me wonder about the ways we use tense in both the teaching and learning of history in both formal and informal context—formal in a sense of a learning session, informal in a sense of engaging with a historical book on our own terms, or even storytelling in our personal, everyday lives. It’s actually hatched an idea of the ethnolinguistic analysis of history teaching at the tense level, as well as at the one-to-one coaching level—stay tuned for more on those fronts.