Investigating History: Massachusetts’ Innovative New Social Studies Curriculum

“Social studies is the place to teach kids how to talk to each other and negotiate conversations and digest information and form an opinion, but also listen to others’ opinions and back that up with evidence. And at the elementary age… that’s the place for some of that work…In history, we can teach them how to be human, just like we can when we read books.”

                  — History Matters Podcast

Stretching all the way back to the Boston Latin School which offered free education to any boy, regardless of ability to pay, through the Common School Movement that argued for and established free, publicly funded education for all children — boys and girls — through 8th grade, to the first law in 1827 requiring a publicly funded high school in every community over 500 people, Massachusetts has long been at the forefront of educational reform.  So it probably should come as no surprise that the Massachusetts Department of Education has rolled out an innovative new social studies curriculum for grades 5-7 this year (2025-26) and is piloting a new curriculum for grades 3-4 that will roll out over the summer for the 2026-27 school year. This new curriculum, entitled Investigating History, approaches social studies in very different ways than traditional curricula have and that is part of what makes it so exciting.

To really understand the innovation here, it helps to know what traditional social studies curricula are like and where they really fall short.  CMSi has looked at a lot of these programs over the years and they tend to follow similar formats.  Students “study” a particular period in history, which involves one or more of the following:

• memorizing a list of dates,
• memorizing a sequence of events,
• memorizing a list of key figures and their biographical data; and then,
• passing a test about any or all of these things.

That test usually requires students to answer true/false, fill-in-the-blank, or multiple choice questions and maybe give the occasional short answer.  Enterprising teachers might require a poster or a PowerPoint presentation or possibly a research project, but a lot of the day-to-day work is often worksheets.*   The vast majority of social studies programs and their associated student work are cognitively low and use the least engaging contexts.  Sometimes the resource is bright and colorful, but because the program doesn’t offer much challenge and the work is not engaging, the effect on kids is the same: students tend to memorize information only long enough to pass a test or a quiz. After that, most of it ends up in the abyss of forgetting, like that scene in Inside Out.  This is the big failure of social studies programs for elementary kids: they take really interesting concepts and human events and transform them in to boring, rote, disconnected bits of information.

Investigating History, however, is aiming to change that for students in Massachusetts. It’s mission is to “contribute to students’ capacities to make informed civic choices and assume their roles in strengthening equality, justice, and liberty in the world.” To that end, it is “centered on the principles of historical inquiry and investigation, culturally sustaining pedagogy, civic engagement and current world relevance, and historical empathy and human connections,” and is designed to “allow for different access points, addressing all students’ diverse and varied needs and supporting them in becoming better readers, writers, thinkers, and citizens. All students are engaged while learning challenging and relevant content and developing the skills of investigators and co-creators.”  So far so good. Lots of buzzwords here that are promising:  challenging, relevant, engaged, diverse needs, investigators, co-creators.” Love all that.

But does it deliver? I think it does, though I have some caveats which I’ll note at the end.

Native American Cliff Dwellings at Mesa Verde; pexels.com

I looked at the 5th grade curriculum and without getting too far into the weeds, here’s what I think really works:

• The whole year is 4 units.  This allows for a considerable amount of instructional depth, which is not common in social studies programs, where the content is usually a mile wide and an inch deep. This deeper focus allows students to get more into the underlying concepts of identity, conflict, compromise, culture, etc. One teacher explained the 5th grade curriculum units and the “big idea”, the conceptual depth, is obvious:                                                                                                                                              “[It] starts with early colonization and the growth of the colonies….then they have a unit on the American Revolution, the development of the Constitution, and just some really founding principles about government…The end of the year is all about the growth of the Republic beyond Lewis and Clark. And then the fourth unit is really focused on the legacy of the Civil War. Not so much nuanced information about battles and generals ー they do read about those and they get information, but …. at the end of unit one, (the curriculum) plants this idea of…is America a place or is America an idea? As kids go through, they learn about…the founding values of the country through all of the historical content and then how people took action to live up to those values….Is America living up to those ideas (now)? Who’s benefiting from the actions we’re taking? Who’s being harmed by the actions? How did things change? And how do people act to protect their rights and interests, is a really big thread throughout the whole fifth grade year.”
• It integrates ELA standards and supports literacy.  Generally when schools adopt new curricula, the various programs — science, ELA, etc. — don’t relate to each other at all, even if they are from the same company.  Each new program increases the total number of standards teachers must teach, sometimes significantly.** Integrated curricula, on the other hand, reduce the total number of standards because some of them are taught as part of another content area. That’s a win for teachers, and kids, too. Additionally, because kids are working extensively with informational texts and developing and offering evidence for their own analysis in Investigating History, the program supports close reading, writing, and speaking skills in very specific and intentional ways. The required oral discourse in particular helps kids strengthen their writing skills.
• It’s inquiry-based and asks kids to think like historians.  Rather than materials that tell kids what something is or how it was used or jumps them right to the way a particular conflict was resolved, Investigating History asks them to analyze primary sources, artifacts, and historical conflicts themselves and draw conclusions or formulate positions about them. It wants them to ask questions and seek out their own answers. This dovetails nicely with a study from the University of Michigan that found students who are curious and ask a lot of questions achieve better in Kindergarten.  There’s lots of potential in Investigating History for higher-order, analytical thinking. Those higher order skills are often thin on the ground in social studies programs, despite being part of many districts’ vision and mission statements.
• It centers around three core routines that build interest and historical literacy skills:  A supporting question launch, an investigating sources routine, and a putting-it-together routine. This starts kids off from a place of curiosity and prepares them to learn important skills around informational text and written and oral discourse.
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  pexels.com

  It lets go of the pressure to memorize dates and battles in favor of deeper thinking.  Releasing the pressure to cover more and more content has allowed for surprising — and surprisingly deep — work on the part of 5th graders.  As one teacher described it: “..Fifth graders are talking about foreign policy and it will blow your mind. They get assigned a brief… about John Adams’ decision about the Alien and Sedition Acts, or James Madison deciding to go to war in…1812, or George Washington deciding to stay neutral. …They get told ‘you are working for the State Department and you need to help the president come up with a decision. So here are the facts and you need to make a recommendation to either President Washington or President Madison or President Adams and what should he do and why.’ …They present to the class what they think  and then they find out what really happened and sometimes they’re really disappointed. They get really opinionated about why the president should have chosen something different.” Fifth graders discussing foreign policy is absolutely mind-blowing and mostly not possible under existing social studies programming.

• It builds teacher content knowledge.  Investigating History recognized that a deeper understanding of the historical content was necessary for teachers to engage students in the inquiry-based curriculum.  Every unit has a Background Brief that goes with it to support teacher content knowledge development.  This is particularly important for any area that teachers might feel anxious or uncomfortable about, since discomfort and anxiety may push people back to what they know — drill and kill. Many historical periods lack good resources for elementary aged children and some difficult topics like race offer even fewer options for teachers of younger students.  Investigating History has provided background information and suggested approaches to help teachers deliver the content with confidence.
• It addresses all three parts of the Instructional Core.  Harvard professor Richard Elmore’s research showed that changing the curriculum was not enough to improve learning. To really improve learning for all kids (what he calls “at scale”) requires changes in teacher knowledge and competence and the student’s role in the learning process. Investigating History, if followed with fidelity, changes all three parts of the core: it makes the work more complex and cognitively challenging, it builds teacher background and capacity, and it changes how students engage with the content and demonstrate mastery.

The Investigating History curriculum is not without some concerns, primarily that moving from a passive program of memorizing dates and taking a test to an inquiry-based program that asks kids to think critically and support their ideas with evidence may be a heavy lift for some teachers.  It requires the teacher to be tolerant of a lot more ambiguity and to find the balance between productive struggle and adequate support for students.  The increased depth demands more preparation for teachers in the form of ensuring they themselves understand the content and approaches fully prior to teaching.  The added depth also makes the curriculum guide for the year a big one — 189 pages — and supporting materials that are equally extensive, with .zip file after .zip file for each unit.  This is not History for Dummies or a curriculum you can pull up the day of and expect it to work for you. There is going to be a subset of teachers who will be either frustrated or overwhelmed by that. Because it doesn’t shy away from difficult content, there will also be a subset of teachers who are deeply uncomfortable with the subject matter, whether because they are afraid of making a mistake or don’t believe students this age should be talking about these things. And there will likely be some resistance simply because the state is requiring teachers to teach it.

But for those willing to put in the work on the front end, it offers an amazing opportunity for students to develop better literacy, better critical thinking skills, and better understanding of the underpinnings of the United States’ government and ideals. That, in turn, prepares them to be informed and engaged citizens.  It also allows for an approach that is hard to find these days, where student curiosity drives the learning.  The potential for Investigating History to do something really amazing — something that could very well bleed into other content areas —  is very exciting, and I am interested to see how it’s received over the next few years.

 

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*This assumes worksheets or other resources are available; at the elementary level they often aren’t.

**I have seen one other program that attempts to integrate social studies and ELA but the result was that social studies was very much an afterthought.