With questions such as these for investigation, no pupil will be likely to secure the full facts; each may state in the next lesson what he has found, and the work of each will be supplemented by that of the others. With succeeding investigations it may be expected that the pupils will be more eager to get at all the facts in the text-book. At any rate they are learning how to gather material from books—a very valuable training, no matter how simple the topic is.
When, in the ordinary course of work, lessons from the text-book are assigned, the teacher should indicate the important points, should suggest certain matters for discussion, and should note certain questions to be answered, indicating precisely where the information may be obtained. In the recitation period following, the topic should be fully discussed, the pupils giving the information they have secured from the text-book, and the teacher supplementing this from his knowledge gained through wider reading. During the discussion an outline should be made on the board, largely by the suggestions of the pupils, and kept in their note-books for reference and review. (See p. [100], Lesson on the Feudal System.)
DRILL AND REVIEW
As has been already stated (p. [15]), the Story stage is useful chiefly for the purpose of arousing interest and developing the historical sense; no drill or review is necessary other than the oral, and, in Form II, sometimes the written, reproduction of the stories. The oral reproduction can be obtained in Form I by using the stories as topics in language lessons.
In the Information stage, where we are concerned more with the acquiring of facts, and in the Reflective stage, where we wish to relate facts to each other according to cause and effect, drills and reviews are necessary. During the lesson, a summary is placed on the black-board by the teacher or pupil, as indicated above. It is used as a guide in oral reproduction and may also be copied in special note-books and used for reference when preparing for review lessons. The teacher may look over these note-books occasionally.
There is great difference of opinion on the value of note-taking by pupils, but it may be said of such notes as those mentioned above that they have the advantage of being largely the pupil's own work, especially when the pupils are asked to suggest the headings; they are a record of what has been decided in the class to be important points; they are arranged in the order in which the subject has been treated in the lesson, and are in every way superior to the small note-books in history that are sometimes used as aids or helps. For the proper teaching of history, the latter are hindrances rather than helps, because they rob the pupil of the profit gained by doing the work for himself. Notes obtained from books or dictated by the teacher are harmful to the right spirit of study, and create a distaste for the subject.
Special review lessons should be taken when a series of lessons on one topic, or on a series of connected topics, has been finished. At the close of each lesson, the facts learned are fixed more firmly in the mind by the usual drill; but there must be further organization of the several lessons by a proper review, so that history will not be a number of unconnected events, but will be seen as an orderly development. This may be accomplished: (1) by questioning the class from a point of view different from that taken in the first lessons, (2) by oral or written expansion of a topical outline, (3) by illustrations with maps or drawings, (4) by tracing the sequence of events backwards, (5) by submitting some new situation that will recall the old knowledge in a different way. It must be remembered that it is not a mere repetition that we seek, but a re-view of the facts, a new view that will prove the power of the pupils to use the knowledge they have gained. Thus the lesson on the St. Lawrence River (p. [112]) is a good review of the facts of history suggested by the places mentioned; the lesson on the Road to Cathay (p. [92]) may be considered a review of the chief explorers of North America. Such a review aims at seeing new relations, at connecting new knowledge and old, at "giving freshness and vividness to knowledge that may be somewhat faded, at throwing a number of discrete facts into a bird's-eye view."
THE USE OF PROBLEMS IN TEACHING HISTORY
The development, or problem, method is intended to get the pupils to do some independent thinking, instead of merely absorbing knowledge from the teacher. The plan is simply to set clearly before the pupils the conditions existing at a certain moment in the story so that they may see for themselves the difficulties that the people in the story had to overcome. The question for the class is: "What would you do in the circumstances?"