You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast, and I’m your host, Mason Pashia. Today, we’re diving into the transformative power of historical thinking with Zachary Coté, the Executive Director of Thinking Nation. Zachary has devoted his career to reshaping how we approach social studies education, empowering students to embrace history, not just as a set of dates and events, but as a dynamic discipline that equips them with critical civic dispositions. From his early days as a history teacher in Inglewood, California, to leading a nonprofit focused on preparing students for democracy, Zachary has seen firsthand how historical thinking fosters empathy, humility, and the ability to navigate complex societal challenges.

In our conversation, we explore how Thinking Nation is transforming classrooms by shifting the focus from content memorization to engaging with history as a tool for understanding diverse perspectives. We discuss the importance of civic education, the connection between historical thinking and modern literacies like media and AI, and how creating a culture of inquiry can empower students to become thoughtful citizens. Whether you’re an educator, a school leader, or simply curious about the role history plays in shaping our future, this episode will leave you inspired to reimagine the way we teach and learn. Let’s get into it!

Outline

Introduction

Mason Pashia: Today we are joined by Zachary Coté, Executive Director of Thinking Nation.

Hey Zach. Good to see you.

Zachary Coté: Great to be here, Mason.

Mason Pashia: We released the episode of the podcast today, on the day we’re speaking, with Ron Dahl from the trip to Lone Rock. So it’s like getting the band back together asynchronously.

Zachary Coté: I remember the hike with Ron, and I feel like you and I switched off walking with him just so we could feel like we were being poured into with wisdom.

Mason Pashia: He has this quality where he tells you at the end of the conversation what it meant to him, which I love. More people should do that. It’s a beautiful thing. Today we’re talking about civics, which was the occasion for that event we were at together.

What was your formative civic experience in your youth?

Zachary Coté: Something that’s probably not normal, and I think it’ll lead into our conversation today—not traditionally civic. When I was in college, I was a history major. I had always loved history and old things. Once I became a history major and started to engage with this discipline, I began to embrace the power of perspective.

When we talk to our elders—and we should heed their wisdom—that wisdom is often confined to an individual experience. What I was learning in my study of the past was that I was gaining the perspectives of hundreds of experiences across time and place. It gave me, one, I think, just a more empathetic and humble perspective of my own vantage point towards the world. It reduced my anxiety. When something would hit the news—and things are constantly hitting the news—and everyone was kind of jumping at responding or feeling like we needed to react right away, I was slow to speak and quick to listen, just processing these perspectives. I started to understand that historical thinking, or these dispositions towards stories and information, can be a really powerful tool in how I navigate the present.

This leads into—it’s not a formative civic experience dealing with civics in the traditional sense of government, but in the sense of a civic disposition or virtue. How do good citizens operate in a democratic society? I felt like historical thinking was giving me those tools.

Mason Pashia: I love that. I don’t remember the name. You had a quippy name for this thing you’re doing this year where you’re only reading people who’ve been dead 150 years or something.

Zachary Coté: So my New Year’s resolution—it’s called Breaking Bread with the Dead.

Mason Pashia: That’s it.

Zachary Coté: I’m only reading books 100 years old or more this year.

Mason Pashia: Amazing. I love that you’re continuing the legacy of looking backwards to look forward or to inhabit the present. That’s a very cool practice.

Zachary Coté: I’m not sure I’m going to go back. I mean, I’m sure, yeah, I’ll be more flexible and not as rigid as like, if it’s not 100 years old, I’m not going to read it. I feel a sense of peace I haven’t felt in a long time, just in engaging with long-form stories that aren’t rooted in a very fast-paced culture.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. You can feel that in the pace of the writing, the way our syntaxes have changed over the years.

Zachary Coté: The books are like this big.

Mason Pashia: I know.

Mason Pashia: They’re so big. I would love to help our audience understand Thinking Nation. You studied history, became a teacher, and started this organization. Talk to me about that journey, the impetus for starting this, and what y’all do today.

Zachary Coté: Sure. Yeah. So I’ll just quickly say that Thinking Nation is a nonprofit organization that seeks to transform social studies education for the future of democracy. I was a history teacher in Inglewood, which is South Los Angeles. And, you know, I walked into classrooms where I thought the…

Historical Thinking as Civic Formation

Zachary Coté: Schools were doing great work in shifting the narrative of history in a way that students felt seen. But I didn’t see the empowerment those changes were seeking. I reflected on that civic experience. What made me feel empowered was my ability to think historically. I rebuilt the class and the department to be rooted in this concept of historical thinking—that history is a discipline that we engage with rather than a content that we retain.

Through a grant that the district I was at received, we began to spiral out what it could look like to do historical thinking work at a systemic level. My last year of teaching was the 2018-2019 school year. So, in 2020, Thinking Nation began seeking to create a radically pragmatic, systemic approach to teaching and assessing historical thinking. And this is that transformation that the organization seeks—to support teachers to not ask questions like, “How do I incorporate more historical thinking or critical thinking into my classroom?” but instead, “How do I teach the content of whatever class I’m teaching through historical thinking?” So the discipline becomes the foundation rather than the additive. And that’s hard, and it’s complicated, and it’s sometimes confusing and not the norm. So that’s where that radically pragmatic approach comes in. Like, how do we do this in a way that can be adopted by anyone, familiar or not? How do you build a culture around it? We work as an organization to shift the paradigm of how we see the classroom and create cultural shifts on campuses where students walk into classrooms knowing that they’re not being measured by their ability to remember, but rather by their ability to engage. That’s a really empowering shift. That’s at the heart of who we are as an organization.

Mason Pashia: Education is guilty of coming up with different names for the same thing over time—the new silver bullet is X when two years ago it was Y, and everyone gets really excited about this new thing. I really like this idea of shifting to a discipline rather than both content and skill. There’s something about a discipline that is alive and evolving. You can’t become the end of a historical thinker. That is a lens with which you see the world.

It brings to mind the idea of literacy, which we’ve chalked up to a skill. You say someone’s literate or not, but literacy has changed a lot in 10 years. You’ve got digital literacy, media literacy, AI literacy. All of these things, for me, stack into this bucket of just, like, what is literacy in the modern era? I’m curious how you think about historical thinking—either in contrast or bucketed into literacy. Is somebody who is literate also a historical thinker? Like, literate to the modern need of literacy—does that include historical thinking? Are those truly separate dispositions or disciplines?

Zachary Coté: They’re definitely not separate. I will argue that the way many use the word literacy, I don’t think it encompasses historical thinking.

Mason Pashia: Agree.

Zachary Coté: And I think true literacy does. You said you prefer the word discipline, and given the context of education, I often have to use the term “historical thinking skill” because that’s what people are familiar with. But to me, they’re better defined as dispositions. A disposition is an orientation towards something. When I think of literacy, I also think of true literacy as an orientation towards something.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Zachary Coté: To be literate is to have this flexible thinking, this flexible mindset to approach information with curiosity and then have a pathway toward satisfying that curiosity. And I think we, in the wave of education reform and pushes, focused on curiosity at younger levels and then not at older levels, which is problematic. But even when we focus on it at younger levels, we focus on curiosity without a pathway toward satisfying it. For me, good literacy—and good historical thinking—where they cross over is having the tools and those dispositions necessary to engage. It goes back to the old proverb: “Give a man a fish to feed him for a day, and teach a man to fish to feed him for life.”

To me, that’s what historical thinking should do—equip students to engage with their interests, passions, and curiosities. It’s a robust tool to understand the world. Historical thinking is foundational. The chief job of a historian is to understand people from a time and place not like our own. And when that is my goal as a historian, and then I apply that to the present, and we talk about civic formation, my chief job as a citizen is to understand other citizens who come from contexts or live in experiences that I don’t share. It’s a fulfillment of this e pluribus unum mantra of our country. And yet we don’t take it seriously. They’re absolutely necessary to combine. I do think the way we define literacy as a collective now falls short.

Mason Pashia: That was a great answer. I love that framing of understanding people from a time and place not like our own. On the opposite side of that—and this is a place where I spend a lot of my time—is really imagination, where you’re also trying to do the same thing. We talk a lot about futures thinking at Getting Smart. It’s almost an inversion of history. You’re looking at data, forecasts, all this stuff that might come to be, to understand someone not here yet. It’s a powerful practice, especially for system leaders who are leading districts and schools—these things that are really slow to change, and the time horizon of change is oftentimes decades, not years. So you have to be thinking about the kid who’s a kindergartner this year and what it will be like when they graduate in 12 years. I think that’s a really interesting skill. When you were in the classroom, did you engage much with that side of things—the propulsive effect of history, like putting it forward rather than just how it’s sitting with you today?

Zachary Coté: A quick anecdote that comes to mind is, you get the inevitable question 50 times a year: “Why do I need to learn this?” or “Why does this matter?” from students. And a lot of times I would talk to whatever student said that, and I would ask them if they want to leave a legacy. And they never said no. You know, they may try to be devil’s advocate and say no initially, and I’d probe a couple more questions, and then they would start talking about how they want to be remembered or how they want people to see them. And so my response often was like, “Okay, so in the same way you want people to show you respect by remembering your legacy, this is how we honor people that came before us.”

Zachary Coté: By respecting the past, having good tools and clear dispositions, we show respect to fellow human beings. We humanize those we study in the same way we want people to humanize us. Using it as a purpose to study the past rather than as a jumping-off point to navigating their future, I think it did make that kind of long-term, cross-generational connection.

Mason Pashia: I talk a lot about the seven generations thinking that some Indigenous groups think about, where if you’re going to act, it needs to essentially be something that seven generations before and after you would be proud of. And I think that starts to formulate legacy, or at least the building blocks of a legacy, by behaving in that way.

So that we’re seeing debates about curriculum and content. At its core, history is a story, and a story always has an audience, and at some level, that’s interpreted through that lens. But I’m curious how you think about objectivity within history—or if that is what historical thinking is. Is it to disarm bias? Is it to understand that thing latent in every story passed on or documented?

Objectivity and Perspective in History

Zachary Coté: There can be objective components of history, but history is not objective. History is a discipline, and the questions I ask about the past are going to be different from the questions you ask about the past. And so, right away, it’s like we are—you know, there was a historian, I don’t know, maybe 70 years ago, who talked about how you can actually understand the present through the questions that the historians are asking about the past. Like, you know, we look at the development of intellectual and social history, and you see glimpses of the present. And so that, right away, kind of disarms the objectivity thesis.

And to me, that’s a very arrogant statement—that history is objective.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Zachary Coté: As soon as one person presents one alternative, you have to maintain that objectivity, which is impossible. I’d also say I don’t know if historical thinking disarms bias, but it does make us aware of our perspective.

Mason Pashia: For sure.

Zachary Coté: Historical thinking humbles us. The aim—asking—I was thinking about this when working with students recently, and the very nature of asking a question is an act of humility. And historical thinking is rooted in asking questions. Humility acknowledges, “I am one human, one perspective among many.” Which, again, there are objective facts within history—that’s why we have calendars—but that’s a very small drop in what the discipline actually is.

Mason Pashia: Right. No, that’s a good answer. I appreciate that. I would love to ground this conversation a little bit right now in some examples. I know that Thinking Nation does things with different schools, teachers, and students, and I’m just curious if you have any stories of your own or examples that are kind of representative of what we’re talking about today. Maybe a class did a project that was a good representation of this in a classroom? Feel free to share if you’ve got ’em.

Historical Thinking in Practice

Zachary Coté: I remember doing a guest lesson in a high school in Los Angeles, looking at the impact of the New Deal on Black Americans. We were reading a primary source—a testimony from Charles Houston, who represented the NAACP. He was speaking before the House of Representatives, calling out the racial discriminatory aspects of the New Deal. Sharecroppers and household workers weren’t compensated through Social Security, and those jobs were dominated by Black Americans.

We were setting up all these social safety nets, and Houston was arguing before Congress that the social safety nets were directly leaving out a whole populace. And so we were talking about it as a class, and students were chiming in. One student raised her hand, and she’s like, “Basically, I hear what everyone is saying, but isn’t this also an example of progress within the Black community—that you have the NAACP testifying before Congress? You know, they’re in the room where it happened. They’re speaking to change a bill. They have this—or Houston, or the NAACP had this agency that Black Americans historically hadn’t had.”

And before she got—and I spoke too much because before she even got to most of that, the teacher—I was just the guest teacher—said, “Oh, I think you’re misreading it.” And I just kind of paused and said, “Well, let’s let her finish.” And so she began on it, and she was citing the source and understanding the context of Jim Crow America and this moment that was not, I guess, representative of every experience, but it was this light in a dark moment.

And we started to talk about contextualization, perspective, and evaluating evidence, and having historical empathy. And we started naming all these historical thinking skills that led her to a very nuanced read of a half-page primary source. Like, we weren’t reading a book. It was pretty quick. But she had this tool belt of dispositions—these ways to orient and ask questions—that led to a nuanced conclusion that the rest of the class, including myself, was not thinking about. And so I love that because it showed things were nuanced.

I was in a middle school classroom, and the students were engaging in a Socratic seminar on slave resistance. They were reading narratives of enslaved people, identifying and making meaning of the ways they resisted their enslavement. And one student began to talk about the trope of a “good master.” And the student didn’t know that this was a trope, right? But the student was saying, like, “Look at the way in which these people groups—or, you know, these enslaved people—were taken care of or fed,” to justify enslavement.

I’m sitting in the back because this is a Socratic seminar—the teacher’s not supposed to get involved. I’m sweating. How do you read these primary sources and get that? But I wanted to see what would happen. Another student calmly started to read the excerpt from Frederick Douglass. And this was from his first narrative. It was when he was living in Maryland. His master said, “You can work for your own wages, but you have to pay me this much.” And it was a ripoff, obviously. And so Douglass just stopped working. He’s like, “If you’re going to take most of my money, then I’m just going to stop working.” So she starts to quote this and then brings up the student’s argument and says, “This isn’t kindness. This isn’t agency. This isn’t freedom. Read the text.”

Zachary Coté: This could have become a social media argument in the classroom—“How dare you?” “No, how dare you.” It would’ve been like a yelling match. Instead, it was this process of understanding that ended up humanizing everyone in the room. It wasn’t shame-based; it was evidence-based, source-based. It let people from the past talk on their own terms. With slight interpretation—we have to interpret people we can’t talk to—it was this really beautiful moment of humanity. What if our town hall meetings looked like that eighth-grade classroom? How incredible would that be?

Mason Pashia: I wish we had more of that. Classrooms are a great space for that kind of design. Student voice is wonderful. Socratic is a great method. Schools are an intergenerational space that could facilitate conversation and actually invite more people into the room and have it be less siloed between, like, the student’s time to talk versus the teacher’s time to talk. It’s a conversation we’re having, and those spaces feel alive when that happens. Yeah, that’s a cool example.

Zachary Coté: I think we need structures to do that well.

Mason Pashia: Sure.

Zachary Coté: I think that’s where historical thinking is valuable. If I, Mr. Coté, come in and make the claims of how we do things, it becomes about me. And I think when structures are outside of ourselves—historical thinking, history is outside of ourselves—it’s a really important tool that also isn’t contingent, like you brought up towards the beginning of our time, on the next best thing in education. Historical thinking is necessary for AI literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, first-grade literacy. It’s not timeless, but long-lasting. It fits the seven generations framework in a way that others don’t.

Mason Pashia: It’s so much more than just information.

Personal Foundations and Civic Experiences

Mason Pashia: Historical literacy teaches you about power and even how to recognize power in a conversation. In something where, even if we’re talking about the classroom and you are an educator trying to basically seed power, that totally changes how you’re going to approach where you put your opinion, how you set up the dialogue. You cannot be a historical thinker without understanding that disposition of recognizing power. It is an important set of resources for how to navigate situations that will be around you your whole life as long as you are engaging with another person. It is relevant, which I think—

Zachary Coté: Absolutely. Being a historian has made me a better researcher, writer, and analyst. I’m a better dad, husband, and neighbor because of the questions I ask, the ways I pause, the perspectives I consider. I have three daughters. I don’t know their experience, but I, like, you know, thank God for historical thinking. I’m like, “Oh, well, I need to find more context or think about their perspective. Or what is the evidence here? How do I source this information?” It’s really helpful.

Mason Pashia: It’s so helpful. Did you have a strong elder presence, like grandparents or people you were engaging with the past with? I’m curious about the foundational building blocks for how this sat with you as a discipline or disposition.

Zachary Coté: Yeah. When reflecting, I recognized I found myself sitting next to my grandma or grandpa during family meals or holidays, rather than at the kids’ table, asking them a ton of questions. I grew up in California. My family’s from New York, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Going there, reading tombstones, asking my grandparents’ friends who still lived in the town—I think antiquarianism was always there, combined with curiosity.

Mason Pashia: I’m reflecting on most of my life until recently. I was very reticent to look back, wary of nostalgia, wary of—not history, but that wasn’t the space that I found comfort. And then I was thinking the other day—all of my grandparents passed away before I was really able to talk with them. I grew up in a suburb of Kansas City where the history was pretty much buried. There was not really a long sense of time, despite growing up in an older house. It just—it was an interesting—it’s interesting. I think we can get primed for that disposition through factors in our life. A lot of the time, those things are kind of going away under our feet, even just in the aesthetics of a city in the United States. It keeps history at a distance unless the city is reckoning in time.

It’s super interesting. You do have to go looking for it. I think that’s a great line to end on. Zach, thank you so much for bobbing and weaving with me today along all these topics. And sorry to get you blacklisted from the civics community. This was a great conversation. For anyone listening, check out Thinking Nation.

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Guest Bio

Zachary Coté

Zachary Coté is the executive director of Thinking Nation, a history education nonprofit based in Los Angeles. He is involved in shaping educational policy and initiatives as a member of both the CivXNow and Educating for American Democracy Coalitions. He blogs at www.thinkingnation.org/blog.

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