PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 20, No. 17, April 5, 2001

Flowchart this: AHA names Butler nation’s top history teacher
Noah Isserman, Special to Inside Illinois
Noah Isserman, a sophomore at Uni High, is a staff reporter for the school’s student newspaper, the Gargoyle. His story ran in the Gargoyle, Feb. 16, 2001.

Photo by Bill Wiegand High marks for the teacher The American Historical Association recently awarded Uni High's Chris Butler the Beveridge Family Teaching Award, the highest honor a K-12 history teacher can receive.

Chris Butler looks over his shoulder.

"I’ll be right with you," says the Uni High history teacher. "Just let me get this started."

It’s the beginning of lunch hour on a Wednesday afternoon, and Butler is starting "Stalingrad," a movie that Uni’s Historical Simulation Society is watching during lunch. Butler selects the scene, starts the DVD playing, walks over and sits down next to his interviewer, all the while hurriedly eating a sandwich.

"Sorry about that. I’m a little rushed today." This is pure Butler. From films to simulations, he’s always willing to go the extra mile, to spend the extra hour to enrich the learning of his students.

This enthusiasm and selflessness has made him one of the school’s most beloved and respected teachers throughout his Uni career, now entering its 23rd year. The vast majority of the students he has taught consider him to be one of the best history teachers they have ever had. Now it’s official.

On Jan. 5, Chris Butler walked across the stage of the Constitution Ballroom in the Sheraton Hotel in Boston. He was applauded by some of the most distinguished historians in the United States as the American Historical Association presented him with the Beveridge Family Teaching Award, the highest honor a K-12 history teacher can receive. "It was stunning," Butler says. "This is the kind of recognition that you can’t really anticipate getting. The feeling was more of shock than anything else."

The honor wasn’t the result of a pursuit of glory on Butler’s part. He was nominated by Barbara Wysocki, head of the Uni history department. After being selected as a finalist last April, Butler put together a 10-page packet outlining his thoughts on teaching and curriculum development, including some sample flowcharts and letters of recommendation from fellow Uni history teacher Bill Sutton and the Classes of 2000 and 2001.

In early November, Butler received a phone call (which the AHA asked him to keep secret) notifying him that he had, indeed, won the most prestigious award in his field. In addition to a $1,500 cash prize, he received an expense-paid trip to the AHA’s annual meeting in Boston, where he attended workshops and lectures by many prominent historians.

So what is so innovative about the way Butler views and teaches history? The answer, like most things about Butler, is more complex and unique than one might expect.

"It may seem kind of strange, but the way the Grateful Dead performed at live shows is similar to the way I view history," he says. "Everything was connected. The Dead would start with a particular song. That song would flow seamlessly into another song, and then seamlessly into another. Eventually, sometimes after five or six songs, the flow would return to the original."

Butler applies this view of history as an interrelated flow of events into perhaps his single greatest educational tool: the flowchart. Flowcharting is essentially outlining the course of history in terms of causes, effects and various cycles along the way – all of which relate and interact to form a larger picture. He explains his method of teaching history in terms of a journey through the past. "I put a lot of work into creating, shall we say, the streamlined interstate approach in the form of the flowcharts," he says. "But I would certainly hate if that were all I was remembered for. It is the signposts and the billboards along the way that make it interesting." Once again, pure Butler.

His classroom teaching is essentially historical storytelling structured around the flowchart for the lesson. Impressive, considering that one of Butler’s first students told him he was the most painfully boring teacher she ever had. Butler has constantly refined and improved his teaching techniques throughout his career. He has no intention of letting up now.

"The Dead never liked to just repeat the same old songs over and over again," he says. "I’m the same way. Sometimes when I’m talking about something in class, it will become related to something else, which will remind me of yet another thing. I may go off on a seemingly irrelevant tangent, but it always eventually comes back to the original point, again reminiscent of the Grateful Dead."

And how exactly does this make his teaching more effective? "So the point is addressed, but I’ve taken the scenic route. If you are always taking the side roads, it’s a different experience every time. And many of those side roads, those scenic routes, I find to be worthwhile in their own right."

The bell rings. Lunchtime is over. Mr. B, hurried as always, walks briskly toward the door as he heads to his next class. Looking over his shoulder, he grins.

"Showtime!"