Tag: Slide decks

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Class 4: Teaching With Documents

M is for

Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:

  1. The right documents.
  2. Knowing how to look at them.
  3. Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
  4. Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.

Class 4 offers strategies for assisting students to more closely read a document (in all their multimedia formats) by answering three Common Core questions.

  1. What did it say?
  2. How did it say it?
  3. What’s it mean to me?

Here’s a pdf handout of my slide deck Week 4 HandOut (6 MB pdf)

Next our class examined two sample DBQ’s that I have designed. The first is my iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America” ~ Free at iTunes. The second is the PDF version of my Homefront iBook series. Link to free PDF.

Students will be assigned the task of designing their own DBQ.

Additional resources:

For more strategies see these tags on my blog:
Close Reading | History / DBQ’s

Other examples of my DBQ’s available as free pdfs.
European Views of the New World | The Impact of Industrialization

Title: “An A B C, for baby patriots”
Creator: Ames, Mary Frances
Publisher: Dean & Son
Place of Publication: London (160a Fleet Street E.C.)
Publication Date: [1899]
Archive: University of Florida UF00086056:00001

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Class 2: Thinking About Thinking

key lesson components

I introduced a modified lesson study model.  As I noted:

The goal of this assignment is two-fold. First to offer supportive feedback on your lesson development through a peer review process. Second to offer some “lenses to look through” that help you easily see the essentials of a lesson. It is not a substitute for the School of Education lesson plan format. Think of it as a pre-lesson plan planning guide. This is not some exercise for the benefit of your instructor. This should be a process that works for you. So feel free to modify to meet your particulars. Use a scale that works for you – focus on just a small segment of a larger unit, or look at the entire unit. Don’t like Bloom? Use another schema to discuss the kinds of thinking that your students will need to successfully complete the assignment. Assignment here. (41 KB pdf)

Next I used a presentation and LearningCatalytics questions to lead the students through a series of activities as participant / observers. I wanted them to look at the lesson from the students’ perspective with a focus on the four components of a lesson. I also wanted them to use Bloom’s Taxonomy to see if they could identify what level of thinking they were using. We monitored the extent the decisions about of content, process, product and evaluation were being made by me (the teacher) or by the students.  Slide deck here. (6.4 MB pdf)

When I asked them to summarize what they thought my goal was for the class, one student replied “You wanted to get us to think about thinking by having to think.”