Category: Classes-14

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Class 7: Teaching with Documents

I is for India

I is for India,
Our land to the East
Where everyone goes
To shoot tigers, and feast

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 7 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 1.3 MB pdf handout of my slide deck

Your best example of a DBQ is Progress and Poverty in Industrial America a pdf version of iBook below. It uses 11 documents, which is a bit more than I expect for your DBQ.

Next our class examined three sample iBooks. The first is my DBQ iBook “Progress and Poverty in Industrial America.” Next we looked at “Exploring History: Ten Document-Based Questions” an iBook designed by my fall ’13 EdMethods class. Finally we looked at my latest iBook, “Portland’s Japantown Revealed.” ~ All iBooks free at iTunes.

Assignment:
Students will design their own DBQ. Assignment (note – various due dates)

Examples of DBQ style questions

Page from: “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 6: Learning and New Digital Literacy

Family_watching_television_1958Class will open with a discussion of Snapshot of a modern learner and it’s implication for the classroom. I will offer a brief lecture detailing aspects of  the “new digital literacy.”

  • Find, decode and critically evaluate information.
  • Curate, store and responsibly share it.
  • Effectively filter information flow and stay focussed.

For more of my thoughts on the impact of digital on teaching and learning, see my post What Happens in Schools When Life Has become an Open-book Test? 

Students will have an opportunity to view GapMinder – a website that exemplifies redefined learning in the digital era. Students will get to use two additional transformative web-based research tools – NGram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle – to develop and test hypotheses. As part of an inclass demo of the power of  word frequency research, students will share their results via a Twitter hashtag: #WordFreq  

Here’s a Storify archive of our research

Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle have many interesting applications in the classroom. For example, they can both be used to introduce the research method – form a hypothesis, gather and analyze data, revise hypothesis (as needed), draw conclusions, assess research methods. Working in teams students can easily pose research questions, run the data, revise and assess their research strategy. Students can quickly make and test predictions. They can then present and defend their conclusions to other classroom groups. All skills called for by the new Common Core standards. Ideas for classroom use Books Ngram Viewer and NY Times Chronicle. For more advanced searches using NGram Viewer click here.

Students will be introduced to Evernote a useful tool for curating and storing information and then sharing it with collaborative teams.
Evernote tutorials – Getting started.
How to use Evernote on web. (Use drop down menu to select other operating systems)

Assignment:
Preparations will begin for student design of document-based questions. At this phase students will be introduced to high quality online archives for World History and US  History. Students will create an Evernote Notebook to begin to collect source material for prospective DBQ projects. They will share their notebook with the instructor by eve of Sunday Oct 5. Note: At this point student topics are speculative. Final decisions on topics will not be due until 10/22.

Image Credit: Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958 National Archives and Records Administration

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Class 5: Historical Thinking Part II / Twitter #sschat

Across the continentThis class leads off with a live demo of the #sschat on Twitter (Mondays 4-5 PM Pacific). Chats are archived here.

Will use the event to begin a discussion of using Twitter to build a personal learning network (PLN). Students that have not already done so , will be asked to create Twitter accounts. More on Twitter hashtags here.

Next, we will turn our attention back to our exploration of teaching strategies for developing historical thinking skills. We will deconstruct The Battle of the Little Bighorn Lesson Plan from the Stanford History Education Group’s Reading Like A Historian and how it’s designed to teaching skills in Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. Keeping with our “western theme” we will take some time to develop lesson ideas for using “Across the Continent” an 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer. [Above]

Finally we will turn do some peer editing of our shared Google presentation of collecting student-designed mini-lesson based on the Beyond the Bubble assessment model. Assignment | Product

Assignment for Class 6 – Shared Google presentation should be done by bed time 9/24. Blog post due by next class.

  1. Take the peer feedback and do a final version of your mini-lesson.
  2. Write a brief reflection on the process – it could include your take on historic thinking, the specific lesson model borrowed from SHEG, working with a shared Google presentation, peer review process, etc.
  3. Take all the content of your lesson plus the reflection and post it to our blog as your second authored post.

Reading assignment: Snapshot of a modern learner in SmartBlog on Education

Image credit: “Across the Continent” 1868 Currier & Ives print drawn by Frances Flora Palmer  Newberry Library

 

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Class 4: Historical Thinking

Phrenology-signs of characterOur class begins with a review of the Sam Wineburg reading and TEDEd flipped lesson Who is the historian in your classroom? That will also provide a chance to discuss the efficacy of flipping content. We will also consider the social media case study inspired by this lesson.

Today we begin our study of historical thinking skills based on the work of Sam Wineburg and the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). We will focus on three key skills – Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating. See historical thinking chart (pdf at SHEG).

You will work with a team to reverse engineer a few of the assessments found in SHEG’s Beyond the Bubble.

  • Spend a few minutes doing a scan of the lessons – and find a few that look interesting to you. (Be sure scan the “Same assessment types” for other ideas)
  • Find 3 questions that focus on any of these skills: Sourcing, Contextualizing and Corroborating
  • With your team diagram how the assessments are designed:
    How many historic sources, what types.
    What additional information are students given?
    How many prompts?
    What are students asked to do?
    How is the assessment designed to support the skills
  • Be prepared to share your finding with the whole class.

We will also look at How to Read Documentary Films  a lesson that I recently developed for the Uprooted Museum Exhibit.

Assignment for Class 5

You will each design a historical thinking mini-lesson based on the Beyond the Bubble assessment model.

We will use this assignment as a chance to create a shared Google presentation. I’ve prepared some brief Google Presentation video tutorials. You can find them at this YouTube playlist / Working with Google Slides.

Note: each of you will be contributing to the same Google Slides presentation. I’ve listed your names in alphabetical order in the presentation. You will turn that name placeholder slide into your mini-lesson title slide. You will insert additional slides in your section of the presentation as needed.

All mini lessons should include

  1. Title slide for your mini-lesson. Make it catchy!
  2. Your name as author of the mini-lesson on your lesson title (your lesson will take multiple slides in the presentation – have your name in small font at bottom of each slide)
  3. Target students – by grade level
  4. Indication of one (or more) of the historic skills to be studied – Sourcing, Contextualization, Corroborating
  5. One or more historic documents. Text, image and videos can be inserted into the slide. Longer documents can be linked to via URL or saved in Google drive with link to it.
  6. Source URLs for all documents used
  7. Guiding questions for students to use with document(s)
  8. Brief description of how the document(s) and question(s) should reinforce the targeted historic skill(s)

My recommended sources for this assignment are the Primary Source Sets found at the US Library of Congress. These sets are organized by theme and include a wide variety of source types. Here’s a few examples of the sets:

Baseball: Across a Divided Society
Song sheets, video clips, images, trading cards, and photographs tell the story of how baseball emerged as the American national pastime. Featured primary source items show Americans from different backgrounds and social experiences embracing the sport.

Maps From The World Digital Library
Explore maps from different cultures and eras to discover diverse perspectives on the world’s geography. All the items in this set are from the World Digital Library, a project that makes available significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

Women’s Suffrage
Sound files, sheet music, photographs, letters and maps help students better understand women’s suffrage

You may also wish to take a look at Teacher’s Guides and Analysis Tool that offer questions for each type of source material.

Image from S. Wells,
New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character…, NY, 1871