Great idea! While we don’t know of any similar web-based projects, there are some easily accessible resources that can help you with planning and structuring student investigations into their own school’s history. Consider the ideas on the PBS website, Get Involved: Discover Your School History.

This Irish site, Ask About Ireland includes additional ideas for potential sources that students could locate and consult. One approach might be to first engage students and the community in building a school archive and this article Establishing a School Archives from The National Archives will be helpful in getting that going.

Teachers have reported on their classroom experiences with school history projects in journals published by the National Council for the Social Studies. See the September 2009 issue of Social Education for an article written by high school teacher John J. DeRose, or the January 2009 issue of Middle Level Learning for articles written by middle school teachers Amy Trenkle and Candyce Sweda. With an NCSS membership, you can access these online or check a local library to see if they subscribe to these journals.

Some of the activities and resources important to doing local history with students or collecting oral histories are likely relevant and you may want to scan this NHEC blog on third-graders investigating local history, this one about working with middle-schoolers, and this one about how to get elementary students started with local history. Also see this entry about an adult collaboration to recapture a local school’s history.

We hope these are helpful—and good luck!

Things have changed since teachers had to go through their private and local libraries to create slideshows using art to teach history. Now with a click of a mouse and a projector, we can show students provocative works of art. And while including art in your teaching will, no doubt, engage some of your reluctant students and add variety and aesthetic appeal to your curriculum, deliberate methods are required when teaching students to analyze the visual fine arts as a means to learn about the past. And those methods require slowing down when we observe and discuss a piece of art.

It may be useful to think about three things as critical to teaching students how to analyze art as historical artifacts:

• Close reading (and we use the term “reading” broadly here, referring to observing the item closely);
• Feeling and considering the emotional impact of the piece;
• Considering the historical context of the piece.

You’ve started with a good entry that introduces some key aspects of using art. Author Carolyn Halpin-Healy, talking about how to use material culture, explains that analyzing these kinds of sources should “begin by describing the object--to analyze its structure, to consider the circumstance of its creation--and only then to propose an interpretation of the meaning of the piece.” She goes on to identify specific steps in this process that include the key aspects above.

Deliberate methods are required when teaching students to analyze the visual fine arts as a means to learn about the past. Those methods require slowing down when we observe and discuss a piece of art.

EDSITEMENT
We have other resources at teachinghistory.org that address art analysis. Visit this review of a lesson plan that uses art and documents to investigate Paul Revere’s ride. The lesson comes from Edsitement, a site created by the National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH] that includes lesson plans using a variety of material culture for both World and American history. These plans can serve as inspiration, models, and resource banks for analyzing art in the history/social studies classroom.

And don’t miss the NEH’s Picturing America program. It was designed to encourage and support teachers in using art to teach history and social studies. This tremendous resource includes a set of artistic works to use in the classroom, information about the works and artists, links to other sites with resources for teaching with art, and a teacher’s resource book.

See this entry to listen to two educators talk about how they use Picturing America in their Teaching American history grant. The third video in this series may be most helpful to you since it concerns the ideas of slowing down with a piece and closely observing it while considering one’s emotional response to it.

There are also many resources designed for teaching photo analysis in the history/social studies classroom.

PHOTOGRAPHS
At teachinghistory.org, see our “Using Primary Sources” feature for links to worksheets that can be used to analyze varied kinds of sources, including photos and art. See both our entry about the National Archive’s worksheets and the Library of Congress’ worksheets. In the Library’s excellent Prints and Photograph collection, you can also find help in preparing to teach students and teachers about analyzing photos as historical sources rather than as truth-telling images. Check out their resources on Dorothea Lange’s iconic migrant mother photo here and here to help you use this photo to illustrate the choices and selection that the photographer makes.

See “Using documentary photography” for a comprehensive guide that uses the photos of Jacob Riis to illustrate the process of photo analysis. Especially helpful may be the guide’s list of questions.

Good luck! And we’d love to hear what was most helpful to you.

Excerpt and scaffold!

Don't be shy about using an excerpt from a document like Otis's rather than the entire speech. While many of us cringe at cutting rich historical documents for our students, it is a necessary step if we are to actually use them in our classrooms. Once you get past the uneasy feeling, then the choice of what to excerpt can pose additional questions. I like to start with the beginning of the document and see if I can use the opening lines. In the case of Otis's speech (or any other document) this depends upon what you are using the document for.

Using the beginning of Otis's speech might work if you are using it to engage your students with the beginning of public revolutionary talk, but not so good if you are using it to help students understand his specific complaint. So when you excerpt, think about what historical question(s) students are considering when they approach the text.

Then think short. Using documents like these is an opportunity for students to learn how to slow down, read closely, and analyze. Anyone can look up Otis on Wikipedia and find an encyclopedic entry about the content and significance of the speech. But reading the words themselves allow students to work on imagining that world, a world where lengthy speeches engaged the populace, and deliberate word choices and tone inspired passion and rebellion in an audience's heart.

But still, the language and syntax in Otis's speech are too difficult for many 8th-graders (as are many pre-20th-century sources). Given a short excerpt, students still need support. Vocabulary legends, guiding questions, working with others to translate the documents—all of these can help students comprehend and analyze the document. And this is just the beginning of a longer list of supports. An orienting headnote is probably a non-negotiable.

And then, I'll go out on a limb and say that in some cases, modifying the language of the document can be necessary. This is necessary when putting primary sources into the hands of struggling readers or English language learners. While this, again, makes many of us wince, it can make the difference between our students getting to work with primary sources and experiencing history as a vibrant and interpretive activity or merely memorizing the textbook's narrative.

Kudos to you for puzzling over how to use these challenging sources with your students.

And hopefully others will chime in with ideas!

That’s a big question! And an important one. While there are many methods for reaching lower level students, two key strategies can help you think this through: scaffolding and formative assessments.

As teachers, we often focus so much on where we want students to be that we forget we must begin by meeting them where they are. When a building is constructed, scaffolds are placed around the building to give it additional support. As the building becomes more stable on its own, the scaffolds are removed, a few at a time. Eventually, the building stands independently of the scaffolds. Similarly, "scaffolding" your lessons provides additional support to students as they work toward understanding the content on their own.

You can scaffold your lessons in a wide variety of ways, depending on your students' specific needs. Some useful scaffolds include graphic organizers, guided notes (notes that are already partially completed for the student), pre-teaching important vocabulary, and adapting reading materials to students' reading levels. Below we discuss two of these methods: modifying documents, and using KWL charts.

Modifying Documents

Understanding the sometimes archaic or complex language of historical texts can be challenging even for experienced students of history. For struggling readers, such a task can be nearly impossible. When the choice is modifying documents or not using them at all, we support doing the former. By modernizing spelling and punctuation, removing confusing or unnecessary phrases, even replacing difficult vocabulary, you open the door for your struggling students to have more successful experiences in historical analysis. For guidance on adapting and modifying challenging historical texts, see this teaching guide on adapting historical documents for the classroom.

K-W-L Charts

Another valuable method for scaffolding, or supporting student understanding while simultaneously preparing them to become independent learners, is the "KWL chart," a simple graphic organizer in which students first list what they already know about a particular historic source (K), and what they want to know (W). This strategy not only helps you as the teacher to see where your students are at the beginning of the lesson, but also helps students read a source closely, connect your lesson with their prior knowledge, and provides a structure for students to organize their new understandings.

The KWL activity also demonstrates our second key strategy for meeting the needs of struggling students—formative assessment. As teachers, we must continually assess student understanding and use what we find out to plan our instruction. What do students already know about a topic? What have they learned from a particular lesson? What don’t they understand? Sometimes we get so caught up with planning our lessons, we forget to focus on what students actually learned from that lesson. Using K-W-L charts allows you to see what students understand at the outset of a lesson, and at its close.

The beginning portion of this video clip illustrates how one teacher works assessment into her lessons. She starts with a question, "What does it mean to be an American?" that allows her to see students' beginning ideas. Then, when students are working with historical sources about the immigrant experience, she circulates through the classroom and listens to individual students make sense of the documents.

Formative assessments can be as simple as a brief one-on-one conversation like those shown in the video, or a short "ticket-out"—a small slip of paper on which students must write one thing they learned before leaving class for the day. They can be more complicated, such as requiring plans and drafts for written work where you can see whether students understand key aspects of historical writing, such as using evidence to support a thesis, or including important background information. As you continuously check for student understanding in a variety of ways, you will see how students are making sense (or in some cases, not making sense) of the material. You will more easily detect misconceptions and most importantly, you can use this information to plan your next instructional steps.

The fact that you are even asking this question shows that you are moving in the right direction—you are aware of how your students are doing, and you see that some of them need additional help. We wish you the best as you work to scaffold their learning, and continually assess their understanding to design lessons that will meet their individual needs.