Deciphering Primary Source Documents

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Digital image, 2010, War Department Correspondence, CHNM
Question

I'm trying to teach my secondary students how to read documents from the 18th century (such as letters) and notice how bogged down they get because of the complexity and length of the sentences. What tools or advice could I give that would help them develop this skill?

Answer

Ah yes…your question captures a problem many history teachers face. First, let us congratulate you on engaging your students in the raw materials of the discipline and persisting even when the going proves difficult. Syntax can be a major stumbling block for students when reading older texts: we recommend scaffolding and careful preparation of the documents to help your students meet the challenge.

Careful Preparation of Documents
See our guide on adapting and modifying documents for ways to make difficult documents more accessible for students. Keeping those documents short, defining difficult vocabulary, and even simplifying syntax (while letting students know that you’ve done so) can help. See the Reading Like a Historian curriculum from the Stanford History Education Group for examples of carefully prepared 18th century documents. The Hamilton vs. Jefferson plan includes two 18th century letters that have been modified. Find our entry about this curriculum here.

One thing to remember is that students need to experience some success with reading difficult documents to want to persevere with them. Carefully prepared documents, especially at the beginning of the school year, can be critical to this.

Scaffolding
There are many ways to support students’ reading of difficult documents. Here are a few strategies.

Background knowledge about what students are reading can help them make sense of the text. Consider what they need to know about the times and the event before they read and then use a short lecture, a headnote, a textbook excerpt, or another method to help them gain that background knowledge. Going a step further, for a very difficult document you may want to give them a short summary (1-3 sentences) of what the author is talking about.

Modeling how you read the document can be helpful too. This allows students to see how you also struggle with the language and the strategies you use to make sense of it, like rereading, monitoring your understanding, and asking questions. See this entry for an introduction to Reading Apprenticeship, an approach that focuses on reading and thinking aloud together to help students become better readers. Also see historicalthinkingmatters.org for examples of “think-alouds” where students and historians are shown making sense of historical documents using specific historical reading strategies. (find one example here.)

Use difficult syntax from our own times (a song or poem) to help students recognize their task and specific strategies for pushing through to understanding.

Teaching some explicit strategies can also help. This guide has ideas for teaching students to annotate documents, something that can help them learn to monitor their own understanding and seek out help when needed. Also see work done at the Oakland Unified School District in California for examples of guiding students to figure out what an excerpt says before any analysis. See an example here: scroll down to the question, “Was the creation of the U.S. Constitution good for the people of the United States?” Then look at the assessment and support materials for that question and you will find, on page 4, one example of how they do this.

A short introductory activity where you focus on the difficulties of making sense of unfamiliar syntax can be helpful. Use difficult syntax from our own times (a song or poem) to help students recognize their task and specific strategies for pushing through to understanding.

More Resources
In our lesson plan reviews, find plans that can inspire ways to work with text that is difficult for students. See this one on the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution or this one on the Declaration of Independence. Both of these are for younger students, but both show the necessities of slowing down to read the documents and focusing on short pieces of text.

You may want to also check out this response that reiterates some of what I've said here.

And remember, it’s the beginning of the year. You will, hopefully, have these students for many lessons and helping them learn to slow down, monitor their reading, and strategize when they are stuck will happen with multiple and varied chances to practice these skills.

Reframing English Language Development

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Grant at the capture of the city of Mexico

We history teachers who teach English language learners face a dilemma: how can we teach our students a rigorous history curriculum rich with opportunities to develop historical thinking, while making sure the language, and hence, concepts, are understandable?

Also, since most of us have a mix of different levels of language learners in our classrooms, along with students who speak and write non-academic English, how can we scaffold the language learning so that all students benefit, without dumbing-down the instruction?

Constitution Day 2010

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Photo, recommended reading, March 18, 2008, neon.mamacita, Flickr
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Every September 17, Constitution Day calls on teachers to memorialize—and critically engage with—Constitutional history in the classroom. But what approach to the Constitution should you take? What quality teaching resources are available? How can you interest your students in a document that is more than 200 years old?

In 2008, Teachinghistory.org published a roundup of Constitution Day resources. Many of those resources remain available, but online Constitution Day content continues to grow. Check out the sites below for materials that recount the Constitutional Convention of 1787, compare the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, explore U.S. Supreme Court cases that have interpreted the Constitution, and apply the Constitution to contemporary debates.

Online Resources

The Library of Congress's Constitution Day page collects the full text of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Amendments, as well as the Federalist Papers and the Articles of Confederation. Lesson plans for grades 6–12 accompany the documents. The page also includes short suggested reading lists for elementary, middle, and high school, and links to relevant Library of Congress American Memory collections, such as Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and the papers of James Madison, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Also check out the Library's collection of primary sources "Creating the United States."

You can find an elegant, simple presentation of the Constitution on the National Archives' Constitution Day page. Check out their high-resolution PDF of the original document, part of NARA's 100 Milestone Documents exhibit.

If the Constitution is proving a difficult read for your students, try the National Constitution Center's Interactive Constitution. Search the text by keyword or topic, and click on passages that are unclear to find explanatory notes from Linda R. Monk's The Words We Live By: Your Annotated Guide to the Constitution. The Constitution Center also offers its own Constitution Day page, with a short video on the creation of the Constitution, interactive activities, and quizzes.

If you're not already familiar with EDSITEment, created by the National Endowment for the Humanities, take a look through their extensive collection of lesson plans. A quick search reveals more than 90 lessons related to the Constitution.

Interested in bringing home to students the Constitution's importance today? The New York Times' Constitution Day page links current events to the Constitution in more than 40 lesson plans. The Times also invites students to submit answers to questions such as "Should School Newspapers Be Subject to Prior Review?" and "What Cause Would You Rally Others to Support?"

Can't find anything here that sparks your interest or suits your classroom? Many more organizations and websites offer Constitution Day resources, including the Bill of Rights Institute, the American Historical Association, Annenberg Media, and Consource. (Check out our Lesson Plan Reviews for a review of a lesson plan from Consource on the Preamble to the Constitution.)

Joe Jelen on Digital Timelines

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Homepage, Timeline, detail
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Beyond Butcher Paper

History teachers have long asked students to create timelines to help conceptualize and understand historical events. Student-created timelines were often limited by the space they occupied. Often teachers would have students focus on a few events and ask them to write very small on their notebook paper to squeeze in events. Clever teachers invested in rolls of butcher paper or banner paper to have students create long timelines. But thanks to today's web designers, timelines are no longer limited in space. Using free timeline builders online allows students to see concepts over time without the constraints of paper and a straightedge.

I have always liked using timelines in my classroom to help students see change over time and help students remember chronology (an oft-heard complaint for students of history).

I have always liked using timelines in my classroom to help students see change over time and help students remember chronology.

My students have made standard social, political, and economic timelines of eras of U.S. history in preparation for exams. My students have also created the popular timeline of events leading up the Civil War. I thought myself a clever teacher using large rolls of butcher paper for these timelines to maximize the number of events included and student participation. It was not until I sat down to read the new National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies put out by the National Council for the Social Studies that I saw another way for students to create timelines. "Learners demonstrate understanding by using graphic software to create a timeline depicting a scientific idea of the evolution of a technological innovation, and predicting how that idea or technology might develop in the next 10–20 years." (NCSS 57) With this, I began my search for digital timeline-building websites.

Finding and Using Timeline Tools

A quick search revealed lots of possibilities for creating timelines online for free. I had to spend a little time playing with each one to find the site that would best work for my needs and students. There are sites that are better tailored to elementary students. There are also those that are more powerful, but less user-friendly. This site provides a nice review of the various digital timeline sites available for free. My project required students to create events with years BCE and CE, which limited the sites I could use and may be a consideration in your site choice. You may also wish to consider what types of multimedia features you would like students to be able to embed in their timelines. Some sites offer the ability to embed pictures and videos. Most timeline-building sites allow users to embed their timelines in blogs or other websites, making sharing timelines easy.

Digital timelines allow teachers greater flexibility and creativity in assigning timeline activities to students over the old paper timelines.

Adapting the product recommended by NCSS, I asked students to create a timeline showing the impact of the Scientific Revolution on a specific field of modern science. To go one step further, students were to make some predictions about future developments in that field (i.e. chemistry, geology, meteorology, etc.). My students quickly caught on to the user interface for the timeline builder and in three 45-minute class periods had researched and created a timeline specific to their field of modern science. You can see an example of one student's timeline here. With more time and practice, I believe that my students will become better at creating richer timelines. After they had created their timelines, students were able to view each others' and comment on them. Ultimately, we created a class timeline merging events from each student's timeline to see the broader impact of the Scientific Revolution.

Digital timelines allow teachers greater flexibility and creativity in assigning timeline activities to students over the old paper timelines. They also allow students to collaborate in a way that fosters chronological thinking and in-depth analysis of eras in history. I hope that you will experiment with digital timelines and share the creative ways you use them in your classroom.

Bibliography

National Council for the Social Studies. "National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies." Silver Spring, MD: NCSS, 2010: 57.

For more information

Looking for more ideas for teaching with tech? Try Joe Jelen's earlier entry on teaching with document cameras, or check out our Digital Classroom section for articles and videos demonstrating more tools and techniques for using technology in your classroom.

Conventional timeline techniques can be used with digital timelines—the Teaching Guide Teaching with Timelines makes suggestions you can easily adapt to digital tools. EdTechTeacher also overviews digital and conventional timeline tools and strategies.

Why Did It Happen? Making Claims about Cause and Effect

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For more information

Christie, F., & Derewiank, B. (2009). School Discourse: Learning to Write Across the Years of Schooling. New York: Continuum.

As we ask students to become more sophisticated in their historical thinking, we expect them to move from reporting historical events to explaining and interpreting them. Making claims about historical events requires a shift in writing that requires new language tools.

Many students, especially English learners, will require more support in the form of explicit instruction in writing explanations about relationships between events and conditions in history. One central relationship in history is cause and effect.

Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History

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Detail, Nature Transformed
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This collection of essays, commissioned from distinguished scholars, is designed to deepen content knowledge and offer fresh ideas for teaching. Essays begin with a thorough overview of the topic. “Guiding Discussion” offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay. Essays include links to primary sources in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library and are part of the larger TeacherServe project.

Visitors can browse 17 essays, divided into "Native Americans and the Land," "Wilderness and the American Identity," and "The Use of the Land." These focus on the changing ways in which North Americans have related to the natural world and its resources. Topics include, among others, “The Columbian Exchange,” “The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes,” “Cities and Suburbs,” and “Environmental Justice for All.”

Useful for teachers looking to expand their content knowledge beyond the information and viewpoints presented in textbooks, and to get a taste of historians' debate over the interpretation of history.

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Earth Day
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Teaching with Timelines

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Image, Timeline, 21 Sept 2009, George Boyce, Flickr CC
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What Is It?

Throughout a school year or history course, students collectively construct an illustrated timeline of historic events and people they have studied.

Rationale

Researchers have found that students too often encounter little bits and pieces of history out of context and unconnected to larger historic themes (1). Consequently, students don’t develop a sense of historic era and they don’t connect individual events to larger movements and themes (2). These limitations not only affect students’ grasp of history topics; they may also restrict students’ engagement in critical analysis. As a recent middle school study found, "Without proper background knowledge, students have difficulty developing the contexts for historical thinking" (3).

Use [timelines] to categorize similar or related events into themes, eras, and topics, and to help students compare elements in different time periods.

Timelines help students understand the chronology of historic events, and help students situate newly encountered events and figures in relation to those they’ve already studied (4). They provide a visual aid for identifying cause and effect relationships between events, and a visual prompt to activate student prior knowledge. They allow students to recognize how historic events, eras and topics overlap in time. Use them to categorize similar or related events into themes, eras, and topics, and to help students compare elements in different time periods.

All of these purposes are important singly, and collectively they help students develop a long-range understanding of historic chronology.

Description

In this ongoing activity, a timeline is collectively constructed by students. It may be made of butcher paper and covered in student drawings, primary sources, and recipe-sized cards noting laws and events. Or, if fire codes allow, it may be made of rope, with images, dates, and documents hung from paper clips and clothespins. The main classroom timeline may be supplemented by smaller posterboard-sized lines that include only a few elements, such as changes in farming or in environmental regulation over time, or a chronology of legislation related to voting rights and disenfranchisement. But timelines should always be constructed by students so they reflect the students’ own learning.

Teacher Preparations
  1. Cut a long strip of butcher paper. Your class timeline should be displayed     as prominently as possible in your room, and should be easily reached for     adding new elements. If it’s hard to reach, you’ll be less likely to add     elements daily. But if you don’t have space in your classroom for your     timeline, try hanging it in the hallway near your class.
  2. In bold colored marker, place marker dates on the paper. These will be     determined by the course content. If you are teaching 19th- and 20th-    century U.S. history, you may wish to label the timelines with 10 or 20     year increments, or you may wish to only list century markers. Be sure to     leave space for dates before and after the time period your class will     explore, however, as your class will almost certainly encounter events that     precede and follow the designated beginning and conclusion of your unit     explorations.
  3. Decide how the class will display elements on the timeline. Will you ask     for volunteers to illustrate events that go on the line? Will you ask the     class to vote on how they wish to illustrate various elements—with a     student illustration, a copy of a primary source, a historic image or...? Will     you decide each time how an element that goes on the line will be     represented?
In the Classroom
  1. Start your classroom timeline at the beginning of the school year. Add to     it throughout the year.
  2. At the conclusion of an exploration of a significant event or person, ask     the class if they would like to include that person or event on the class     timeline. Tape the representation of the new element to the timeline, with     a date and title prominently visible. When posting a person’s life rather     than a single action by a person, you may wish to list dates of birth and     death.
  3. Every day or two, begin your history study with a review of the timeline.     Settle your students on the floor in front of the line and invite them to do     a silent “walk and talk” of the events on the line. Allow a minute or two     for this activity, and then invite a student to stand and do a walk-and-    talk aloud (see video). The students don’t need to account for every     element on the line; they should just use the elements as prompts to     tell a story about a particular era or theme, or inventory various things     that were happening during the same time period. Let students finish     before correcting any mistakes they may make in their storytelling.
  4. When deciding which elements to put on your timeline, it’s better to err on     the side of generosity than stinginess. The more elements on your line, the     better it reflects your class's learning, at least if you are engaged in rich     history explorations. But don't limit your dates to events you explore in     formal history lessons; include elements from other disciplines as well.     Language arts, science, music, math; if you encounter a historic topic in     one of those areas, add it to the class line. If a student finds something at     home that relates to history, invite them to add it to the line. A dynamic,     full-to-the-brim timeline is a sign of a class that’s engaged in history full-    tilt.
  5. As your class explores history, allow and encourage your students to view     and reference the timeline spontaneously to situate new evidence in     relation to what they’ve already studied, or to infer the timing of a new     historic element for which they have no date.

Watch this video and listen to a student walk and talk her way through her class timeline.

For more information

Lesson plans and units that incorporate timeline activities are available on the Bringing History Home project website. Additional information about using timelines in elementary and college history classrooms is also available on the site.

See this entry about Docs Teach from the National Archives to explore their “Finding a Sequence” timeline tool that allows teachers to create their own document-based timeline activities.

EdTechTeacher overviews online timeline creation tools and techniques.

Bibliography

1 Barton, K. (2002) “Oh, that’s a tricky piece!”: Children, mediated action, and the tools of historical time. The Elementary School Journal, v.103, n.2.

2 Shemilt, D. (2000) The Caliph’s Coin: The currency of narrative frameworks in history teaching. Knowing, Teaching & Learning History, eds. Stearns, P. et. al., New York: New York University Press.

3 Twyman, T., et.al. (2006) Using concepts to frame history content. The Journal of Experimental Education, 74 (4), 331-349.

4 Fillpot, E. (2007, 2008) These findings are from unpublished studies conducted with children in the Bringing History Home K-5 curriculum and professional development project.

Children’s Voices from the Civil War

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Photo, "Camp of 31st Pennsylvania Infantry near Washington, DC," 1862, LoC
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Why do it?

Textbooks, which feature the passive voice and condensed versions of momentous events, rarely capture the passion and drama of the past. By supplementing the textbook with documents that show how real-life children experienced historical events, the teacher can engage students' interests and can also offer multiple perspectives on historical events.

As an example of this approach, consider children's experiences during the Civil War. Although Joy Hakim's excellent textbook A History of US (volume six, War, Terrible War), touches on how the war affected children's lives, students can gain a much deeper understanding through analyzing additional primary sources. Documents such as period photos and excerpts from letters help students reconstruct what children experienced during the Civil War.

Young girls were pressed into service as nurses when their farms and villages became battlefields.

The destructive swath of "total war" drew children into its path as they witnessed violent death, looting and burning of their homes and farms, and occupation by the enemy. Boys as young as 13 enlisted as drummer boys, and while official recruitment policies required that a soldier be at least 18, many younger boys conveniently added a few years to their age or received permission from their fathers to enlist. Young girls were pressed into service as nurses when their farms and villages became battlefields.

What is it?

After reading a section of the textbook, students analyze primary sources showing how children their age experienced the events described in the textbook. In this lesson, students examine excerpts from letters written by teenagers who witnessed or participated in Civil War battles, and they analyze period photographs to consider the extent and ramifications of children's involvement.

Teachers can adapt this approach to other historical topics by supplementing with the appropriate primary sources.

Example
  1. To gain background knowledge, students read Chapter 16 of War, Terrible War, "The Soldiers.” Ask students to consider the following questions as they read.
    • How did adolescent boys experience the war?
    • How did adolescent girls experience the war?
  2. As you discuss the chapter with students, help them understand the mixture of excitement, optimism, boredom, homesickness, and terror that many young soldiers describe. Students may note that the chapter does not discuss how adolescent girls experienced the war.
  3. Assign students to teams or pairs. Distribute copies or display the photograph, "A Soldier and His Family." Explain to students that this photo was taken early in the war (1862) in the camp of the 31st Pennsylvania Infantry near Washington, DC. Ask students to speculate and discuss with their teammates the following questions.
    • As a child, what do you think it would be like to live in a Civil War army camp? What responsibilities might the young girl pictured have?
    • What does the photograph tell you about living in such a camp? What details in the photo support your impressions?
  4. Distribute the sheet "Children’s Voices from the Civil War" to student pairs or teams. Students discuss the quotes with teammates, and answer the following questions.
    • How were boys' and girls' experiences of the war similar? Different?
    • How did enslaved children view and experience the war?
    • How did the war change the lives of the children being studied?
    • What character qualities did these youths demonstrate in their response to war?
    • How does it change your perspective to read the quotes from the boys and girls?
Why is this a best practice?

Comparing the textbook with additional primary source documents expands students' knowledge, breathes life into the text, and introduces the voices of those left out of the text—in this case, girls. While women did not officially serve as soldiers, some accompanied their husband or fathers to army camps or were pressed into service as nurses when battles raged near their homes. Supplementing the text with voices of young soldiers gives students a broader picture of how boys self-reported their reasons for enlisting and their experiences.

For more information

The photo, "A Soldier and His Family," is available on the Library of Congress website.

Hakim, Joy. A History of US. Vol. 6, War, Terrible War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Student handout, Children's Voices from the Civil War.

TR Workbench

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screenshot
What is it?

What is it?

TR Workbench is a web authoring application that allows users to create single pages or full sites, portfolios, and classroom and conference presentations—"any content you could imagine!"—and save them.

TR Workbench features include integrated use of text and images, tools for image manipulation, and ample facility for substance-laden content. Easy drag-and-drop tools promote coherent content and graphic quality. Projects can also be downloaded or embedded in a blog, wiki, ning, or ordinary HTML screen. There's no software to download and Workbench is compatible with Firefox, Explorer, and Safari.

Founder, Ron Gwiazda, started TR Workbench after 27 years in the Boston Public Schools as a teacher, department head, and curriculum and program developer. According to Gwiazda, his goal "has been to create the software that we wished that we had while in school, software that would allow non-technical teachers and students to collaborate, create and share all kinds of online content."

This concern is reflected in introductory, teacher-narrated videos which not only take the user through the mechanics of establishing a site, but explain the teaching methodology, lesson module progression, and relevance of selected resources.

Getting Started
...our goal is to create the software that we wished that we had while in school...

Ease of use and technical support are hallmarks of TR Workbench and geared to a variety of student and educator needs. Tutorials explain how to create a classroom group, control permissions and privacy for different kinds of use and access, and talk about how group members may work collaboratively on specific projects.

Workbench tutorials are comprehensive and step-by-step, and incorporate a learning-by-doing approach supplemented with thorough explanations. It's an excellent program for beginners and the advanced alike.

An extensive collection of tutorial materials occupy their own searchable site.

A site blog talks about updates and projects and offers tips and tricks.

The basic free use of the site limits the number of projects and web screens. A special subscription for a teacher and 20 students costs $46 per year (February 2009 quote); additional blocks of 10 students are $15 each. This subscription level offers a variety of tools for group projects. Information about opening a block of school accounts including students, teachers, administrators—any school staff—is available on request.

Examples

Third graders through graduate students currently use Workbench. Current projects include school and teacher websites, digital publications, and a diverse array of classroom and conference presentations. Examples of the variety of student individual and group work and teacher presentations are available on the TWorkbench website. They are flash presentations accessed and viewed via a browse page.

Educators may also contact TRworkbench about free accounts. Gwiazda can offer large blocks of accounts free to teachers and programs with a keen interest in experimenting with online collaborating, creating and sharing, and will offer tech support as needed.

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