*Please note that this video is no longer hosted by the Teachers TV website. It may be hosted on a different site and found through doing an internet search on the video's title.

Interpretation in Action examines a mixed-ability 9th-grade class working with documentary films. This video shows students working to plan, write, and organize their own documentaries about World War I. In this video, students create an account of the Battle of the Somme and, in so doing, practice evaluating historical evidence and constructing interpretations. This video provides examples of two promising practices:

• Engaging students in creating their own historical interpretations through the scripting of their own documentary films; and
• Structuring instruction so students move back and forth between historical evidence and their interpretations of what that evidence means.

Before beginning work on their films, students spent a week developing deeper understandings of World War I, particularly the Battle of the Somme, the subject of the documentary film that students viewed in the first part of this two-part video. Students then spend time collecting accounts of the battle that they will use for their projects.

According to the instructor of this class, creating their own documentaries helps students understand that history is a result of evidence-based interpretation. The task turns the process of doing history inside-out, asking students to construct narratives rather than simply learning them. It also makes transparent the dual purposes of documentary historical film: providing a credible record of the past and entertaining a target audience.

In this assignment, students create historical interpretations as if they were planning a documentary film. To do so, they are told, requires careful use of evidence. Consequently, the students' first task is to examine primary sources regarding World War I and the Battle of the Somme. After asking questions about the reliability of sources and comparing them against each other, students begin to piece together narratives. Then, having constructed initial interpretations, students are asked to return to the evidence to carefully select images and words, which they then sequence in a documentary-style narrative. By having students move back and forth between evidence and interpretation, the instructor helps them understand a complicated process.

Many teachers use documentary film in the classroom, but few use it to teach about historical interpretation. This lesson takes this concept a step further by having students plan their own documentary films. Consequently, the lesson directly engages students in the work that historians do and helps them develop skills that they will continue to use throughout their history coursework.

*Please note that this video is no longer hosted by the Teachers TV website. It may be hosted on a different site and found through doing an internet search on the video's title.

This video shows a 9th-grade history class applying new knowledge about causal reasoning to the question of whether two bullets were, in fact, responsible for the start of World War I. The instructor builds on the previous lesson on historical causality to help his mixed-ability students (categorized as Gifted and Talented) examine their previous understandings of the origins of World War I. (See the the classroom video.) The students make diagrams representing the causes of the war, using specific vocabulary to describe historical change. Ultimately, they come to rich and complex historical understandings of multiple causality and why WWI happened. The video provides examples of two promising practices:

• Using concrete instructional strategies to help students to consider different kinds of historical causes and the relationships among them
• Developing students' repertoire of change-related vocabulary to support more sophisticated understandings of historical change

The lesson begins with the instructor recalling the story of Alphonse the Camel that served as the focal point of the previous lesson. He asks students to draw diagrams of how specific causes came together to cause the camel's death. After completing this task, students are asked to apply this same sort of thinking to the causes of World War I.

Each group of students gets two sets of note cards. One set contains specific change-oriented words that help describe the relationships among historical causes (for example, provoked, accelerated, contributed). Another set contains the various causes of World War I (for example, nationalism, Austria-Hungary attacks Serbia). Students are then asked to arrange their cards on the table in a way that explains the origins of the war. Previously, students have written essays analyzing whether the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused the war. By revisiting the war's outbreak after the lesson in multiple causality, the teacher hopes that students will construct more sophisticated explanations than they were able to do while writing their essays.

By asking students to create diagrams representing the interplay between multiple causes, this lesson goes beyond generating simple lists of historical causes. Further, by providing them with particular vocabulary for discriminating between historical causes, it helps students construct and comprehend sophisticated, nuanced narratives describing the origins of World War I.