DIALOGUE JOURNALS

In this strategy, students "talk back" to the text.   Teachers get insight into their skill level/thought process.  This tool mimics an activity done in Sam Wineberg's book and lets the teacher point out the differences between decoding and thinking critically about the text, if desired.  (An additional benefit is that the teacher can easily catch cheaters on the assignment!)  The activity can be adapted for videos as well as text assignments but works best with long rather than short pieces.

To facilitate student growth, teachers can mark the dialogue journals to let students know what level of Bloom's taxonomy they are using; as the year progresses, the student should move away from decoding comments and include historical thinking processes.  

               Samples of Student work from textbook reading activities

               Quick start guide for this strategy

PRIMARY SOURCE ANALYSIS TOOLS

Teachers on our team were exposed to several helpful tools for analyzing primary source documents from professional development we attended.  Rather than reinventing the wheel, we each found tools that worked for our own teaching styles and used a common vocabulary about thinking historically when working with students.  These tools can be used for reading texts but also work with the problem of practice "Picturing the Past."

The Library of Congress

Team members attended the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institutes and found them extremely helpful in becoming comfortable with the LOC's PSA.  The tool emphasizes through its logo that analysis is a circular, not linear, process.  By following this link to professional development for teachers at the LOC, you can take on-line modules and download their tools for classroom use.  

UCI's History Project

UCI's History Project offers professional development for teachers and uses the 6 C's chart to analyze sources.  This tool works with picture formats, cartoons, and shorter pieces of text; for longer pieces of text, our team preferred other tools.  To download the 6 C's chart, use this link.

UCLA's History Project

The UCLA History/Geography Project is close to our school site, and our team attended several professional development offerings in which their tool Say/Mean/Matter was used (such as the joint UCLA/UCI/MIT Visualizing Cultures workshop, summer 2010).  Like the UCI tool listed above, this tool works well with visual sources but can also be used with longer pieces of text because of it's format.  To download the Say/Mean/Matter chart, use this link.

Modified SOAPS from A.P. History

Our team modified the English department's version of the SOAPS strategy to explicitly address the ways historians think about an author's audience, purpose, etc.  The A.P. teachers on our team found this tool helpful because many of our students have been in honors English for years and are concurrently enrolled in A.P. English, where SOAPS is a strategy talked about for literary analysis.  The PowerPoint download for SOAPS/AP History can be used in class right away; an example from the Civil War era is in the PowerPoint.