Guest Teacher Blogger – Winner of the 2012 Sopris Learning Blog Contest!
By Michelle George
I've just returned from a fantastic trip to Virginia for a class on James Madison and the Founding Fathers, sponsored by the Gilder-Lehrman Foundation. The class focused on using primary sources to fulfill the requirements of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
The rolling, lush green hills were beautiful, and the lectures and tours gave me personal insight into the lives and thoughts of many of the men and women who formed our early government. But, of course, one of my favorite parts of any trip is the getting there; I marvel every time those lumbering jets take leave of the tarmac. As I traveled, I thought about how journeying requires important strategies our students could use to be successful with the primary document reading demanded by the CCSS. So, pack your passport of the mind…and come along for a voyage into learning strategies for the Common Core explorer.
The Gilder-Lehrman session that I attended this summer delved into using primary documents to gain insight into history. Primary documents are original sources that are from the time period being studied. They are not interpretations or analyses of historical events, but actual artifacts from a historical period. For example, a primary document would be a letter written by John Adams about how Thomas Jefferson was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence, but an essay or book written about the relationship between Adams and Jefferson is not.
Traditional education has often been based on interpretations of historical events. The CCSS require that students work directly with primary documents and draw their own conclusions. However, the challenge is that students must be prepared to approach the documents independently. As educators, we won’t be there to fill in the entire historical context as we love to do. Consequently, we need to arm our students with strategies they can use to make sense of an unknown document without our help. Here is where my traveling analogy comes into play.
Observe and learn
I flew out of Spokane, Washington in the wee hours of the day, headed for my connection in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I've only been in the Minneapolis airport once before, so I wasn't sure of the layout. That's when I used my first core strategy: I took a moment to look the place over. Our students could benefit by taking this step first. When presented with an unknown document, the first task should be to get a general understanding of the thing, such as:
- What is the form?
- Is it a letter, diary entry, or an essay?
- How long is it?
- How is it organized?
- Who is the intended audience?
Just knowing the form of the thing gives the reader some hints as to what the document might contain and how to approach the information.
As I looked around the airport, I spotted the arrivals and departures board and found my next gate. Reconnoitering again, I discovered that the gate was downstairs and at the far end of the complex. The structure of the airport was discernable when I took the time to look. I remember earlier trips when, in my excitement, I started walking first and researched or observed only after I ended up in the wrong place. Young readers often do the same thing: they jump into the reading without figuring out the nature of the document. Explicitly teaching our students to observe first can help them successfully predict the content to better understand what they read.
Pay attention to organization
My class was in Orange, Virginia on the lovely Montpelier plantation founded by James Madison. Arriving into Washington, D.C. a day early, my intention was to visit some of the many national treasures found in our nation’s capital. The problem was what to see when I had just one day? This dilemma leads to my second core traveling lesson: pay attention to organization. I'd never been to D.C. before, but my hotel offered maps to the city and the metro system. I could study the maps, descriptions, and personal reviews to help me choose the path to take in order to see as much as possible.
Our students should learn to read organizational clues as well. We teachers can help them to discover that journals and diaries are usually chronological; that letters and essays, particularly those of the classically trained founding fathers, are carefully organized with explicitly stated theses. We can help them identify transition words that assist in understanding the organization of the details that those early writers provided. How many main points did the author provide? What were they trying to explain or persuade? What rhetorical devices did he use? We can also teach our students how to differentiate between fact and opinion. These deep reading strategies can be applied to any writing, with or without contextual background. They become navigation tools our students can use to interpret unfamiliar texts like seasoned travelers.
Using the basic strategies of observation and identifying organization helps keep my travel adventures insightful and successful. Likewise, I believe that teaching our students those same skills will help them find success in journeying back in time with primary documents. Perhaps those personal insights will lead them to fall in love with history as well. Now, that’s a trip worth taking.
Michelle S. George is a language arts middle school teacher in Orofino, Idaho. She has a B.A. in English and secondary certification in English, reading, and journalism. Michelle has been teaching seventh and eighth grade for 20 years, and still loves going to school—as a teacher and a student. She has published a variety of lesson plans and written several award-winning grants.
