4 Step Reading Process for Middle Level Students and Primary Documents - Ohio Resource Center

A recent post to teachinghistory offers a four step process for teachers to use with middle school students in their analysis of primary documents. It offers an approach that highlights the more complex historical thinking skills found at the middle school level.

In the illustration provided, students analyze the texts of four speeches given by President Jackson around the time of the Indian Removal Act. Each text, along with its accompanying key questions, is included.

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There are also free posters for downloading - available here...

Everything Hinges on Assessment - By Justin Reich

Here's an interesting blog entry, by Justin Reich, about Sam Wineberg's Beyond the Bubble project at Standford. As in Canada, assessment within historical thinking remains a substantial topic for discussion. How to move beyond marking students merely for their ability to recall surface narratives or facts about the past. 

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Rating System for Evaluating Public History Web Sites

By Debra DeRuyver, Jennifer Evans, James Melzer, and Emma Wilmer
(Written and Mounted April 30, 2000)

Regular visitors to public history Web sites include historians and non-historians; academic and non-academic publics. Oft times, Web sites are used as the sole source of historical information on particular topics, particularly by K-12 and undergraduate students. Therefore, critical analysis of these sites is of the utmost importance. We as public historians have a responsibility to critique and evaluate these online resources, both to help improve the specific sites under review and to raise the bar for the entire field of public history. Site analyses provide benefits to several different groups:

• The user gains an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of a site and the validity and reliability of the information contained therein.
• The reviewed site benefits from a constructive outside appraisal.
• Un-reviewed public history sites benefit from having models of best practices and common pitfalls.
• Critical site analyses encourage better scholarship and more engaging presentations of public history.
• Ultimately, the historical record is served by site analyses; site reviews provide traces of presentations of public history on the Web during its first decade of existence.

Table of Contents:

Aristotle's Teleology

Lecture 3 Aristotle's Teleology

Celebrating 15 Years of Making Learning Visible | Harvard Graduate School of Education

Celebrating 15 Years of Making Learning Visible | Harvard Graduate School of Education

Visual Thinking & The Writing Process

View more PowerPoint from Ryan Coleman | Freelance Information Designer & Facilitator

A-08 Making Thinking Visible in History Education: May 4, 2012 – Middle School Subject Council, Fredericton - Cynthia Wallace-Casey (UNB)

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey,
PhD Candidate
University of New Brunswick (Fredericton)

Agenda for the day 

Introduction – What is making thinking visible?

What is Thinking?

What is Understanding?

The Big Picture (Historic Space Mapping)

What is Historical thinking?

The Little Picture (Heritage Fair projects)

Historical inquiry – working with sources

Memory cases

                St Croix – 1604

                School Culture – 1900

                Governance – J Leonard O’Brien – 1960

                WWI – 1918

                York Street, Fredericton - 1882

Wrap-up – Tying it back to the history map

How did you organize your data? What stories are told?