Nurturing Historical Thinking

1. Nurturing Historical Thinking • Document Analysis/Socratic Seminar • Persistent Issue: What should society do to promote fairness and • justice for people who live within its jurisdiction? • Focus Question: Were Reconstruction policies the most appropriate • means for the government to establish freedom and • equality for former slaves following the Civil War?

2. Nurturing Historical Thinking What does it mean to be free? How would the authors of this document answer?

3. Nurturing Historical Thinking • Socratic Seminar Discussion • Purpose To enlarge our understanding of ideas, issues, and values in this text • Norms • Don’t raise hands • Address one another, not the discussion leader • Use the text to support opinions

4. Nurturing Historical Thinking How would you describe the authors’ feelings about the government and their relationship to the government?

5. Nurturing Historical Thinking “This is not the condition of really free men.”

6. Nurturing Historical Thinking Soule document What does Soule want the ex-slaves to understand about freedom?

7. Nurturing Historical Thinking Did the new policy give freedmen a genuine opportunity for freedom?

8. Connecting the Past to the Present What is required to be “really free” in our society?

9. Comparison of Economic Indicators

10. Comparison of Economic Indicators - continued

11. Connecting the Past to the Present What does it mean to be free? Negative FreedomPositive Freedom Freedom from restraint Resources necessary for achieving one’s potential

12. PIH Curriculum Design Principles Scaffolded Instruction Authenticity Multiple Intelligences Effective Collaboration

13. Why is PBHI Hard to Do? Nurturing Historical Thinking • Building a Model of the Problem Landscape • Historical thinking • What seems to be true? • How do we know? • Dialectical reasoning • What is the good? • What different arguments are made about the “good”? • What do I believe?

14. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails?

15. Nurturing Historical Thinking • Scaffolding: Wise PBHI Practice • 1. Establishes relevance of tasks • 2. Explicitly introduces the Central Question and the unit purpose • 3. Sets tasks within the context of the overall unit purpose • 4. Places events within larger historical contexts • 5. Models historical thinking and critical reasoning • 6. Provides feedback & support for student reasoning • Probes & challenges student thinking • Encourages students to empathize & consider multiple viewpoints • Gets closure; helps students link knowledge to larger unit questions

16. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical thinking: Rich, divergent knowledge • Declarative knowledge • Conceptual knowledge

17. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Challenging Epistemological assumptions: What is history? • It’s not “fact work” • History as an argument • Recognize that subtexts exist

18. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Challenging Epistemological assumptions: What is history? • Confront with irreconcilable accounts • Hyperlinks that direct traffic

19. Challenging Assumptions: Hyperlinked accounts

20. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Challenging Epistemological assumptions: What is history? • Confront with irreconcilable accounts • Hyperlinks that direct traffic • Modeling and scaffolding reasoning

21. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Procedural & strategic knowledge • Metacognitive knowledge

22. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Historical Heuristics • Sourcing • Contextualization • Corroboration

23. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Historical Heuristics • Sourcing: • When evaluating historical documents, • look first to the source before reading text

24. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Sourcing: • Primary or secondary source? • Public or private document? • When written? • Purpose for document? • Biases the author might take?

25. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Historical Heuristics • Contextualization: • When trying to reconstruct historical events, • pay close attention to when they happened • and where they took place.

26. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Contextualization: • Under what conditions did events occur (geography) • weather, etc.) • What precedes and follows events? • How long did they last? • Time lapsed between event and recording by witness • What does document leave out? What does it assume?

27. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Historical Heuristics • Corroboration: • Whenever possible, check important details • against each other before accepting them as • plausible or likely

28. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Hard Scaffolds • Document Analysis Scaffold • Contextual Cues

29. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Historical Thinking: Rules of the Road • Soft Scaffolds • Anticipatory set • Probing for subtext

30. Nurturing Historical Thinking • Scaffolding: Wise PBHI Practice • 5. Models historical thinking and critical reasoning • 6. Provides feedback & support for student reasoning • Probes & challenges student thinking • Encourages students to empathize & consider multiple viewpoints

31. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? TF-4: 5:05

32. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Anticipatory set: • - Empathy TF-4: 5:05

33. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? CC-11: 1:59

34. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Anticipatory set: • - Positionality CC-11: 1:59

35. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails?

36. Nurturing Historical Thinking: How do we help students “read” historical evidence trails? • Probing for subtext: • - Positionality/Bias CC-12: 3:53

37. Selecting historical documents: • The “Goodness” Factor • * Is the language accessible to adolescents? • * Is the subject vivid and memorable? • * Is there “human interest” in the document? • * Can the document be excerpted without distorting its meaning? • * Can it be related to documents already covered in the curriculum? • Wineburg, 1991 • * When used with other documents does it confront students with competing perspectives that convey the complexity the phenomenon?

38. Selecting historical documents: • The “Standards” Factor: • Grade 5: Standard 4- Explain effects of European exploration upon European society and Native Americans. • Grade 8: Standard 14 – Describe key aspects of pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas. • Grade 9: Standard 2- Describe the role of mercantilism and imperialism in European exploration and colonization. • Grade 10: Standard 1- Contrast effects of economic, geographic, social, and political conditions before and after European explorations of the 15th -17th centuries on Europeans, American colonists, and indigenous Americans.