High School History Teacher
Powerful Teaching Strategies
Document Analysis Worksheets
As a teacher, there are many strategies that we can use to present information to our students. They range from typical lecture based models, all the way to high-technology strategies. With so many to chose from, it can be hard for an educator to pick the correct one for the lesson that they are planning. I've chosen three of my favorite strategies that I see as being beneficial to educators and students for a variety of reasons.
The first of the strategies that I personally find very useful is actually a group of strategies. These are document analysis worksheets. Their role is to guide a student in how they interpret a document, what questions to ask of the document, and to get the student thinking about different, less obvious facts. There is a specific type of document analysis worksheet for what ever type of primary source you can think of, from speeches (both text and audio), video, poetry, and even paintings and art. There are many different types of analysis worksheets, some better than others, but the types that I prefer are from the archives.gov website. Pictured below is a written document analysis worksheet. As you can see, these worksheets are not too complex. It is important when working with difficult documents that we allow the difficultly to come from interpreting the document, and not from the strategy itself. These worksheets provide enough structure for a student to get the basic, important, knowledge from the document, as well as probes the student for further inquiry. Another useful variant of these worksheets is either a PROP or SOAPS style worksheet. SOAPS is another way to analyze documents, while PROP is used to help students understand biases in sources, and how those biases can be interpreted.
Graphic Organizers
The second strategy is again a group of strategies that all fall under one header. Graphic organizers are an amazing tool to help guide our students with concepts, ideas, names, or events in history that they might be unfamiliar with. With a little bit of work, a graphic organizer can be made comprehensive and for anything imaginable. Making a graphic organizer couldn't be easier as well. Using technology like Inspiration, software specifically designed to create graphic organizers, teachers can edit style, information, and images easily. Free models also exist, such as TeAch-nology's graphic organizer maker which can be found at http://www.teach-nology.com. Graphic organizers can be used in two main ways. Either the organizer can be blank, and the students can fill in the information as the lesson or unit progresses. The organizer can also be given to the students filled in. Doing this allows the organizer to act as more of a guide for the lesson or unit being presented, acting as a handy key for the students to refer back to. Graphic organizers can also serve to help students focus their notes to what teacher will be looking for on assessments. By having the graphic organizer already filled out, students can focus on the details of the event, structuring their notes under that particular section of the organizer, and using the graphic organizer in conjunction with their notes to help them study.
Above is a graphic organizer that I made about Malcolm X's letter to Martin Luther King Jr.
To the left are the two websites, Inspirat ion and teach-nology.
Socratic Seminar
The final strategy I choose as one of my favorites is a Socratic Seminar. A Socratic Seminar is a collaborative, intellectual dialogue facilitated with open-ended questions about a text. With basic rules in place, such as how the room is set up and assuring that everyone has read/watch/listened to the required material a Socratic Seminar is easy to put into use. As teachers, we have to make sure that we have prepared a list of guiding questions to move along the discussion, as well as having open-ended questions like their students will have prepared for the seminar. This is required to start the seminar, as well as guide the students to the core ideas and values of the text. It is important to note that all questions, including the guiding questions, should be open-ended questions with no right or wrong answer. The rest of a teacher's role in the seminar is simply keeping the topic on track, asking students to elaborate their points, invite those who have not spoken into the conversation, and recording at least the basic ideas that the students are bringing up to refer to at a later time in the lesson.
For students, the set up for the seminar is also rather simple. Students have to have read the material and create five open-ended questions about it. A handout that gives samples of what the questions could look like can further help the students understand what is being asked of them. The second thing that students are required to do is “score” their partner. Each student is given a hand out and asked to rate an assigned partner by the criteria listed on the handout. These sheets are then collected at the end of the seminar and used along with the teachers personal assessment to determine the students' grades for the seminar. Other benefits of letting the students grade each other are helping assure that they are paying attention to what each others are saying, having a copy of how they themselves will be assessed, and letting the teacher know what they consider to beneficial to the seminar.
To the right is a link to the full Socratic Seminar page. Below are three pages of the eight that make up how to do a Socratic Seminar. The smallest page, 109, details the styles of questions that a teacher can use to guide the seminar and give rules for a variant of the Socratic Seminar called a “Fishbowl.” The page to the right, 110 is the partner evaluation sheet that students will be given to evaluate their designated partner. Finally, the unnumbered page on the bottom is one page of the example questions that students are to bring in prior to the seminar.